[CDG5] Cube-E and Apple Events

[Elliot Nunn]

Hi everyone,

I hope 2019 is treating you all well!

On Monday I go back to uni after a very relaxing summer holiday. Then
only about 7 months until my final exams. My time as the perennial
student is coming to an end. But with a hobby as fun as this one,
working life will surely be a breeze. ;)

Slowly but steadily I have been making the changes to the CubeE repo
necessary to build System 7.1. I want to take a moment to lay out what I
currently think about the history of this fortuitous code dump. First, a
brief interpretation of some codenames found in the sources:

- Cube-E is the System 7.1 project.
- SuperMario is the ROM project for 61/71/8100 and some contemporaneous
  68k Macs. It was forked from Cube-E at or near GM.
- Reality is a branch that was developed in parallel with SuperMario,
  with files frequently being copied or merged back and forth. This
  context, and also the definitive-sounding name, suggest that it was a
  continuation of the "main" System repo post-Cube-E.

The SuperMario repo features changes to several parts of the source tree
that can be built into both ROM and the System. However, the
System-specific parts of the source tree have suffered several months of
"code rot" (most obviously the missing System makefile), and cannot be
built. The team maintaining the branch seemed to have a strong focus on
hardware.

But we know from our earlier hacking on this repo that many, many
SuperMario changes survived all the way to the final NewWorld ROM
release. It is implausible that they arrived at this point through a
decade of development in parallel with the main System codebase. There
must have been a "master" branch to merge back into. The frequent merges
between SuperMario and Reality strongly suggest that Reality was this
"master" branch.

Accordingly, most of my work on the repo has been on reversing the
anti-System code rot, with a minority dedicated to backing out the
actual SuperMario code changes. Check out the "system" branch
(frequently rebased, as usual).

And on this topic, is anyone interested in getting the Apple Event
Manager (PACK 8) to build? I speak very little Pascal! Some highly
relevant history can be found below.

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf

My best to all,

Elliot