Development Environment

Any Quadra or Power Macintosh running System 7.0 or greater will do. At the moment, a 68040 based Macintosh is recommended, since there is no PowerPC implementation of the Magic Cap simulator. If you choose to get a Power Macintosh, empirical evidence suggests that the simulator runs sluggishly on the 66 MHz models. We've tested the development environment on the Quadra 630, 650, 700, 800, and 950, and the Power Macintosh 7100/66, 7100/80, 8100/80, 8100/100, and 8100/110. The Magic Cap simulator also uses 68881 floating point instructions, so if you're using a 68040 Macintosh that doesn't have an FPU, or a Power Macintosh, you'll also need to run an FPU emulation extension, like SoftwareFPU. (The CodeWarrior Magic installer places a version of SoftwareFPU in your Control Panels folder if the installer determines your hardware configuration needs it.)

You'll need at least 20 Mb of RAM, to run MPW and the Magic Cap simulator simultaneously. (You don't need to do this, but it's a pain to quit and start MPW every single time.) If you're the type of person that runs a lot of system extensions, you'll need more memory. MPW and the Magic Developer scripts, tools, and samples will take up around 100 Mb of hard disk space.

You can't link in the MPW C library to use C routines like strcpy, strlen, etc. If you look at the Utilities class, though, you'll find several string related operations. Magic Cap likes to work with Pascal strings, which are strings preceded by a length byte. You can call CToPString() to convert C strings into Pascal strings, then call the various operations of class Utilities.

Note also that other C libraries (such as ANSI math functions) that rely on the Macintosh cannot be used. As a rule, if the library has "A4" in its file name you can't use it.