Now that work on Memory Manager and Resource Managers has started, it’s time to focus on the next important part of Mac: The graphical user experience.

A5 World and InitGraf

As all QuickDraw operations depend on existence of QuickDraw globals, and they are addressed with the A5 register in an application’s “A5 world”, we needed to have a way to simulate this at boot time. It appears that real Macs use part of the boot-time stack space for temporary A5 world, so we decided to follow this path. At this point in boot process, we don’t have a 68K needing a stack, but we decided to simulate this anyway. At this point, system zone resides near the beginning of RAM (after low memory globals and trap tables), and the stack pointer is located somewhere just below the screen memory, a perfect place to stick QD globals and a mini A5 world into.

The InitGraf was pretty simple, and also OpenPort following it. With necessary QD globals set up, and a full-screen GrafPort available, next step was of course to fill the screen with the familiar gray pattern. It’s funny, how just filling a rectangle has a lot of dependencies to other quickdraw APIs, such as regions, and a common blitter routine which will be shared by a large number of future QuickDraw routines. For now, we just skipped the unused cases with “TODO” comments, and after a few days a hard work got this: