Re: Is it too hard to program for the Apple?

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

> You already seem to have a seamless toolchain, can you
> elaborate?

Sure!

So, when I am doing a build of something like, say, apple game server,
I select "clean/build" on the project in my IDE and in addition to
recompiling the java assets, all of the machine code is reassembled as
well and repackaged into the program executable.  So that way, the
next time I start the project, it's all ready to go.

Moving on to apple-only development, I started off using Apple Game
Server as the host for single-load games.  And it didn't take any
stretch to move that into something that could load additional things
as well.  This has some advantages in that you don't have to build a
floppy image (for an emulator) or go the extra step of transmitting to
a physical machine via ADTPro.  Much closer to instant gratification,
only requiring typing in#2 and waiting for the bootstrap routine to
complete.  But this is an OS-less approach and has some obvious limits
to it, namely no file management.

So my next step is to make things more seamless, if things go well and
time permitting.  Phase 1) Finish the JACE emulator's virtual prodos
volume support (read-only works, write support doesn't).  Phase 2)
Borrow the apple game server bootstrap and reuse it to do something
different: Bootstrap prodos over serial and insert a device driver for
the serial hard disk.  That way you can recompile things, edit things,
whatever on the PC/MAC side and the apple // sees everything plain as
day right there.  No rebooting to see new/changed items.  This works
in an emulator with an emulated hard drive device after all!  So you
could test run over and over only rebooting if you broke something.
And if you like what you have, then use your favorite file copy method
to transfer it permanently to the Apple-side.

This also opens another very interesting door: Having a shared
filesystem.  So what if you had your favorite editing tool hosted in
an emulator and had that writing to your physical filesystem.  It
should also be possible to share that same filesystem with a physical
apple at the same time.  So you could for example compile at an
accelerated speed in an emulator and run from the physical machine at
a normal speed.  Test, and if you broke something go fix it without
having to restart your emulator.  Fun fun fun.  OK, maybe too much
fun.  Either way, it could make my life very interesting if I took it
one step further and got GS/OS working.......nah, that's just crazy-
talk.  ;-)

-B