Category Archives: Productivity

A LOT of fixes, improvements and new test applications

It’s now approximately one month since last update, and a lot of “under the hood” type progress has been made.

M68K Tester and 68K bug fixes

One major task we had on roadmap was attempting to see how we could integrate Pukka’s emulator core with the amazing M68K Emulator Testsuite (by Gwenolé Beauchesne and Ray Arachelian, archived at this URL: http://web.archive.org/web/20090417202939/http://gwenole.beauchesne.info/en/projects/68ktester ). After holidays, Pukka was able to get the integration done, and we found a bunch of hard-to-find CPU bugs thanks to it:

M68K Emulator Test Suite
M68K Emulator Test Suite

Even though a lot of bugs were fixed, there are still test cases which do not pass, and will be fixed soon. However, with the fixes already done to the bugs that were found thanks to the test suite, Dark Castle and Beyond Dark Castle appear to be stable in rooms that used to crash before:

Dark Castle “Fireball 1” works now
Beyond Dark Castle rooms are working

New relative mouse mode

A long-time task that has been waiting implementation has been the relative mouse mode, in which M.A.C.E. captures mouse cursor entirely, and instead of using the absolute position given by the host operation system, calculates mouse motion itself using the mouse delta vectors. This both prevents stray clicks outside emulated desktop window, and allows long delta swipes such as required to control helicopter in Apache Strike. As a result of this, Apache Strike can now be played, as previously it would immediately crash into the wall – and Pirates! no longer hangs in the swordfight at beginning – both which depended on certain low-level mouse low memory globals being emulated correctly:

Apache Strike controls are working
Pirates! swordfight works now

Another fun feature which we added to complement the relative mouse mode as experimenting with game controller input API of SDL, which took about 30 minutes to do and works quite OK as seen on this video:

Apache Strike controlled using USB gamepad

Another issue that was fixed was missed clicks problem with “Tap to Click” MacBooks, which now should generate mouseDown events correctly.

Currently the cursor itself is still displayed using SDL “hardware” cursor API, but with the recent changes adding support for software cursor should not be a big problem – One that might be required to have decent cursor is certain games, where the cursor visibility depends on the cursor having ability to “invert” depending on underlaying graphics (such as the crosshair on black background in lemmings), which the SDL hardware cursor does not support.

Keyboard text input rewritten with proper character mapping

In first iteration of keyboard handler, we only had scancode support with minimal MacRoman mapping (without modifiers), which although was working for the simple use cases, did not allow flexibility required for example to enter upper-case letters.

For second iteration, we attempted to utilize host operating system keyboard layout mapping by using SDL text input API, and although it worked nicely for TextEdit text input, broke command keys and other things (such as Dark Castle & Lode Runner controls) horribly.

For the latest, third iteration, we went back to scancode based input, but instead are simulating the exactly same type KCHR scancode to MacRoman mapping like on real Macs. This allows every key to work properly in text editing, game input and menu shortcut etc, but one downside is that for international layouts we will need to have separate KCHR resources, currently only having U.S. as default layout. However, as “dead keys” are also working, typing special characters such as accents, umlauts, etc is working nicely even on this layout.

ResEdit bug “treasure chest”

ResEdit proved to be a real “treasure chest” of bugs and improvements, as it used literally every possible List Manager routine, and it also surfaced some unexpected bugs in other places such as TextEdit, Dialog Manager, QuickDraw, and other already heavily used toolbox traps.

After Dialog Manager and QuickDraw fixes, DLOG editor works perfectly
MENU editing also works after List Manager bug fixes
‘PACK’ 1 bitmap editor works now
TextEdit improvements for the hex editor

Some major improvements found through testing ResEdit:

Most of List Manager calls were implemented, including resizing lists, deleting rows/columns, searching data. Also some bugs were fixed, such as corruption of data offsets in some cases, etc.
Dialog manager edit field handling had a number of bugs, which surfaced in the DLOG editor, and there also were bugs in item hiding/showing which were also manifesting in Civilization.
TextEdit had some bugs in the MixedMode handling of special case calling conventions, which caused crash in the hex editor. After fixing them, not only the hex editor works, but also MacPascal editing bugs were fixed, as it also used custom TEDoText hooks.
The PACK 1 (“BitEdit”) package in ResEdit surface a couple QuickDraw bugs, such as random SeedFill memory corruption (using the paint bucket tool) and StretchBits memory corruption. These also make MacPaint more stable, which was also suffering from the SeedFill bug.

