NuTek Mac comes

Swift Griggs swiftgriggs at gmail.com
Tue Jul 12 16:26:53 CDT 2016


On Tue, 12 Jul 2016, sub at hoffart.de wrote:
> > No doubt! That rarely ends well. Emulation is a tough gig.
> Executor is no emulator, and it does not seem that NuTek was/had one, 
> too. It is just a (more or less) compatible clone of APIs. In principle 
> as System 7 was one of System 6 - also not fully compatible.

Quite right. I should have been more clear about both rather than use the 
term "emulator" which I already knew was pretty loaded with expectations. 
However, my point was only that if Executor could do it, so could someone 
like Nutek. However, from reading about the hardware, it sounds like it 
had an actual '030 in there. 

> > Ask the ReactOS team,
> Yes, that?s a similar effort ?

Well, WINE is probably a closer analog to Executor than ReactOS. However, 
again the point wasn't to define "emulation" but to say that 
re-implementing an OS isn't easy and has a spotty history of results. 
That's all. I agree with you that it's not impossible to do right. Just 
hard.

> And I disagree ? it *can* be done: rewriting an OS from scratch, 
> implementing a given set of APIs, and have some success. It?s been done 
> several times e.g. with compatible UNIX implementations.

I understand. I've used many such API-rigs myself under both NetBSD and 
Linux.

> One of it is close to total domination of the UNIX market, although it 
> is not a certified UNIX and came laaaate to the UNIX market: Linux.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here: binary emulation, POSIX 
compliance, Single UNIX Specification, iBCS emulation, etc... Personally, 
I've seen NetBSD "emulate" (for lack of a better term) a lot more 
commercial UNIX systems than Linux ever has. I've also had a lot more luck 
cross-compiling to other OSs which has some overlap with the whole 
API-emulation topic. However, in some of those cases you need to fetch 
libraries from the original dist to make it work right and that's probably 
"cheating" to most people who want to get froggy about the "emulation" 
term.

> Or MagiC from Andreas Kromke et al.: a full replacement for Atari TOS 
> (BIOS; XBIOS, GEMDOS, VDI, AES). It?s been quite popular on the Atari ST 
> in Germany.

It sounds interesting. I'm familiar with Firebee and MiNT, though this 
sounds a tad different. I'm not expert on STs, but I think they are neat. 
I'll have to check it out.

-Swift


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