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| Learning to write drivers? |
Posted by: aphetica on 2008-05-27 07:52:18
Where would be a good source of information on how to write drivers for pre-OS9 machines?
Where does one begin learning how to write code for Macs?
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Posted by: paws on 2008-05-27 08:41:24
Most of the info is still on Apple's site, I think. developer.apple.com.
Else there are the developer CDs Apple released in the 90's with sample code.
There are books about development, too, but probably not about driver development as such. But if you're completely green it's not the first thing you want to try and tackle either.
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Posted by: II2II on 2008-05-27 08:50:46
The Code Warrior 9 Gold CDs had a few "learn to program " books in PDF format. They did cover the basics. And some of those basics are pretty messy on the classic Mac OS, so it would probably be a good jumping-off point for drivers.
Check out Inside Macintosh. They should cover driver development, and certainly cover DA development. If I recall correctly, DAs are just a special case for device driver programming.
Also look for articles in the MacTech archives.
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Posted by: aphetica on 2008-05-27 08:53:32
Thanks. That helps a lot. 🙂
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Posted by: paws on 2008-05-27 10:02:45
Check out Inside Macintosh. They should cover driver development, and certainly cover DA development. If I recall correctly, DAs are just a special case for device driver programming. "DA"?
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Posted by: tomlee59 on 2008-05-27 11:18:36
DA = "desk accessory" (we're talking *ancient* history here!)
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Posted by: paws on 2008-05-27 11:48:59
DA = "desk accessory" (we're talking *ancient* history here!) Aaah!
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Posted by: Charlieman on 2008-05-27 11:51:11
The old Mac archives such as Umich had collections of programming frameworks. You might be able to save some time by using an existing framework that contains all of the right headers etc.
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Posted by: II2II on 2008-05-27 17:16:42
Desk accessories were tiny applications that you started from the Apple menu, and they were common in the System 6 era and earlier. (System 7 through 9 allowed you to put pretty much anything in the Apple menu.)
These systems didn't support multitasking (or, in the case of System 6, it could be disabled) so an alternative means of having concurrently open programs had to be developed. This mechanism was through writing the second program as a device driver.
Of course, this had trade-offs. Which is why it wasn't done for major programs. One trade-off was that DA development was more complex since it was a device driver and it had to communicate with the currently running application. There were probably resource limitations too, since most DAs are small.
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