Some of these fixes had quite universal effects, such as improving the previously buggy behaviour of Lists and TextEdit in HyperCard 1.x:

HyperCard 1.x font lists work now
HyperCard 1.x script editor works better

Other improvements

Text scaling and measuring had some bugs, which were fixed so that MacPaint and Macwrite can display text of all sizes, faces and styles.
MacWrite now works, at least kind of…all other edition options are working (styling, page breaks, font sizes, fonts, rulers, etc), except adding newline using enter/return causes text to corrupt.
As the region corruption bug in polygon rendering was fixed, PT-109 appears now the be completely stable.
With “dummy” SetPalette trap implemented, Railroad Tycoon is now able to proceed past first “End of Fiscal Period” report
Scrollbar (CDEF 1) implementation (and related Control Manager TrackControl/DragControl stuff) were finally finished, so the indicator thumb dragging works now.
Prototype of font fractional width support added, only test case for this is curently Photoshop, which enables them. Right now only FOND width tables are supported, but extended width tables could be easily added as soon as some application needs them.

New test applications added

Also, we have now finally two new test app bundles that should be complete enough for trying out. These are ZeroGravity by Duane Blehm, and Blob Manager Demo by Paul DuBois. They are now available for trying out in the Downloads section.

Additionally, the old test application bundles have been updated with the new M.A.C.E. runtime, which includes all the bug fixes and improvements done since their last update. For example, Stunt Copter uses now the new relative mouse mode, and all apps have been updated to support the “Tap to Click” trackpad mode on MacBooks.

Full list of changes since last post

There are too many changes to detail in a single post, so as a new feature below is the version control log of all changes made since last update:

