🚀 go-pugleaf

Sorry if this sounds stupid, I was a little bleary when I thought it up...
Folks were talking about the intricacies of producing legal Mac/BIOS ROM
clones. 2 programming teams, one to analyze the existing code and document
it, one to reimplement according to team 1's specs.

I don't care for Macintoshes or PCs very much. I'd really like to see some
detailed TOS docs though, and this sounds like the ideal approach to getting
it. Original source code from Atari would be pretty cool, but they don't
even give that to registered developers any more. (Much to my chagrin, $300
after the fact, y'know?  }-)  How 'bout a team of ST programmers getting
together to analyze TOS 1.4, and publish their specs? That ought to be at
least as useful as the original source code, and doesn't require any effort
on Atari's part. Ideally the Atari system programmers themselves would be
best suited to the task, being most familiar with everything, but they're
already pretty busy. And, I suppose, being so thoroughly familiar with the
code, they may overlook mentioning some things that they take for granted.
It would be a lot of grungy work to explore the ROMs from a total outsider's
viewpoint, but it would be useful...

I'm not particularly interested in cloning TOS ROMs. i don't have the desire
(or the resources!) to produce ST clones. But I *would* like to have enough
docs to write my own mods to TOS. I can't see this being a bad thing, look
at all the info you can get about MSDOS, and look at the sophistication of
most DOS programs...
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