INTRO MacMiNT is a port of MiNT from the ATARI ST to the Macintosh. MiNT is an enhanced version of the ATARI OS TOS. MacMiNT is very buggy right now and is only useful as a hobbiest's toy, but in time it should serve as a reliable platform for developing programs on the Macintosh with free tools like the GNU software. Let me say part of that again for clarity: THIS SOFTWARE IS VERY BUGGY, USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK! With that said let me say that I have been working with this for about 3 months and I have not corrupted my system file or my hard disk with this software. I have run MacMiNT on a Quadra 950 and a Mac II. I don't think it will work on a Mac without an FPU, although, it should some day. It might run on a Mac with 2M RAM, but it probably needs more like 4M. The copyright, readme's, and documentation that came with the Atari distribution are in the mint095 directory. Make sure you read and abide by the copyright information. My additions to MiNT are neither copyrighted nor documented. The MacMiNT distribution is composed of a mostly empty hierarchy of folders. Many things that are needed to run MacMiNT are not provided, but indications of where to get these things are provided. Most Mac programs can be FTP'd from ftp.apple.com, sumex-aim.stanford.edu, or mac.archive.umich.edu. Most Atari programs can be FTP'd from atari.archive.umich.edu or one of its mirrors like 'src.doc.ic.ac.uk'. I am beginning to prefer gopher to FTP on the Mac. I will try to make most MacMiNT related stuff available via a gopher server on my Mac, june.jpl.nasa.gov. This is an experiment, though, and I don't know how long it will last. Beware, my Mac is not turned on all the time and it crashes a lot (especially when I work on MacMiNT), so you may have trouble getting stuff from my machine. INSTALLATION If you are reading this file you should have already extracted a folder called mint from the distribution archive. Make sure that this folder is on the top level of your hard disk. MacMiNT looks for its configuration file in \mint\mint.cnf on the current drive. If it doesn't find it, it will exit. On startup, the current drive is the same volume that you launch MacMiNT from. When MacMiNT starts up it will tell you what drive letters correspond to what volumes. You need to edit your mint.cnf to reflect your setup. You should get and install Apple's Communication Toolbox. MacMiNT uses the VT102 tool as its terminal emulator. The CTB can be ordered from APDA, FTP'd from ftp.apple.com, or it comes bundled with many communcations programs. If you FTP it from apple, make sure you read and abide by the copyright notice in the help directory and attached to the file. You should get TurboGopher (>= 1.06b2). This is an efficient and easy to use tool for downloading software and other things. The following are some interesting gopher servers: sumex-aim.stanford.edu: Mac software; src.doc.ic.ac.uk: Atari, Mac, and other software.; june.jpl.nasa.gov: MacMiNT software. You should get BBEdit (>= 2.2). This is a free editor that supports editing of Mac, UNIX, and DOS text files. Files used by MacMiNT should be in DOS format in most circumstances. Be sure to turn on automatic LF convertion. You should get MacZOO (>= 2.1). This is needed to extract files from .zoo archives which seem to be the standard distribution format for Atari stuff. It is easiest if you put this program in the 'save' folder. You should get MacPerl (>= 4.0.6). This is needed to use the Perl scripts that perform various automated tasks. You should get what ever TOS/MiNT programs you can find and try them out under MacMiNT. You can run them with DEBUG_LEVEL=2 to see what calls they are making and try to figure out why the crash. The following entries describe where and what Atari programs to get, and where put them. Use MacZOO 2.1 to extract files from .zoo files. Use the MacPerl script zoofix to rename the resulting files. Use TextChanger (comes with BBEdit) to convert 'TEXT' files to have a creator of 'R*ch'. Note: if you extract files into the 'save' folder and rename files with zoofix, most files from the MiNT Distribution Kit will be copied into the appropriate folder. description format: atari.archive.umich.edu Mint/Distrib_kit/Distribution/disk2.zoo (fileutils.zoo) cp.ttp,ls.ttp,mkdir.ttp,rm.ttp (maybe others?) /bin atari.archive.umich.edu Mint/Distrib_kit/Distribution/disk3.zoo (bin1.zoo) make.ttp,mem.ttp,more.ttp,od.ttp (maybe others?) /usr/bin atari.archive.umich.edu Mint/Distrib_kit/Distribution/disk4.zoo (gcc222b.zoo) gcc222 binaries /usr/bin atari.archive.umich.edu Mint/mntinc25.zoo c includes /usr/include atari.archive.umich.edu Mint/mntolb25.zoo c libraries /usr/lib atari.archive.umich.edu Gnustuff/Tos/Bash/Bash-110/Unixmodeversion/110bin-d3.zoo bash.ttp /bin Replace /usr/bin/gcc-as with the version in /save. HINTS You have to play around with newline setting on the VT102 Tool in different circumstances. I have not figured out the best way to handle this. CONCLUSION The source code is there for you to examine, fix, and enhance. Please send me any changes you feel should be put in my distribution. Please let me know if there is any other information that should be in this README. I welcome suggestions on anything about MacMiNT but I make no guarantees. I really don't know how long I will continue to work on MacMiNT, probably until it gets boring to me. I will almost certainly develop it until it is capable of reliably developing Mac programs using GCC. This should be long enough for others to get interested in MacMiNT and continue to support it if I decide to stop. The need for MacMiNT will probably go away when other porting projects get finished, but this could be quite a long time. I think that MacMiNT could serve as a good platform for porting X windows and maybe Mach for the Mac because it is similar to UNIX, where these products were originally developed. MacMiNT developed programs avoid many of the traditional barriers to porting UNIX code to the Mac. One barrier is segmentation and another is memory management. Brad Pickering brad@tazboy.jpl.nasa.gov PS - Thank you Eric Smith for writing a cool OS and making the sources freely available.