In article <37A04DD8.3493FE6D@pacbell.net> , Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet>  
wrote:
> Ron Parker wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 06:24:35 -0700, Ken wrote:
>>
>> >  Has anyone ported your patch to the Mac platform yet and if so who
>> >and where ?
>>
>> I know Chris Huff was working on it; I don't know if he succeeded.  I've
>> been looking for my own cheap PowerMac for a few months now, but I suspect
>> that the cost of the computer plus a compiler for it will be out of my
>> reach for a while.
>
> Why not just set up a Mac emulator. I had one set up for a while to evaluate
> a couple of PovMac utilities and they ran ok on my system. The hardest part
> was learning all of the differences in the operating systems (not something
> I will ever choose to repeat again thank you very much as I would rather have
> dental drilling and filling done instead).

There are several limits in this approach. The main one is that you can't do
the deveopment on a current Mac OS, as Apple does no longer support 68K
processors from Mac OS 8.5 on (we are now a 8.6 and 9.0 will follow later
this year). The second one are legal issues. If you don't get a Mac ROM (its
the Mac "BIOS") you will need a copy of one and the Mac ROM is of course
completely copyright protected and Apple has an unbeateable army of lawyers
to enforce that :-)  Many tried, all died!  The supply of old ROM modules
from old Macs is very limited.
That is why there never were/are Mac clones (also they had a licensing
program a few years ago, but they stopped it) out there. Nobody ever managed
in the past 15 years to write a legally clean replacement for the ROM.


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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