Mac OS 9 Discussion > Mac OS 9, Hacks & Upgrades

The Trampoline (Inside booting the Mac with a microscope)

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nanopico:

--- Quote from: powermax on August 24, 2017, 08:19:52 AM ---
--- Quote from: nanopico on August 22, 2017, 07:17:04 AM ---Sounds like the same thing I am doing, but most of the work after the disassembler is manual. I would say tedious is an understatement no mater which way you go. A boot loader like this is more difficult than other programs as there are no external libraries linked to help aid in identifying what is making external calls and there are no debug symbols.

--- End quote ---

Yes and no. That boot loader is actually much easier to analyze than any other program because
Probably doesn't help that I am still not completely versed in ppc asm and I have this sadistic obsession with going through the code just to get a better grasp at ASM.  I figured out early on it is all written in C, but again I'm just a bit sadistic in this regard.


* it's pretty small comparing to full-fledged applications
* it's written in C - no classes, to virtual function calls, no callback hell
* low-level assembly is tiny compared to said NK
* there is no floating-point arithmetic inside, no other fancy stuff like hand crafted Altivec asm

--- Quote from: nanopico on August 22, 2017, 07:17:04 AM ---Oh god debug symbols would be the best thing in the world for this.

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Yeah, we got the booxtX code to compare with and I'm currently preparing a list of functions, their prototypes and descriptions for you to grab.

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Agreed on all yes.  I guess my point of more difficult is it's interaction with the parcels.  Probably is more effort to me as I have very little time to go through it right now. Everything seems difficult at this point right now. A little overloaded at work make me kind of not want to touch any code at the moment at home. 


--- Quote from: DieHard on August 24, 2017, 08:41:24 AM ---I will not say much as I do not want to "taint" this amazing thread; I just wanted to say that you guys are truly the "Dream Team" and our heroes;  I read this one almost everyday and when there are no new responses, I usually re-read it from the top, just to get the old brain flowing again.  I have not coded assembler or C or Pascal in over 25 years, but the excitement of tracing out tight, well written code and finding a better way to "skin a cat" without introducing some bugs has always appealed to me. 

You guys are great, keep up the good work, feels like the progress is accelerating on all fronts. I doubt that anyone, even at Apple, could imagine that their secret box of treasures would be exposed to light all these years later !

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I'm sure all of use appreciate the sentiment.

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