Comment by lproven
4 hours ago
> 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 :-)