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Re: Strange idea... Cleanrooming the ][+ monitor?

This may be trickier than you think, depending on how compatible you
wish to be; as I recall, for instance, a number of programs used the
disassembly routines & tables in the monitor. My impression of this
code is that it was carefully hand-crafted by Woz himself; it will take
a long time for some one to independently rediscover his tricks, I
imagine. He was a really clever guy.

There aren't many bytes in the monitor program which aren't tightly
packed between entry points that *some* program *somewhere* depends on.

After all, the whole thing was just 2048 bytes. But, at the time, that
was a whole bunch of useful code just begging to be used
every-which-way-you-could.

The old IBM BIOS had a much more limited set of "INT" entry points,
much more ROM space, and much less pressure to use every trick to get
programs to run before clones became popular. I also doubt it was
written with the same kind of intense concentration and compaction that
was typical for 1977-era micros, even if the writers were somehow as
clever as Woz. Even so, it was a serious matter to get clean-room PC
BIOSes.

>From your description of simiie.zip, it sounds like an Applesoft
clean-room clone. Is it compatible with all the things that use
Applesoft? DOS 3.3, ProDOS BASIC.SYSTEM, Basic compilers, Beagle Bros
Applesoft tools & two-liners?

Finally, do you know of a single viable project being held up by the
lack of a clean-room monitor ROM? Seems to me that there are plenty of
left over real Apple IIs of various kinds to satisfy the hard-core
fanatics, the less-hard-core folks are satisfied with emulators & ROM
images downloaded from the net so they can relive Lode Runner whenever
they get the itch, and enough people willing to overlook inconvenient
legalisms to provide images from the former for the latter. Everyone is
happy :-). Unless they can't afford $50 for a system from eBay and have
a highly developed sense of legal scruples.

That said, if you can pull it off, it will be an impressive feat! But
Franklin and others failed even when there was some money to be made
from success, at least as I understand it.

--Joe