Dear Emaculation community!
As this forum is all about emulation i thought this might be interesting for you:
Some time ago people over at nextcomputers.org started the project to write an emulator capable of emulating a NeXTstation computer. The company, that built this machine - NeXT Computers, Inc. - was founded by Steve Jobs and has built some very advanced 68k-based hardware during the late 80s and early 90s, including the famous NeXTcube.
These computers ran an operating system called NeXTstep, which is the direct predecessor of today's Mac OS X.
The NeXT computer emulator that nextcomputers.org forum member gilles started to write is called "Previous" and is based on Hatari (an Atari emulator). It should be able to run the 68k version of NeXTstep and thus also be able to run some very famous software, like the first web browser (World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee) or Lotus Improv.
The emulator is still in very early stage, but it is already able to boot the ROM to the ROM monitor prompt. The next step would be to add support for keyboard input to the emulator.
Is anyone in here interested to help writing code for this emulator?
Any other contribution to this project (finding hardware documentation, etc) is also very welcome!
There is a thread discussing this emulator in the nextcomputers.org forums:
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/vie ... php?t=2642
The emulator's source code is available here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/previous/develop
If you have any questions or need to know what documentation has already been collected, just ask!
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
With best regards,
Andreas
Finally, here are some very early screenshots of the emulator:
"Previous" during boot process:
ROM monitor, this is how far "Previous" can get at the moment:
