Print

[stepleton]

That file browser is nice. Looking through one of the files reminds me of another problem I've had with the Monitor disk images on Bitsavers: not being able to run Editor.obj. The error message mentions something about a font file, if memory serves. It's been a while...

Like everything Monitor, this feels fixable with some hacking. Even the fact of not being able to boot off the hard drive feels negotiable. The format document you've provided says "Blocks 0 and 1 are the boot blocks", and that ought to be plenty to fit a bootloader that can read the simple filesystem. We have source code for Monitor 11.6, and this might provide hints that would indicate what other changes should be made to the Monitor "kernel" itself (I don't think it calls itself that) so that it's happy to start on a hard disk.

A good reason to do this would be to make a convenient standalone Monitor drive image that can boot the Smalltalk environment that you find on one of the Bitsavers disks. Right now you need a Lisa 1 to run it --- the Monitor in one of the drives and the Smalltalk disk in the other. It's nice if you're patient. (For anyone who feels like trying this: Smalltalk won't run under the version 12 Monitors; I've always run it under 11.6.)

Speaking of bitsavers --- that useful second document you found made me head back to http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/ to see where you'd extracted that text from. I came up short! Do you have a link to the original somewhere? I probably have just not done a good enough job of scanning the PDFs, but I'm curious to know if there are Monitor docs in a different directory that I may have missed.

[D.Finni]

Speaking of bitsavers --- that useful second document you found made me head back to http://bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/ to see where you'd extracted that text from. I came up short! Do you have a link to the original somewhere? I probably have just not done a good enough job of scanning the PDFs, but I'm curious to know if there are Monitor docs in a different directory that I may have missed.

I may have misspoken the source. It's from Apple Macintosh developer documentation. It's from the early version of Inside Macintosh, distributed to developers in fall 1983 or spring 1984. It just tells you how to set up Monitor to use for developing Macintosh applications.

[rayarachelian]

That file browser is nice. Looking through one of the files reminds me of another problem I've had with the Monitor disk images on Bitsavers: not being able to run Editor.obj. The error message mentions something about a font file, if memory serves. It's been a while...

Just ran across it here: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/apple/lisa/pascal_monitor/The_Pascal_Development_System_Manual_Feb82.pdf page 62:

Code: [Select]

The Pascal Development System Manual THE EDITOR File needed:
  EDITOR.OBJ
  LISA:EDITOR.FONT
  LISA:EDITOR.MENUS
  LISA:SYSTEM.FONT

And on page: 64

CUSTOMIZING THE EDITOR
The editor uses whatever font it finds in the file LISA:EDITOR.FONT to display the folder contents. The suggested fonts are:

TITLE12R12S.F  20 lines x 82 chars
SARA8.F             26 lines x 83 chars
TlLEX.F               32 lines x 82 chars (default)
TlLE7R15S.F      32 lines x 94 chars
TlLE5R18S.F      37 lines x 132 chars


[D.Finni]

Here's another little tidbit I came across today:

The Filer will create a volume with a large directory, capable of storing 786 file names, so long as the volume size is greater than 2048 blocks (1 MB).

Also, I have a possible reason why the Monitor did not automatically boot from the ProFile. It's because the Lisa developers also had Lisa OS installed in another partition on the ProFile, and they wanted LOS to boot from it instead of Monitor. And they did not yet have a way to pick which OS to boot from the ProFile.

[rayarachelian]

Also wondering, how did one transfer files from Monitor to LOS? Did LOS 1.x understand the Monitor file system or vice versa?

[pablo_marx]

That file browser is nice. Looking through one of the files reminds me of another problem I've had with the Monitor disk images on Bitsavers: not being able to run Editor.obj. The error message mentions something about a font file, if memory serves. It's been a while...

I've attached a 400k disk image for a Monitor 12.3 system (based on monitor_12.3_copysony.dc42) with a working setup for The Mouse Editor (cobbled together from lisav.dc42, root1.dc42, root2.dc42).  You'll want to use the File menu, Open or Tear Off Stationary, and use one of:  MEMO, MACROS, PAPER.  I'll detail soon how this disk image was made.

[stepleton]

Nice! Looking forward to reading about how you did this one.

[pablo_marx]

I've attached two more 400k disk images that I find more technically impressive than the above, but as they only contain a barebones Monitor environment neither is particularly useful on their own.  Both of these originated from Monitor 11 Twiggy disks.  The boot sector and MON.LOADER were replaced with those from monitor_12.3_copysony.  The TWGDRVR7.OBJ was replaced with a patched SNYDRVR7.OBJ, and BOOTFILES.DATA modified to search for SNYDRVR7.obj instead of TWGDRVR7.obj. 

