So I got vMac running on Linux, and I found the ROMs and a MacOS 1.1 boot disk image for it. I figured I'd be able to use that to get the original Dali Clock executable running; then from there, I'd generate a disk image that I could boot in the Mac 128, once I figured out how to actually get that image onto a 400k floppy.
But I can't find any unix tools that can generate MFS file system images. MFS is the original file system, before HFS (it was not yet hierarchical -- there weren't any directories, that was all implemented in the Finder, not in the file system!)
So I need to use a later version of MacOS, so that I can transfer the files into the Mac world with HFS, and then tell it to write a 400K MFS floppy image from there. Which I could do, if I could find boot disk images for later versions, but I can't. All I've found is lawyer detritus where people who used to distribute these things say that Apple made them take them down. Apple, of course, distributes disk images themselves for free -- but only as far back as MacOS 6, sigh.
I'm told that when you run this Dali Clock executable on MacOS 9, it looks all wrong because it assumes a 1-bit frame buffer. From reading the ASM, it looks like it wouldn't be too hard to hack it to work by spreading the hardcoded bitmaps into byte-maps and multiplying a few variables by 8. It'd be better to draw into an off-screen bitmap and then copy that onto the screen, but I'm not feeling quite motivated enough to learn to hack QuickDraw in 68K assembler in this day and age. Actually, I wonder how hard it would be to get an assembler running at all. It might be easier to just hack the executable file by hand in emacs...
This original Dali Clock executable is 16k (including the 7k of bitmaps.) My X Windows version is 74k, not counting all the libraries it uses. But my PalmOS version is only 15k, so it's not my fault, it's X ("Complex Nonsolutions to Simple Nonproblems."[tm])
