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[cheesestraws]

Hi folks,

I have successfully built a working GEMDOS for Lisa from the sources (well, sort of sources) that Caldera/SCO released ages ago (as part of the GEM Porting Kit).  I strongly suspect that nobody has touched this for a very long time, partly because at least one critical bit of it was missing.  A pre-made directory tree with the source and all the necessary tools is downloadable here: http://dump.ecliptiq.co.uk/d/hatari-gemdos-lisa-build.zip

To get it to build:

• Grab the Hatari Atari emulator (lol.)  Other emulators will likely work, but I've only tried Hatari.  Leave it using the built-in EmuTOS.
• Unzip the file and point Hatari's "GEMDOS Drive" (which is what it calls its host filing system implementation) to the directory
• Fire up Hatari, double-click on the C icon and double-click on COMMAND.PRG in that directory.
• Do:
  
  • cd SYSBLD
  • SETUP
  • MAKEFI

(you can run MAKEHI instead to make a hard disc image, but since at least for me the hard disc support isn't actually working, this is probably moot). 

When it's chugged away, you should have a GEMDOSFI.SYS file and a COMMAND.PRG file, which are the OS and the command line interpreter, respectively.

To check whether this works, you can use this person's magical boot-disk-o-matic: http://www.alternative-system.com/en/revive-gemdos-for-lisa/ but replacing the GEMDOSFI.SYS that DRI built with the one you just built.

Note that GEM itself won't run, at least on my 2/10; I've tried the GEMDOSFI.SYS that DRI built too and that won't run GEM either, so that's a problem for another day.

To get this to work, I had to:

• Reconstruct CON.O -- this is the device-independent console driver.  CON.O was missing, and the corresponding CONSOLE.C from the sources for the Atari was too new.  So I replaced chunks of it with the console driver in CP/M 1.2, and the result seems to work, but is probably... questionable.
• Take too long to work out that it was always building a hard disc image because a #if was never firing (due to a preprocessor incompatibility, perhaps?), so worked around that

The tree contains the Lisa GEMDOS BIOS code (in \BIOSSRC), the GEMDOS BDOS in object form (in \BDOSOBJ), and a build system in SYSBLD.  It also contains the Atari GEMDOS code (under AHC), the Atari GEM compilers (which work to build Lisa binaries too) in \TOOLS.  Also some random source files I was using for testing that got caught up in the ZIPping process.  All the files except the random testing stuff came from the Caldera GPL dump, except for CON.C, which is my hybrid thing.

Hope this is of some interest to someone!

[rayarachelian]

Many thanks! This is very cool!

[cheesestraws]

I've uploaded the source code/build environment to Github to try to make it a bit saner to work with.

Here's the link: https://github.com/cheesestraws/lisa-gemdos

[cheesestraws]

A brief progress update on this: I've now upgraded this to the release version of GEMDOS 1.1, which is the version the sources seem to have survived for.  This means the OS can now be built from source, no more remaining binary blobs.  I'll clean up the build process in a few days, it's a bit of a mess right at the moment.

GEM, the graphical environment, gets to the desktop but then none of the input devices do anything.  Most of the source for this version of GEM has not survived, though I do have the source to the screen driver (which will build), which is probably the most precious bit.  I spoke to the emutos folks, and they confirmed my fears that the GEM source that has survived is for PC GEM, and that they had made the first cut of their AES by combining the PC GEM source with bits of the disassembled Lisa binaries and then manically debugging.

I'm quite pleased :-).