pseudo-code machine
What you are talking about is quite a large undertaking. If you are doing this to teach yourself low-level operating system design, fair enough. Sounds like a plan.
But unless you also want to learn all about designing and building virtual machines, and create all their opcodes and a programming language, -and- get all that working before you even start on the OS and GUI, maybe you wanna pick an existing virtual machine spec - preferably one that you can just apt-get and install. Maybe even Java itself - who knows, you could eventually have the thing run in a browser.
Failing that, one that you implement yourself, but to an existing spec, with an existing support/enthusiast/fanbase. There should be a few available, and hopefully the article above is a good place to start. There's probably a swathe of Usenet groups under the comp. subheading, once you know what terms to look for.
I'm sure there is at least one specification that is designed for teaching OS design and comes with a famous textbook on the subject, /edit/ that would be Minix I'm thinking of - see below.
Then you can move on to the "easy" part - an OS and GUI [
)] ]'>
Treat the idea of loading and running the MacOS Toolbox ROM as a seperate (but related) project. There you will have to emulate either a 68k CPU or a Pascal virtual machine, plus a whole bunch of other stuff I don't understand at all. But I guess essentially recreating the effort of other Mac emulators.
If you want to do that as well, cool - consider (also/instead/first) taking an existing open-source emu and picking it apart.
See also:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Category:Operating_System_Design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JNode
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix
Once I understood your idea, it sounded a bit like you want to create something like the Java virtual machine. Generically, these are called p-code, or pseudo-code machines. And then to create an OS and GUI on top of that.
What you are talking about is quite a large undertaking. If you are doing this to teach yourself low-level operating system design, fair enough. Sounds like a plan.
But unless you also want to learn all about designing and building virtual machines, and create all their opcodes and a programming language, -and- get all that working before you even start on the OS and GUI, maybe you wanna pick an existing virtual machine spec - preferably one that you can just apt-get and install. Maybe even Java itself - who knows, you could eventually have the thing run in a browser.
Failing that, one that you implement yourself, but to an existing spec, with an existing support/enthusiast/fanbase. There should be a few available, and hopefully the article above is a good place to start. There's probably a swathe of Usenet groups under the comp. subheading, once you know what terms to look for.
I'm sure there is at least one specification that is designed for teaching OS design and comes with a famous textbook on the subject, /edit/ that would be Minix I'm thinking of - see below.
Then you can move on to the "easy" part - an OS and GUI [
)] ]'>Treat the idea of loading and running the MacOS Toolbox ROM as a seperate (but related) project. There you will have to emulate either a 68k CPU or a Pascal virtual machine, plus a whole bunch of other stuff I don't understand at all. But I guess essentially recreating the effort of other Mac emulators.
If you want to do that as well, cool - consider (also/instead/first) taking an existing open-source emu and picking it apart.
See also:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Category:Operating_System_Design
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JNode
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix