[NTLK] Simulating the Newton: new version!

[Greg Toffer]

It’s mind boggling that we could (or, should I say, AI could) fix all the bugs in the original Newton ROM in a matter of hours, while the original programmers spent months or even years working on that… We could get the perfect ROM and more… 

 Daniele

Il giorno 1 ott 2026, alle ore 14:18, Matthias Melcher <m.melcher at robowerk.de> ha scritto:



> On 1. Oct 2026, at 05:50, Daniel Parnell <me at danielparnell.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
>    I set Claude running last week to reverse engineer the whole Newton 2x00 ROM to the point where I can run pretty much any Newton software I want. It has produced something that seems to work really well most of the time and no longer requires a ROM file to boot and run. It has extracted all the resources into a form that I can now make changes to the built in apps.  I should be pushing it up publicly soon if anyone is interested in taking a look.
> 
> Daniel

Hi Daniel, hi everyone,

That is really great news. We are at a fascinating time, and I hope we can bundle all our resources and soon have the perfect ROM source code.

My hope is to get the source code restored so well, that we can recompile the original Newton ROMs  from scratch, and get a byte-identical result. If we manage that, we can fix bugs and add fixes, recompile, and get a ROM that works in the original hardware. We would also know that the code is as bug-free as possible.

With mosrun, we have all the original developer tools available on Windows, Linux, and Mac. I just refreshed the code, and the compiler is fast enough to recompile the entire ROM in seconds. With newton-framework, we have a NewtonScript compiler, runtime, and decompiler. With very little effort, it can create linkable Newton Bytecode blobs.

My suggestion is to bundle efforts, managed and hosted in a common GitHub repo, and recreate the identical ROM  first. Once we have that, we can divert into all kind of projects, Android environments, Desktop simulation, more build tools, and of course ROM bug fixes.

- Matthias
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