2019-08-19 22:54:49 +0300 • Add SetDialogDefaultItem/CancelItem/TracksCursor 
2019-08-19 22:47:32 +0300 • Tweak TrackControl and LClick delay to 8 ticks 
2019-08-19 18:15:47 +0300 • Save alert default item also in the DialogRecord 
2019-08-19 16:23:03 +0300 • Partial support for default dialog StdFilter proc 
2019-08-19 07:03:12 +0300 • Bumb the M.A.C.E. version number & use current date 
2019-08-19 07:02:52 +0300 • Replace printfs with log, and add a few DEBUG #ifs 
2019-08-19 07:00:17 +0300 • Fix the SDL window title for now by using EnvStartupFile 
2019-08-19 06:59:57 +0300 • Tweak Blob Mgr Demo and ZeroGravity for release 
2019-08-19 06:00:30 +0300 • Work on FOND widthtable and fractional size support 
2019-08-17 03:17:27 +0300 • Work a little on resource map "shadowing" handling 
2019-08-17 03:04:32 +0300 • Fix WaitMouseUp to not return 1 extra "down" state 
2019-08-17 02:23:40 +0300 • Fix SeedFill random memory corruption case 
2019-08-15 23:36:01 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of  
2019-08-15 23:35:56 +0300 • Fix TextEdit cursor right-side clamping 
2019-08-15 22:55:05 +0300 • add xcode 6 project 
2019-08-15 22:43:06 +0300 • Fix incorrect register usage in TEDoText overrides 
2019-08-15 21:21:29 +0300 • Fix StretchBits stack buffer overrun 
2019-08-14 23:46:30 +0300 • Fix scrollbar redraw bug in List Manager 
2019-08-14 23:25:48 +0300 • SetPalette classic-QD dummy trap 
2019-08-14 21:44:36 +0300 • Fix LSetSelect highlight bugs 
2019-08-14 19:28:32 +0300 • Fix lNoNilHilite flag handling in LSetSelect 
2019-08-13 03:14:24 +0300 • Fix value clamping in Control Manager 
2019-08-13 03:11:51 +0300 • Tweak CloseWD stub to not crash 
2019-08-13 03:11:28 +0300 • Implement LClrCell and proto of LDelRow/LDelColumn 
2019-08-12 21:10:26 +0300 • Fix a couple byteswap bugs in lists (selection) 
2019-08-12 17:39:11 +0300 • Fix one-cell delta calculation in list pageup/down 
2019-08-12 15:03:44 +0300 • Fix maxIndex bug in LNew 
2019-08-12 02:34:18 +0300 • List Manager LSize implementation 
2019-08-11 05:12:39 +0300 • Finished LAutoScroll, another easy one for ResEdit 
2019-08-11 04:56:40 +0300 • Implemented C_LFind, was simpler than I thought… 
2019-08-11 04:46:28 +0300 • Finish LNextCell trap, work on LClick multiselect 
2019-08-11 02:18:20 +0300 • Implement C_LClick scroll indicator handling 
2019-08-11 02:06:55 +0300 • Fix dividend overflow in scrollbar CDEF 1 rounding 
2019-08-11 01:43:52 +0300 • Implement DragControl, finish TrackControl & CDEF1 
2019-08-10 03:41:37 +0300 • Fix caps lock usage in SDL key event handler 
2019-08-10 02:01:37 +0300 • SDL gamecontroller support "hack" to Apache Strike 
2019-08-09 20:45:44 +0300 • Add FSpOpenDF, FSpCreate, FSpDelete, FSpGetInfo, FSpRename & (dummy) _Rename 
2019-08-09 18:08:02 +0300 • Hacked procinfo for UIMagIDString call in LSearch 
2019-08-09 03:28:00 +0300 • Fix buffer overflow in GetVolParms 
2019-08-09 02:42:54 +0300 • Added dummy GetVolParms selector to _FSDispatch 
2019-08-09 02:00:31 +0300 • Add Jigsaw test app 
2019-08-09 02:00:10 +0300 • Implement LSearch, and (dummy stub) IUMagIDString 
2019-08-09 01:58:42 +0300 • Implemented 1-bit NewGWorld in QDExtensions 
2019-08-08 17:10:34 +0300 • Fix allocation of key state buffer 
2019-08-08 02:45:45 +0300 • C_KeyTranslate Deadkey support + fix mac scancodes 
2019-08-07 18:30:41 +0300 • Fix dialog edit field handling 
2019-08-07 12:13:26 +0300 • Fix picture recording of port fgColor/bkColor 
2019-08-07 04:49:10 +0300 • Add git log generator, for fun 🙂 
2019-08-07 04:21:32 +0300 • Tweak type of ScrapSize in low memory 
2019-08-07 04:21:04 +0300 • Fix fromMode handling in Picture Line recording 
2019-08-07 04:19:58 +0300 • Fix picture line recording Point saving 
2019-08-07 04:17:59 +0300 • Fix Hide/Show dialog item bounds calculation 
2019-08-07 04:15:36 +0300 • Prevent editfield citation replacements in dialogs 
2019-08-06 19:43:28 +0300 • Fix Scrap Manager bugs 
2019-08-06 19:41:31 +0300 • Clean up Mouse module a bit 
2019-08-06 19:07:03 +0300 • Fix bug in DefaultShowCursor 
2019-08-06 16:38:47 +0300 • Un-obscure cursor before _MDrawCursor in CrsrTask 
2019-08-06 01:42:37 +0300 • Make phase-shift adjustment configurable 
2019-08-06 00:20:31 +0300 • Move audio phase-shift from RAM to ClassicSound 
2019-08-06 00:17:50 +0300 • Disable VM_MAP and reverse-page mapping 
2019-08-05 20:44:39 +0300 • Disable a couple of mouse debug log calls 
2019-08-05 00:10:21 +0300 • Updated some test apps with relative mouse mode 
2019-08-05 00:09:22 +0300 • Refactor cursor to support relative motion mode 
2019-08-04 00:30:38 +0300 • fix abcd, partially fix sbcd instruction 
2019-08-03 23:20:09 +0300 • fix zero status for subx.b/w/l instruction 
2019-08-03 00:40:07 +0300 • fix add.b, addx.b/w/l and negx.b/w/l status bits 
2019-08-03 00:40:01 +0300 • Merge branch 'master' of  
2019-08-02 00:05:57 +0300 • Fix TEIdle blinker 
2019-08-01 23:10:07 +0300 • Implement LLastClick and tweak trap glue generator 
2019-08-01 16:03:22 +0300 • Disable the extra log debug trace of heap compact 
2019-08-01 16:02:28 +0300 • Reduce logging in MixedMode calls 
2019-08-01 16:01:44 +0300 • Fix size bug in WriteResource 
2019-08-01 16:00:47 +0300 • Fix resProtected flag check in ChangedResource 
2019-08-01 15:58:51 +0300 • Fix dialog edit field disabled check + others 
2019-08-01 05:19:49 +0300 • Add missing lowmem changes for CurActivate bug fix 
2019-08-01 05:19:04 +0300 • Work on KeyTranslate KCHR mapping (fix keyboard) 
2019-07-31 01:21:08 +0300 • Add MacConcentration test app 
2019-07-31 01:20:39 +0300 • Implement FADDD & fix major 64-bit float SANE bug 
2019-07-31 01:08:21 +0300 • fix lsl and lsr instruction for shift > 31 
2019-07-30 22:53:46 +0300 • fixes for m68k tester 
2019-07-30 21:50:19 +0300 • move x68k xcode6 project to x68k root 
2019-07-30 21:48:42 +0300 • add m68k tester 
2019-07-30 21:46:25 +0300 • make kemu lib c++ compatible 
2019-07-29 15:51:21 +0300 • Tweak GunShy config to use version 1.3 
2019-07-28 04:54:27 +0300 • Fix window activation handling 
2019-07-27 04:36:27 +0300 • Fix GetFontInfo for scaled fonts 
2019-07-27 04:22:21 +0300 • Fix bug in fast-case of text blitter 
2019-07-27 02:13:56 +0300 • Set Lo3Bytes lowmem global properly 
2019-07-27 02:12:01 +0300 • Implemented ReadDateTime and (dummy) SetDateTime 
2019-07-27 01:26:28 +0300 • Fix LActivate 
2019-07-27 00:46:46 +0300 • Fix cursor leak 
2019-07-26 18:29:56 +0300 • Tweak InitResources to be (again) re-callable 
2019-07-26 17:32:20 +0300 • Fix UPP ProcInfo of DABeeper callback 
2019-07-26 15:46:55 +0300 • Implemented LActivate selector in List Manager 
2019-07-26 05:45:33 +0300 • Fix bug in resource manager name remove code 
2019-07-26 05:44:44 +0300 • Add Glider4 test app 
2019-07-26 05:44:24 +0300 • Fix possible bug in SetVol NFS handler 
2019-07-26 05:43:07 +0300 • Setup CurrentA5 during boot stage 2 for INITs 
2019-07-26 02:55:49 +0300 • Re-fix PurgeSpace to also return correct D0 
2019-07-26 01:52:59 +0300 • Optimize FramePolygon case 
2019-07-26 01:43:57 +0300 • Actually update the existing ADF header 
2019-07-26 01:36:18 +0300 • Finish SetFileinfo handler in NativeFS 
2019-07-26 01:35:28 +0300 • Fix region corruption bug in polygon drawing 
2019-07-25 23:16:56 +0300 • Fix MapRgn duplicate inversion point bug 
2019-07-25 23:07:21 +0300 • Fix MapPt negativity check 
2019-07-25 22:08:06 +0300 • Fix size of ScriptUtil selector 
2019-07-25 22:02:10 +0300 • Fix edge case bug in UnpackBits 
2019-07-25 21:02:00 +0300 • Fix ADF file create bug, mixed up rsrc and data 
2019-07-25 19:27:32 +0300 • Also reserve space for mapping in the stack after packBuffer

