Comment by cmrdporcupine
6 hours ago
One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations. Not just the EmuTOS stuff which is itself amazing. Commercial ones (now open sourced!) like MagiC but then XaAES and so on.
You can even run MagiC on Linux now:
> One interesting turn on the ST side was the creation of from-scratch GEM implementations.
Oh yes indeed. I was on the edge of the FreeGEM project: I did some bug-fixing, documentation, translation, and stuff like that. I ended up learning a lot about the history of ST GEM, and one aspect was how its cleanly-layered design let people just re-implement bits and plug them back into the original.
Which is what led to FreeMINT and TOS 4, and the desire for a FOSS distro of that is what led to AFROS.
> You can even run MagiC on Linux now
Oh! I knew he'd open-sourced it. I did mention MagiC in passing in my follow-up to Nemanja's history:
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html
I didn't realise there had been recent activity. I must try it. Thank you!
Being in the North American sphere and distinctly post-Atari by the mid 90s, I didn't really know about MagiC until much later. It's pretty amazing what he built!
Too bad it's 100% assembler. Though very nicely written assembler.
Hm. I have a Firebee downstairs untouched. I am tempted to point an LLM at the MagiC sources and have it port to Coldfire :-)