Yesterday, Eckhart Köppen announced that he’s started piecing together a command line Newton compiler named tntk, based on NEWT/0 & DCL:

So far my experiments are actually quite successful, and it seems that developing Newton applications with just a text editor is not that impractical. […] Some things are still missing for developing larger apps, like the ability to split the code into multiple source files, and a way to embed resources into the final package, but for simple applications (and even auto parts), we might have a way forward.

This is nowhere as ambitious as Matthias Melcher’s DyneTK project, but maybe good enough to get people interested in a bit of Newton hacking.

It’s not really far enough along for a release yet, but you can peek at the Subversion repository if you’re so inclined.

I have a PowerMac 9500 configured for Newton development purposes, among others, but it’s inconvenient at best when I’m actually inspired to do any Newton development. As Eckhart alludes to, dealing with Mac NTK’s binary files w/resource forks in version control is a major pain.

[Via NewtonTalk]