Update on resource fork writing, ResEdit, and resource ‘dcmp’ decompressors

Resource write support status

So, the plan since last update was to do some work on resource write support, and there was indeed some progress. The nature of how resource forks are handled on disk compared to memory is quite interesting; After the resource map is read into memory, the resource fork on disk only needs to preserve resource data, and thus the resource manager has quite free hands on how it can move data around in the resource fork:

When a new resource is added using AddResource, it gets both a resource entry in the in-memory resource map, AND the resource fork gets expanded (to reserve space on disk), and on-disk location for the resource is appended after the current data area on the disk
When ChangedResource is called on existing resource, its size is checked to see if it grows or shrinks. Shrinking is more simple, as its data length just gets shorter, and does not need space allocation. However, if a resource grows, it needs more space allocated to it, so while the resource file is open, the resource manager simply allocates new space at end of resource fork, like it does in AddResource, and leaves the old location as “gap” in the file. This feature actually is why apple warns in the Inside Macintosh documentation, that calling ChangedResource often without calling UpdateResFile may lead to large amount of disk space used, as each new allocation expands the file size by the new allocation length!
When WriteResource is called, a resource with resChanged flag will get contents of its handle written to the location specified by resource entry in the resource map
UpdateResFile does the real “house-keeping” of resource fork, as it will iterate through all resources, removing any gaps in the resource fork, moving data to the proper places (a process called “compating” of resource fork). After this, the resource map is written at end of the resource fork (after the data section), and file size is truncated to minimum required, releasing the extra disk space.

Currently, most of write support is in place, except that resource fork compacting still needs finalization to make it work properly

Extended resources and ‘dcmp’ decompression

Of course a natural way to stress-test resource manager is to try ResEdit, which I think uses literally almost all of resource manager features. However, an interesting surprise was that ResEdit seems to utilize resource compression on a large number of its own resource, which led to the following MacTech article:

http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.09/09.01/ResCompression/index.html

Which had nice, although brief, insight on ‘dcmp’ resources and their role in resource decompression. Adding the parsing of extended resource headers was not that difficult, and luckily ResEdit contains its own ‘dcmp’ decompressors, so they could be immediately be tested, resulting in following type of logs:

This snippet of debug log shows ResEdit’s ‘PACK’ resource ID=1 decompression procedure, when Get1IndResource was called. This shows how on-disk compressed data of 19568 bytes gets decompressed into 27200 bytes in memory, using a ‘dcmp’ ID=0 decompressor which is contained within ResEdit as 68k code.

