General Category > LisaList2
Monitor format for ProFiles
pablo_marx:
--- Quote from: stepleton on February 20, 2021, 08:16:22 pm ---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...
--- End quote ---
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.
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