For the record, if you were porting Minix to a homebrew 68k machine MacMinix probably would not be the best place to start for the very reason that it *is* encapsulated inside of a MacOS program.

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Ah, yeah. Didn't explain my train of thought there. I was thinking (for myself, anyway) that as an educational venture, building and tweaking Minix inside an app would be more appealing than doing so on DIY hardware that I would have to concurrently debug. And possibly useful in terms of understanding what the heck is involved when it comes time to do it in hardware.

not to be cruel to it, but Minix is pretty straight-up a waste of time.

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It's mostly building it in conjunction with the Tanenbaum courseware that appeals to me, not setting it up as a rock-solid end-user experience.

My idea is to instead have the "master" CPU talk to plain old SRAM and have the Prop regularly copy segments into its internal buffer.

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OK, pardon me if I've got this sideways -- why copy it into the Prop? So you can use the Prop's dedicated video timers/libraries and whatnot?

I'm imagining something where the Prop tickles the SRAM in just the right way to make it clock the data straight out to video, without having to ingest and regurgitate it.

My thought there is for graphics applications the Prop could be set up to accept *commands* written to some area in RAM

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Sort of like -- "You there! I need a circle yea big, here and here, and move sprite #3 a smidge to the left. You handle the details, I have stuff to do." ?