ResEdit

And of course, with the decompression working, and with a lot of fixes to file manager, list manager and various other places, ResEdit magically appears to be starting to work, one bit at a time 🙂 In this test case, we made a copy of ResEdit itself as “Test File” file, which was hard-coded for now as reply to CustomGetFile call to get it open. And this is what we got so far:

ResEdit splash screen, with PICT animation
List of all resource types in Test File
List of ‘ALRT’ resources
‘ALRT’ resource editor
‘ICN#’ editor
List of ‘MENU’ resources
‘MENU’ resource editor
List of ‘PICT’ resources
Info window for a ‘PAT#’ resource
‘STR#’ editor (using template)

Naturally there’s still a lot to fix, but surprisingly many features seem to work out-of-the box. But at least the following problems were immediately noticeable:

The actual resource writing does not yet work properly
List Manager still has some calls which are not properly implemented which leads to a number of assertions, and most likely causes the missing icons in ‘ICN#’ editor.
Font scaling has issues which is why dialog texts appear weird in the preview of ‘ALRT’ editor
A couple IconDispatch/ScriptUtil calls which need to implemented for resource file info dialog (mostly to get Finder labels, and format the file dates)
Proper multi-select support for List Manager
A bunch of other minor issues, such as text missing from a couple places, etc.
Probably other issues in features not yet tested

It’s still a bit too early to start testing the actual resource write support, but it won’t be far away from now after ResEdit is made more stable first.

Package Manager update

One small, but important thing which was fixed in this update is an actual, proper ‘PACK’ resource support. This is because ResEdit uses Apple’s ‘PACK’ ID=1 to implement its “BitEdit” graphic editor (used at least in ‘ICN#’ resource editor). Until this point, all packages could be implemented as regular dispatcher calls, but for the ResEdit to work we actually had to load the ‘PACK’ resource in InitPack, and register it as one of the AppPacks in low memory globals. A quite small change, but one which ResEdit seems to be happy with, for now 🙂

Ps. As another interesting side effect, with bug fixes done to toolbox HyperCard can now both close files properly (allowing us to navigate back to Home stack), and also HyperTalk editing seems to work well enough that changes to the script source actually affect behaviour of the stack 🙂

Second mid-summer update: Post-roadtrip, TextEdit progress, Clipboard…

Okay, so both members of development team have been busy being on vacation trips for the past few weeks, but we’re again back (although still on “kind of” summer break). To celebrate this we decided to each post a picture of what we’ve been up to, but to make this appropriate to topic of this blog, we do this by showing the photos using M.A.C.E running Photoshop 🙂

Road trip vacations

First, Pukka went on a road trip to Eastern Finland with his good old trusty Volvo station wagon for one week:

Toni went on a two-week road trip to Northern Germany, visiting 12 cities in 14 days, including taking this amazing train from Hamburg to Kiel:

TextEdit progress (and Scrap Manager)

During this two weeks of visiting a lot of places, Toni had a couple evenings time to do some work on (non-styled) Text Edit, which now is nearly complete, and is able to run TeachText with almost all text editing features working:

These are the notable features which work now in TextEdit:

Multi-line text display, with scrolling support (viewRect/destRect offsetting)
TEKey text input (still a bit hacky but functional)
TEClick with autoscrolling support, double-click word selection (using TEFindWord), and fExtend support for “shift-key”-type extending of selection, and recognition of left/right side of character for proper caret positioning
TextEdit hook support for nearly all TE Hooks (TEDoText, TERecalc, TEWordBreak, ClikLoop, TEFindWord, TEFindLine, TETrimMeasure, EOLHook, HighHook, etc…) which can be customized by 68K apps
Caret support with TEIdle blinking, TEKey cursor key movement (including multi-line support), and multi-line selection range support
Nearly all “quirks” of regular System 7.x TextEdit implemented as they work on real Mac; including the weird way caret gets positioned when moving across line boundaries using left/right arrow keys if previously clicked on right-hand side of a character, etc…
Dialog Manager edit field support, with System 7-type multi-line text support (i.e. edit fields with one line get extended horizontally 2x size, and scroll both horizontally and vertically, while multi-line edit fields only scroll vertically), “tabbing” between edit fields, and complete TEKey/TEClick support
Maybe some others I’ve forgotten to mention

Additionally, as TeachText wanted to use also Scrap Manager for edit functions, in parallel to implementing TECut/TECopy which use private TextEdit scrap, the implementation of generic Scrap Manager was finalized so that Clipboard file is fully supported (previously only in-memory state of scrap was implemented).

