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Very cool! It's a lot of fun working with retro computers and helping them be more "useful" in the modern age. I've also been playing around a lot with Classic
by camhenlin 5y ago
Very cool! It's a lot of fun working with retro computers and helping them be more "useful" in the modern age.
I've also been playing around a lot with Classic Macintosh programming recently and have been working on building out some serial port-utilizing software, and some different UI approaches due to finding the Macintosh Toolbox a bit frustrating to work with. Although having spent more time with it, I may commit to diving in more on the Toolbox at this point.
I haven't written up any blog posts or anything yet as I haven't built a full piece of software, mostly just library exploration, but I have plans to build some more comprehensive pieces of software soon.
Here are some of the things I've been working on:
probably the most interesting at this point is this one:
- coprocessorjs host library:
https://github.com/CamHenlin/coprocessor.js https://github.com/CamHenlin/coprocessor.js + mac app library: https://github.com/CamHenlin/coprocessorjslib https://github.com/CamHenlin/coprocessorjslib + example app: https://github.com/CamHenlin/retro68-coprocessorjs-test https://github.com/CamHenlin/retro68-coprocessorjs-test, allows Classic Macintosh applications to send nodejs programs and function calls over a serial port to a remote machine (I was thinking an RPi) and get a response back.
and some UI toying around:
- nuklear quickdraw: https://github.com/CamHenlin/nuklear-quickdraw https://github.com/CamHenlin/nuklear-quickdraw - nuklear back end for quickdraw. Too slow for 68000-based system unfortunately. I think this would be fine for targeting an 020 system however. Looks and functions really nice so it's unfortunate that it's a bit too slow.
- micro UI quickdraw: https://github.com/CamHenlin/microui-quickdraw https://github.com/CamHenlin/microui-quickdraw - similar to the nuklear backend, a micro UI backend. Also too slow for 68000-based systems but was an easy test after writing the nuklear back end, so why not?
- UGUI quickdraw: https://github.com/CamHenlin/UGUIQuickDraw https://github.com/CamHenlin/UGUIQuickDraw - again similar to micro UI and UGUI, but way slower due to only relying on drawing a single pixel at a time. Might work OK on a considerably faster system
- news_to_me 5y agoWhoa, super cool work! I can see Coprocessorjs being really useful. I love seeing modern dev for 68k Macs. The toolbox can be a pain at first, but it's not so bad once you internalize all the different managers you have to remember. MacApp supposedly helps do a lot of the work for you, but I haven't gotten around to doing much with it yet—it's more fun implementing my own abstractions like an async task manager.