The patches to the Sony driver were fairly minimal, and guided by diffing a Twiggy driver from a Monitor 12 disk against one on a Monitor 11 disk.  One of the patches had to deal with interrupts (Monitor 12 seems to use TRAP $D to deal with them, and on Monitor 11 that trap just enters a level 7 interrupt / LisaBug). The other two patches deal with what is presumably the disk buffers provided by the Monitor.

lk026_mon11.1 (Sony).dc42:


lk025_mon11.8 (Sony).dc42

[stepleton]

Excellent. Let me propose a challenge for you --- obviously it's up to you to decide if you want to give it a go!

Given that you have 11.8 working on a Lisa 2 (or is it 11.6 despite what the disk image is called --- see your screenshot!), see if you can run Smalltalk on a Lisa 2 with instructions matching the ones found here:

https://lisalist2.com/index.php/topic,195.msg1492.html#msg1492

The Smalltalk Twiggy disk contains the interpreter and a file containing the Smalltalk virtual environment. This file is large, and the Smalltalk interpreter simply loads it sequentially from the disk into RAM. You will need at least an 800k disk to hold the information, and even that may not be enough. Therefore there could be these challenges:

- Can the monitor work with 800k disks?
(Accessing those disks is not radically different to accessing 400k disks, but even so)

- Does the Smalltalk interpreter talk to the disk in its own way?
(In which case that disk I/O code would need to be patched)

- Is 800k too small? Twiggies hold 871k.
(If it is, maybe the image is partially empty and can be trimmed to fit)
(Or maybe you can compress the image and replace the loading code Smalltalk uses)
(OR, maybe you can put the image and the interpreter onto a ProFile?)

If you accept the challenge, and if it would help, and if the computer feels like playing along (no reason to assume it wouldn't), I'm happy to do whatever you need on my Lisa 1 to help you investigate the problem.

Thanks for this awesome work!

[pablo_marx]

Oh trust me, we are on the same page here – it is my current goal.

[AlexTheCat123]

Wow, this is really awesome! It would be so cool to get Smalltalk working on the Lisa 2.

[pablo_marx]

The Monitor's Sony bootblock and mon.loader already understood 800KB disks.  And after a little bit of time spent understanding the interleaving format, I've been able to produce 800KB disks that work fine in lisaem.  As I haven't owned a Lisa in 25 years, I haven't been able to test this on hardware.

I've attached a copy of lk026_mon11.1.dc42 but converted to Sony 800KB format.  I've executed a number of programs on the disk and all seem to work fine, which makes me reasonably confident in all of this.  I'd much appreciate if somebody could test this on a Lisa with an 800KB drive.

I'm still working on Smalltalk:  A minimal Monitor environment and the four Smalltalk files (bci.symbols, bci.obj, smalltalk.obj, image) fit on an 800KB disk with a little wiggle room.  When executing Smalltalk, it loads into memory fine (verified by dumping the memory in lisaem), but its presently complaining about loader error 5 (SetSP at wrong place after physical link). I'm still working on figuring this out.

dumphex.obj:


compiler.obj:


code.obj:


dumpobj.obj:



codesize.obj:

[stepleton]

Seems to work fine on my 2/10: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ps23jWErTxW4Jh8LA

In my limited experience, regular 400k Lisas can handle 800k images served by a Floppy Emu. I don't know how you used the Monitor programs to make some of your busier screenshots, but I think I can run all of the programs you were running. Attempting to run the Editor fails with "I/O Error 1 type: <space> to continue", but I'm guessing this is because files are missing. The lack of a file called EDITOR.OBJ is probably a clue

Good luck with Smalltalk!

[pablo_marx]

I have Smalltalk running in lisaem.  The issue was that the Monitor's config.data that was being used was for a 1MB system and lisaem was setup for a 1.5MB system.  Changing lisaem to be a 1MB system resultingresulted in it working.  Conceivably I could've swapped out the config.data with the config1.5.data on the lk025_mon11.8 disk.

However once the Smalltalk system launches, I can't move the mouse. It would be nice to know if it works the same or not on hardware (e.g. to track down whether or not its an emulator issue).

[pablo_marx]

And for what its worth, here are a few more Twiggy Monitor disks converted to 800K Sony.   lk025_mon11.8 was too large to fit, so one file was excluded: dumpobj.obj.  The other Twiggy disks all fit within 800K.