However, TEPaste still needs to be added for a 100% completion of “Edit” menu features for TeachText – and also, styled TextEdit work has not yet been started, which will be required in future to support more complex apps such as SimpleText and HyperCard 2.x.

Next up, on Toolbox API side, work is being done on Resource Manager’s resource fork write support, mostly just because after Scrap Manager was implemented, SuperPaint was able to progress a bit further in it’s startup, but wants to create “SuperPaint Prefs” file using Resource Manager’s functions, so might as well add that next. As of writing this, there’s already support for AddResource, ChangedResource and WriteResource, but we need to add resource fork compacting support to UpdateResFile to actually write the file properly. But we’ll get back to that later.

Bonus pic – for fun 🙂

Meanwhile, here’s a funny pic of what it looks when we run 28 M.A.C.E. instances at once 🙂 All quite responsive even though they’re all in full debug mode, although same can’t be said about the old Mac Pro when it was running them… 😀

28 individual M.A.C.E. applications (in debug mode) running at once 🙂

Mid-summer update: TextEdit progress

We’re still on summer “break”, but there has been a few evenings time to work on some TODO items, lately especially on the TextEdit implementation. It’s still far from complete (the basic, single-style TextEdit – Styled TextEdit is another undertaking on its own!), but there has been some progress that has already some visible effects.

For example, one of the games we’ve been testing emulation with, Scarab of RA, relies EXTREMELY lot on TextEdit, including quest log, inventory (which includes selecting items with text selection highlight included), help/hint, about, and score dialogs. Some of these work in very interesting ways, for example quest log and inventory assemble text by concatenating text from individual segments – for example, “16 ounces of food” line in inventory is assembled one by one from strings “16”, ” “, “ounce”, “s”, ” of food”, and carriage return. The game also appears to use the internal line start offsets to intercept clicks in inventory, highlighting individual lines using text selection by itself.

The game is already approaching playable state, but there are still a few issues – most notably, recalibration of line start offsets does not update last line offsets correctly when removing, causing removed lines to sometimes leave “trashed” text at end of text edit boxes. Here’s some screenshots of how it looks like now:

Scarab of RA gameplay screen, with inventory selection highlighted

Multi-line text highlighting of recent message in quest log

Additionally, a few other games (Lemmings, Simcity) can now proceed past copy protection screens, as we can finally use the VERY hacky TEKey implementation to enter correct answers to the protection questions (SimCity also required a bunch of new selectors to be added to the FP68K SANE dispatcher):

Lemmings can now proceed to gameplay, which appears to work perfectly, including sound & music output using Sound Driver

SimCity (black & white version) can also proceed to game, although sound does not yet work as it still has the weirdly mixed up sound completion routine method signature which crashes the device manager if sound is not disabled

EDIT: Here’s a video of first 15 minutes of Mac Lemmings gameplay:

Lemmings running on M.A.C.E.

There is also some effect on productivity apps:

Text object can now be created in MacDraw

As the “message” window in HyperCard 1.x is now able to accept commands, we can use “set userlevel to 5” command to actually modify the included stacks! Still a lot of things broken there, but yet a lot new functionality unlocked… We haven’t though had time to play with them, but it should soon be much more usable!

EDIT: After minor tweaking with SDL TextInput API, MacPascal can also now accept text input, compile and run Pascal code:

Some test code entered, compiled and run in MacPascal

In general, TextEdit still has a lot of important features unfinished or to be implemented:

No caret display yet (teCaret in TEDoText)
TEClick not yet implemented, thus using mouse for selecting text does not work yet
TEKey is VERY hacky, needs for example arrow key control, backspace support, etc
Dialog Manager keyboard input does not yet handle default items/clipboard commands etc
The keyboard driver is still passing key events through scancodes without real mapping to actual MacRoman characters, preventing modifiers/host operating system keyboard layout from having effect
Line start recalibration has still sometimes issue when removing lines from middle of text
Selections have still some visual glitches, especially when typing text in dialogs
Styled TextEdit support still completely missing…for now
Probably other things too which I can’t remember…

And now back to the summer break…

Some “Music” to entertain in the quiet period

The past few weeks have been a bit quiet for us, as we’ve been both busy doing important work and personal life stuff, so we haven’t had as much time recently to spend on this project. We will continue progress soon when each of us gets more spare time, but meanwhile here’s a bit of entertainment for meanwhile:

MS-BASIC 2.0 running “Music” example program in M.A.C.E.

As mentioned a few weeks ago, the audio output – which previously was not working in MS-BASIC – suddenly started working as Pukka fixed some 68k CPU bugs. At that time, I recorded a short video of the “Music” sample program running with audio included – and as there’s no other news to share at this time, we hope this “filler” video will keep you entertained for the time being!

