On Sun, 17 Dec 1995, Bill Studenmund wrote:

> My insticts are that you shouldn't touch the System file AT ALL. There
> are two ways to go, as I see it:
> 
> 1) Replace the code in the boot blocks with code which will fire up
> NetBSD. Note: At this point in startup, we don't have a MacOS yet.
> We just have rudiments which can deal w/ hardware. We don't even have
> the ability to read files yet. This method would be the fastest, as
> we don't load ANY MacOS, but we have a 24-bit memory scheme at this
> point, so we'd need to screw heavily w/ the PMMU tables.

Assuming the system even supports 24 bit addressing.  Yeah.  Disassemble 
MODE32 and stick the relevant sections in, set to execute only on older 
systems.

> 2) Let MacOS come up. Note: we'd probably want to run w/ a minimal
> system, possibly one just for the machine in question. We then either
> relabel the booter to be the startup program (as described in the
> bootblocks), or we just stick the booter in a Startup items folder
> and set its preferences to boot after launch. The advantage of this
> technique is that we don't really have to do anything new. We just make
> minimal OS disks, stick on a booter, and away we go. 

Easier than that.  Install a minimum system, move the system file out of 
the system folder to the root directory.  Move the enabler if one exists 
to the root directory also (either that or delete the DSAT resources to 
eliminate checking of system type and cross your fingers that it will 
boot -- this worked last night, anyway).  Then delete the system folder 
and the rest of its contents, *including* the finder.  Finally, copy the 
program that you want to autoboot to the root directory of the disk.  
When you start up with the disk, your program will boot without the 
finder as the only executable program.  I don't know of a way to add 
extensions this way, though.  Good reason to include MODE32 in the 
booter.  (It would run at the time extensions normally do, anyway, 
approximately.)

> Also, we can use
> the booter to change boot defaults if we want, and the booter only has
> to run under MacOS (we don't have to roll our own windowing system).
> As a final plus, we have a system in a state documented (as well as it
> is) in IM.
> 
> I kinda think the latter is the easiest. I tried to make a boot floppy
> for my IIsi last night, but the disk was defective, so I ran into
> trouble.

You had a bad disk last night too?  How ironic.

> Also, I'm not sure if System 7.1 likes having a StartUp
> program which isn't the Finder (as theFinder's such a special app
> to the machine).

See above on how Norton and some of the others do it.  (99% sure this 
will work correctly.)

> Take care,
> 
> Bill
> 

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