Question about which tools to use, bugs, the best way to implement a function, etc should go here. Don't forget to see if your question is answered in the wiki first! When in doubt post here.
study the 68k bootloader, find out what it does at start up, find out wehre the booloader goes to
read all u can for the processor on the 68k, and then ull know what a bootloader should do for it
The operating system/firmware on these machines is integrated into ROM, there is no way to natively bootstrap these systems without doing so from within classic Mac OS (..a GUI), this is possible because Apple didn't really take advantage of memory protection hardware until Mac OS X.
These are very old systems, slow.. and they don't get a whole lot of attention these days, but several alternate operating systems exist.. so you have example code to learn from.
Good luck.
Twitter: @canadianbryan. Award by smcerm, I stole it. Original was larger.
I recommend SNASM68K, which is what I use for Sega Mega Drive programming. There's also a program called CodeWriter, but I've never used it. The first 1024 bytes of a disk contains the boot loader. The first word is always "LK". Execution begins at offset 2.
It's probably a good idea to initialize HFSGlobals ($34e) to point at something before trying to load anything. The standard bootloader allocates 300 bytes times the number of 128K banks in the system, plus 2, for this structure. Then the boot drive should be mounted, and you can load your system file. If you are going to use the BIOS after that, there are probably more things that need initializing.
