Access to the Toolbox and Other Hardware Under A/UX

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In article <376 at ajpo.sei.cmu.edu> eberard at ajpo.sei.cmu.edu (Edward Berard) writes:
>It has been mentioned that either "one has no access to the toolbox
>under A/UX", or that "access to the toolbox under A/UX is different
>that it is under the original Mac OS." I need some answers to the
>following questions:
>
>	1. The term "toolbox", as I understand it, refers only to a
>	   specific part of the ROM in the Mac II, _not_to_all_the_
>	   hardware_on_the_Mac_II. Is this correct? In any event, I am
>	   concerned with gaining access to the entirety of the Mac
>	   II's hardware. Please help me with my terminology.

	Correct, 'toolbox' applications under A/UX run in user mode.
	If you want to access the hardware you have two choices:

		- for a program that doesn't need access to interrupt
		  hardware you can run a normal program as root and
 		  use the phys() system call (a Unix call rather than 
		  a toolbox call) to map the hardware into you processes
		  address space, then you can just poke at it. This works
		  well for things like frame buffers etc

		- anything else needs a 'traditional' unix driver written
		  for it.

	I believe that Apple have said that programs that access the 
	hardware directly may not run on future versions of the MacOS
	(and obviously hardware)

>	2. "No access to the toolbox" or "different access to the
>	   toolbox" can be taken to mean any number of things. For
>	   example, it could mean that no one has yet written the
>	   necessary "glue routines" to bind C and Pascal routines to
>	   the toolbox, or it could mean that there is no access to
>	   any of the Mac II's hardware under any language due to some
>	   implementation bug. I was informed by one source that this
>	   bug would be fixed in version 1.1 of A/UX. If this is so,
>	   when will version 1.1 be released, and does it fix this
>	   bug?

	You can write an A/UX toolbox Application 2 ways:

		- in the MacOS world, then cart the application over whole
		  and use the 'launch' command to run it

		- using the glue that they provide, this way you can actually
		  mix Unix and toolbox calls in the same application

>	3. It occurs to me that complete access to the toolbox and
>	   other hardware will involve more than just simple bindings.
>	   What differences should one expect?

	Some toolbox calls are not implemented under A/UX 1.0, more are
	said to be implemented in the forthcoming 1.1 (in fact PixelPaint
	runs unmodified). Things that seem to be missing have mainly to do
	with real-time sorts of things like sound etc


		Paul
-- 
Paul Campbell, UniSoft Corp. 6121 Hollis, Emeryville, Ca ..ucbvax!unisoft!paul  
Nothing here represents the opinions of UniSoft or its employees (except me)

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