Experimenting with INIT/cdev support

This previous weekend, while helping Pukka to fix a mysterious coordinate calculation bug in Fool’s Errand intro, I decided to experiment with one weird idea: How about adding support for System Extensions and Control Panels? Therefore, yesterday I added the After Dark ‘cdev’ control panel to MacPaint app’s build settings to be included in the System Folder, and took some time to look what it would take to make it work.

Basically, INITs and cdevs are loaded during the startup by Mac OS by checking a few bits (such as file type, visibility, etc), opening the resource map of each file, and executing the first ‘INIT’ code resource found. At this experimental stage, we don’t yet have full INIT/cdev scanning, but instead have just a hard-coded filename to load INIT code from which works ok enough for this test case.

Our boot-time heap wasn’t quite properly set up yet, as the boot stack was too high, not leaving enough space between MemTop and BufPtr, which on the first attempt of running the INIT caused After Dark’s InitZone call to actually end up at top of the stack, causing all sorts of havoc. Besides that, there were a ton of bugs/improvements:

68k-to-68k trap calls did not work correctly (i.e. calling a trap patched with 68k from 68k code)
InitZone parameter block handling was completely broken from the last year’s trap refactor, so it was fixed
Memory Manager’s Handle validation had not taken into account the case where handle’s “relative handle” field would point to invalid memory location in some “fake” handles (as one in After Dark), for which validation was added
Empty stubs were added for Notification Manager calls to allow After Dark to call them during activation/deactivation of screen saver
Locking of 68k mutex was not done early enough, so After Dark’s VBL handler was making the initial call Launch trap to have invalid register values
After Dark uses grafProcs to call QuickDraw, so one missing case used by it was added (ovalProc for ovals)

After that bunch of minor tweaks, we have now at least After Dark working nicely!

After Dark icon displayed during loading of MacPaint

Although the INIT code itself works, there is not yet any UI for displaying cdevs (Control Panels), so modules cannot be configured yet, and thus only the default “Starry Night” built-in module is displayed.

“Starry Night” (default module) running in After Dark inside MacPaint application bundle

There’s also a short video to demonstrate After Dark running:

Although not very usable feature at the moment, this will definitely allow interesting possibilities in the future, as theoretically we should be able to run applications requiring certain application-specific extensions to be present in the System Folder. This experimenting with After Dark has anyway allowed us to find a number of important bugs (as previously mentioned), and also works as a very good “compatibility” test to see how well our Toolbox API and 68k implementation can handle one very quirky control panel, as it patches a ton of toolbox traps and does a lot of low-level stuff which all appear to be compatible with our emulation.

HyperCard 1.0.1 works now (kind of)

As mentioned in the previous post about file system write support, one major motivation for experimenting with it this point was the interest about getting HyperCard to work on MACE. So, after we added it a few days ago, and after fixing a few bugs, we already got quite a few default stacks (included with HyperCard) to at least open up and display something! Below is a HyperCard screenshot extravaganza what we can do right now (click on pictures to see full size!!!):

As you can see, there’s a lot of stuff appearing correctly, but also a lot of things still broken and needing work. Cool stuff that works:

Most of cards open up and actually do sensible stuff
Most of drawing tools work (see the mess we made in the Home card!). I think they also share a lot of code with MacPaint tools, as some have same toolbox bugs present in both MacPaint and HyperCard

Stuff that needs a lot of work still:

Corrupted texts appearing here and there around places (such as between months in calendar & weird mess in some lists)
Bunch of error messages popping up here and there
Font setup dialog is not displaying font names correctly as using some still unimplemented selectors at least in List Manager
Cannot get back to Home stack, which apparently does not close correctly and cannot be reopened without restarting entire HyperCard application
HyperCalc stack does not appear to work well at all, all fields are empty and the “help” popup does not appear
File system writing needs improvements, especially to add the Standard File package so we wouldn’t anymore have to use the hard-coded filenames
TextEdit support is not yet complete, so most of text input does not yet work (with the exception of text drawing tool, which like MacPaint does not use TextEdit)
A bunch of other misc bugs here and there

Anyway the current status looks quite promising, and as eventually bugs will get hunted down & features added, the state of this application should improve over time.

File system write support (and MacPaint kind of works)

This week we reached a major milestone! From the encouragement on the work on HyperCard on 68KMLA forums, we got inspired to attempt tackling one major obstacle that was preventing it from working – file system write support!

