Rhapsody Developer Release Copyright 1997 by Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

Rhapsody Developer Release Notes:
Blue Box

These notes are for the Developer Release of the Blue Box. The Blue Box enables the execution of pre-Rhapsody Mac OS applications in a pre-Rhapsody environment. This document is primarily a list of Macintosh OS features that require interaction with the underlying operating system. As this is the first release, many of these features are minimally functional or not functional.

 

Notes Specific to Developer Release

Initial Features

The following items identify the features that make up the Blue Box and contain other useful information for the Developer Release. Known problems are integrated into descriptions below.

 

Installation and Launching

The Blue Box is a standard Rhapsody application located in /NextApps/MacOS.app. This directory contains the binary Mac OS, the TruBlueRomImage, the BlueBoxDiskImage, the BlueBoxDiskImages folder, and the Resources folder. To launch the Blue Box, log in as root, open the /NextApps folder, and double-click on the MacOS.app icon. This procedure starts up a full-screen Blue Box. You can also launch the binary (as root) from the command line using the Terminal application. The application directory MacOS.app must also be writable by root.

 

System Software Supported

Mac OS 8 is the only supported system software for Developer Release.

 

Sound

Sound is not supported in Blue Box for Developer Release.

 

Copy and Paste, Drag and Drop

Copy and paste operations between the Blue Box and the Yellow Box environments are not supported in either direction for the Developer Release. These features will be supported in the Premier Release. It is unclear how well direct manipulation of the scrap (not using GetScrap and PutScrap) will be handled.

 

File System

Disk image files created with utilities such as DiskCopy or ShrinkWrap are supported. The system disk image, contained in a single disk-image file named "BlueBoxDiskImage," is located in the same directory as the MacOS executable. Additional disk images can go inside a directory named "BlueBoxDiskImages" in the same directory as the MacOS executable. These volumes can be locked by removing write permission from the disk image file. It is recommended that the system disk image, BlueBoxDiskImage, have read-only permissions.

HFS partitions on SCSI hard drives (internal and external bus) are supported in the Developer Release. They will appear locked. It might not be possible to mount an HFS partition that is mounted through the core operating system's HFS file system (this restriction will probably extend to all partitions on the same disk).

The only modifiable file systems in Blue Box are writable disk images. Internal HFS files can be accessed read-only.

 

Networking

Networking does not work in the Developer Release.

 

Floppies

800 KB and 1.4 MB floppies are not yet supported.

 

CD-ROM and Block Storage

HFS-formatted CD-ROMs will be supported soon. Initially they will behave like (locked) SCSI hard drives. Auto-detection and auto-ejection might not be supported in the Developer Release. Non-HFS CD-ROMs (for example, Audio, Photo, ISO 9660) are supported in the Developer Release.

Third-party SCSI devices, such as Zip and Jaz drives, might not be supported in the Developer Release. If they are supported, they will probably behave like generic SCSI hard drives; that is, they won't have the ability to recognize media inserted after system startup and they won't be able to auto-eject media.

Note that although SCSI drives are supported as disk drives, direct SCSI access through the SCSI Manager is not supported in the Developer Release.

 

SCSI Manager

When the Blue Box starts up, it loads SCSI Manager 4.3. In the Developer Release, no buses are present (that is, no SIMs are loaded) so most SCSI Manager calls fail and return an "invalid SCSI bus" error (this is true with both current and earlier versions of SCSI Manager).

In a subsequent releases, SCSI Manager 4.3 will represent each bus that is present in the machine as a SIM. A subset of the devices that are physically present—those that the user designates as being "owned by Blue"—will be controllable by device drivers or applications in the Blue Box through the existing Mac OS APIs. Third-party Mac OS SIMs, however, will not be supported.

 

Video

 

User Input

Apple Events

Apple events are the preferred mechanism for sending events and data between Blue Box and Yellow Box applications. The Yellow AppKit APIs will be extended to incorporate Apple events. The API is under development and will be released to developers in the future. Apple will make extensive use of this functionality in its implementation of the Blue Box.

The Apple event functionality has not been implemented for the Developer Release. Apple events inside the Blue Box remain unchanged from MacOS 8.

 

MacOS Native I/O Model

The native I/O model, including the Name Registry, DriverServicesLib, and associated libraries are present in Blue. However, since the Blue Box cannot detect hardware, there are no devices in the device tree. As a result, no native drivers are loaded.

 

Serial Support

The Developer Release of the Blue Box does not include serial support. The Rhapsody serial services are not implemented in the Developer Release. Clients that attempt to open either port will receive a notInitErr (-900). Full serial support in the Rhapsody Blue Box is planned for the Premier release.

 

This page was last modified on Friday, September 19 1997 04:26