Mac Emulation / Daydream for NeXT

[olsen]

Please forgive me if this has been posted elsewhere but I have been following the recovery of the Mac emulator for the Next computer called Daydream. I did not even know there was such an emulator for the NeXT computer and to be honest I was surprised given the bad blood between Apple and the founding members of Next. (Though this was a 3rd party product)

DayDream was very much like Amax on the Amiga as you had a box with Mac roms attached to the computer (in this case the DSP port) so the emulator could be legal.

I actually have this in storage, along with the hardware it attaches to.

At the time when this hit the market, it must have been the highest-resolution (black & white) Macintosh display that you could want to use, although shelling out for a NeXT cube or NeXTstation would have been quite an investment. But then again, some DTP users were willing to go that far. The NeXT megapixel display was quite good at its time in terms of resolution, sharpness and contrast.

I do wonder if this solution qualified as an emulator. It took over the display hardware and the CPU, but the Macintosh hard disk contents were still stored on the NeXT hard disk as a file. So supposedly a layer to manage the hard disk access would have had to be part of this solution.

DayDream shipped with a System 7 setup, and (funny enough) because you could not upgrade it much, it started to suffer from Mac OS 68k Y2K bugs. It still works, but everything connected to time keeping and the current date is wonky.

[olsen]

MacOS was quite a simple operating system & loading and patching the rom was all you really had to do.

NextStep is much more complex. A better option would be to start with an Amiga port of BSD 4.3 and use the Next binaries

If I remember correctly, the BSD kernel API and userland code grafted onto the MACH kernel used in NeXTstep is significantly older than 4.3BSD, somewhere in the ballpark of 4.2-Net/2 release. Also, you'd have to find a Mach-o binary loader to match it. Doable, but probably not a lot of fun in the long run.

[olsen]

I don't know, blame wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#Unix

I have no idea how fun it would be to run NeXTSTEP. Although you could probably find out by running the x86 version on a PC, 3.1+ or OpenStep.

I actually did a few experiments in this area recently (OpenStep), and some 15 years ago (NeXTSTEP).

You can install OpenStep for Intel in a virtual machine and give it a spin. You are limited to the very basic graphics hardware support offered by the installation disks, which takes a lot of fun out of using the system (it's greyscale 640x480 VGA). OpenStep and its precursors were intended to be used with a high resolution display, and without it, things become very uncomfortable very quickly.

Both OpenStep and NeXTSTEP are now so old that it is next to impossible to build or install any contemporary software on them. Say, you wanted to play MP3-encoded files or use SSH either as a client or a server application.

Today such software expects a POSIX-ish host, and both OpenStep and NeXTSTEP are far removed from that. These operating systems sit among the branches of the original Unix tree, with distant cousins such as HP-UX, IRIX or SunOS on other branches. Portable Unix software had to account for the minor and major differences between these platforms that shared common ancestors, but were at times so different that it took extra effort to port the code to those platforms.

Because NeXTSTEP is an "exotic" Unix, building client software required the respective project's "configure" script to run and produce useful results, which in turn would permit the code to be built. This step almost always ran into trouble, because either the respective script supposedly supported some version of NeXTSTEP, but that was not the version I was using, or the NeXTSTEP support was by now incomplete and untested. Tinkering with the script sometimes allowed for it to produce some useful build files, but once the compiler and linker got to work, the code failed to compile or link because it had never been ported or tested on NeXTSTEP.

I tried this with OpenSSH and LAME, but both failed in the early stages of the build process. That was in 2001. For OpenSSH one of the obstacles was in building the crypto libraries it needed, and that failed, too. One could, given enough time and patience, port such software properly, but this seems like a really tall order. Even the 'C' compiler is so old that you would have to port a more recent version first.

Long story short: in my opinion you can have a lot more fun with your Amiga than with the NeXTEP or OpenStep platforms today, and that used to be true even 15 years ago

[olsen]

I was just watching a youtube video about NeXTStep OS.   The default windows manager kind of reminders me of WindowMaker which was my preferred windows manager for Xwindows when I was big into Un*x and XFCE wasn't around. .

Guess which one came first

[olsen]

This works on virtual box with a bit of fiddling.

It is very fiddly indeed, and the result leaves a less than charming impression of the system and its power. It's like running AmigaOS 3.1 on an early version of UAE and drawing conclusions from what you see...

[olsen]

Couple problems with that - one is the lack of a DSP. 3120 murders an 040 on FPU calculation.

For balance, programming the Motorola DSP56001 (not to be mixed up with the AT&T 3120) will probably melt your brain unless you take great care, so I'd rather stick with the '040 FPU, given the option

We covered the DSP56001 in more detail than I found comfortable while I was at unversity, in the lecture on computer architecture and parallel data processing.

If I remember correctly, the DSP56001 did not see much use in the "normal" NeXTSTEP operating system and application software context. One notable exception was the Mandelbrot set renderer application which demonstrated how much faster the DSP56001 floating point operations would be than the '040 FPU's capabilities. However, the GCC version which shipped with system only supported the FPU, but not the DSP56001...