Bare Metal Emulator on the Raspberry Pi

[mikeboss]

I just discovered BMNeXT, haven't installed it yet... it is, of course, based on Previous.

BMNeXT is a bare metal NeXT Computer, NeXTcube and NeXTstation emulator for the Raspberry Pi 4 and 5.

https://github.com/jhonnaker1/bmnext

[Rhetorica]

Looks like new registrant @phranck's https://previous.li will have some competition.

There seems to be a theme of duplicated effort among porting emulators lately. This is why you post your results publicly, people!

[phranck]

Oh, wow! These are interesting developments. His first commit was on 11 October 2026 – exactly one day after I'd written in my notes that a port like this wouldn't really be worth the effort. It involves a great deal of work without any real benefits. I'll need to take a closer look at the project to assess whether my assessment was wrong.

However, Previously is not just an emulator running NeXTSTEP on a Pi. It is the combination of this with the browser-based admin tool, which offers a lot more functionality. Furthermore, it has already been extensively tested on the RPi 4 and RPi 5.

[mikeboss]

the first (pre-) release of BMNeXT is here!
https://github.com/jhonnaker1/bmnext/releases

[mikeboss]

Oh, wow! These are interesting developments. His first commit was on 11 October 2026 – exactly one day after I'd written in my notes that a port like this wouldn't really be worth the effort. It involves a great deal of work without any real benefits. I'll need to take a closer look at the project to assess whether my assessment was wrong.

However, Previously is not just an emulator running NeXTSTEP on a Pi. It is the combination of this with the browser-based admin tool, which offers a lot more functionality. Furthermore, it has already been extensively tested on the RPi 4 and RPi 5.

the web UI of Previously is gorgeous, I love it!

I installed BMMacintosh about an hour ago.
https://github.com/jhonnaker1/bmmacintosh
it has a web UI, too. not as pretty as yours, but it has one:
https://bsky.app/profile/n4n0.ch/post/3myxjjkd3ic2r

[itomato]

Neat. I was trying to get there with Buildroot on a Pi 3 (9 years ago) and I'd argue that nobody is yet running 'bare metal', regardless of what the runtime says.

I'm curious how Redwood would perform on a 4 or 5. It would be almost as simple as adding the board definitions: https://github.com/itomato/redwood

[retronym67]

Deleted by the author because the post contained errors ;-)

[kokomuck]

Oh, wow! These are interesting developments.

[...]

However, Previously is not just an emulator running NeXTSTEP on a Pi. It is the combination of this with the browser-based admin tool, which offers a lot more functionality. Furthermore, it has already been extensively tested on the RPi 4 and RPi 5.

A bit off-topic, but why is the Github repository now an archive? It's a real shame, as I really like the web interface - and I wanted to give it a try in the coming days.

All the best,
Kokomuck