DIY cartridges for the ST

[NathanAllan]

Does anyone have any links to this kind of thing? I wanna make a cartridge for running a 68k linux os of some kind. I mean, if it can emulate a mac through a cart, why not run a small linux on it? I'm researching it myself.

Nathan

 

[NathanAllan]

sorry for the double post, I forgot to select instant email notify, darnit.

 

[Micom 2000]

Could be possible. Small's Mac emulation board included the Mac roms.
The big problem would likely be the STs limitation of 4megs. There was some work on this using Linux 68 and of course Minux (Minux Is not Unix). A google search could turn up what became of attempts to use Linux on the ST.

Lawrence

 

[carlsson]

Both MacOS, Linux and Minix probably are far too big to fit on a 128K cartridge, or whatever that page suggested was a typical maximum size the ST can address via its cartridge port. Maybe if you have bank switching then. I suppose the Mac emulator only supplied the Mac ROMs on hardware, and the operating system - requiring ROM access - was loaded from disk as usual?

By the way, I suppose you already have seen this recent thread on AtariAge:
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=83127
It appears a lot of hardware devices and a few utility programs used the cartridge port.

 

[NathanAllan]

I'm not really sure how the MagicSac worked with floppies, I'm trying to read up on that now. I'm between appointments so this is a cursory post. I found this:

http://www.geocities.com/clu-da-bard/spectre.html

on the Spectre Mac emulator. There are embedded versions of Linux, like elks that run on systems with very limited amounts of memory and slower processors. There's an elks for a toshiba t-1200 and it has an 8086 with 360k(?) of ram. On that link it says that you can use that emulator as long as you have Mac roms. I have a Mac that has a motherboard problem; it has a short somewhere and I'm not gonna fix it so I might as well use its roms. It's a Mac toaster of some variety, I haven't looked at it in over a year. I'll get it out and see what I can do with it. It might be a 512k or a 1mb, can't remember. I might be able to figure out a way to make Linux elks go to a rom.

I'll read more and post more later.