As we mentioned earlier last year, when we last fall added the file system API, we did so using abstraction on top of AppleDouble file format. As Mac file system has the special dual nature of being split to data and resource forks, the AppleDouble format helps managing this in the emulated file system. Data fork, as mentioned earlier, is saved directly in its own file, while resource fork is merged with other file metadata in the AppleDouble header file. With this distinction, adding support for writing to data forks was really just trivial mapping of file manager write calls to the data file. Resource fork writing is a bit tricky, but we currently force the AppleDouble headers to keep resource fork as last element in the file, which allows us to offset also write operations from the beginning of resource data, and allows us to expand/shrink file easily, as end of resource fork is the actual end of header file. (One side note, setting EOF of files doesn’t have a standard C file operation, so we’re for now using the POSIX extension “ftruncate” which works at least on Mac OS X, but may lead to portability issues.)

Currently there’s very limited set of features for writing to file system implemented, basically just “Create” and “Write” file manager calls. For example, resource manipulation does not yet work as it will require a number of routines added to the Resource Manager to support it. However, one test application that directly benefited from this new feature was our beloved MacPaint, as it requires two scratch files to be present on startup volume/folder to function. This was nice, as it allowed us to add a few other missing features, such as PackBits (which also benefitted other apps and picture recording).

Although all tools don’t yet work perfectly, most of basic drawing functions are solid enough to not only allow drawing, but the experimental file writing also allows saving of MacPaint files, which appear to be readable by the Preview application in development host system Mac OS X 10.12!

FatBits and some test pixels drawn (including ‘hello’ done with the MacPaint text tool)

Additionally, many other applications have seen improvements from this, as now we can save Civilization games and continue playing them! (Although Standard File package is still using hard-coded SFReply records).

Photoshop 1.0 (and MacApp support)

The past week we’ve been busy working on optimizations on the 68k CPU and various improvements to the toolbox API. One of the improvements has been adding support for Apple’s MacApp MethodDispatch routine, which is used by Object Pascal and C+- (yes, that’s “C plus minus”, Apple’s proprietary C++ version which was briefly out before official C++ came to Mac). Basically, MethodDispatch is the virtual function table dispatcher commonly seen in C++ programs, but instead of being bundled in the application, it is actually implemented by the operating system as a toolbox trap – although with special calling convention, which cannot be called directly through A-line traps, but needs to be invoked through jump from 68k code. It handles selecting the correct implementation for class functions which can be inherited and overridden.

With the new MacApp method dispatching support, we should now be able to try running any MacApp-based applications – one cool such application, which is written in Objective-Pascal, is the first version of Adobe Photoshop:

About box and intro screen of Adobe Photoshop 1.0

Most of the dialog boxes appear to display (almost) correctly, although color picker, text input and popup menu support are missing so there’s little that can be done here:

Color separation preferences dialog in Photoshop

And just to test out how it works, we did a quick “Hello world” drawing using Photoshop drawing tools inside MACE:

Although implementing the method dispatching routine was fairly trivial, some time was taken by other features used by Photoshop, such as crude International Utilities/Script Manager support, PrGlue dispatcher for printing (or as in current case, telling application that printers are not available), proper Gestalt support, and various bug fixes even to some fairly low-level things as handling of empty regions in UnionRgn calls, rewriting the 80-bit “Extended” floating-point format conversion in SANE, etc… A few other test applications did benefit of those additions, but we’ll post more about them later!

Ps. In case you are interested how MacApp-based application code looks like, the original Object Pascal source code for the first Mac Photoshop was at some time ago published as open-source and is available on github: https://github.com/amix/photoshop

Microsoft BASIC first run

After spending a few days fixing bugs/issues, we can now successfully start up Microsoft BASIC 2.10, and run BASIC sample code applications with it. It looks a bunch of stuff is now working:

The BASIC sample apps seem to all be opening up and running the basic code is working fine in the BASIC interpreter.
Sample code listing, formatting and scrolling (by dragging text selection with mouse) appears to be working.
Trace and single-stepping seem to work ok using “Run” menu (and stopping using cmd+period).
The BASIC sample apps seem to be able to draw text and pictures, read files, and create menus, windows and dialogs.

There’s still a few issues to iron out though:

Only binary version of MS BASIC works, decimal version has some issues.
Standard File Package is still unfinished, so opening BASIC applications for testing is done temporarily using hard-coded SFReply records.
TextEdit input does not work yet properly, so for now we can only run existing sample apps. Interestingly, MS BASIC uses custom text input field which appears to do all the text drawing/selection itself without TextEdit, but depends on it for text input. This also prevents “Command” window from being much of use.
SOUND command does not appear to work yet, and there’s no visible signs of attempted calls to .Sound driver or sound hardware, so it needs further investigation. This may be related to sound missing from a few other test applications.