Ferris Weather

A demo app to try building a networked Rust application for PPC classic Mac OS. This application fetches some JSON from my server, parses it with serde and shows an alert with the temperature (the file on the server doesn't change).

Building

Note: these steps have only been tested on Linux (Arch).

Prerequisites

1. My fork of the Retro68 with updated binutils (binutils branch) built and on $PATH. E.g. export PATH=$PATH:/home/you/path/to/Retro68-build/toolchain/bin
2. rustup
3. Docker (if not on Debian based system) or binutils-powerpc-linux-gnu on Debian based systems For non-Debian systems build the binutils docker image: (cd powerpc-binutils && docker build -t binutils-objcopy .)

Prepare

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=path/to/Retro68-build/toolchain/powerpc-apple-macos/cmake/retroppc.toolchain.cmake
cd ..

Build

Compile the Rust code with:

cargo build --release -Z build-std=core,alloc --target powerpc-apple-macos.json

Convert the static library to XCOFF, either via Docker or powerpc-linux-gnu-objcopy directly:

docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/src binutils-objcopy -O aixcoff-rs6000 /src/target/powerpc-apple-macos/release/libclassic_weather.a /src/target/powerpc-apple-macos/release/libclassic_weather.obj

Build the C code, link in the Rust code, and produce the final binary:

cmake --build build --target FerrisWeather_APPL

Running

FerrisWeather.bin is the MacBinary encoded application, you can copy this to a machine or emulator to run it. Retro68 provides the LaunchAAPL tool, which combined with its server counterpart makes this very easy. With the server running on a machine or emulator you can launch the binary directly from you host with:

LaunchAPPL -e tcp --tcp-address 127.0.0.1 build/FerrisWeather.bin