EmuTOS - a new FOSS OS for the Atari ST, compatibles & emulators
Something interesting that has come out of Caldera's release of the original DR GEM code as FOSS 20 years ago, and I totally missed it...
This is a great ~40min intro to EmuTOS.
Nowadays there are two different all-FOSS OSes for STs, compatibles & ST emulators.
I knew about AFROS and have played with it -- it's a compilation of various ST GEM enhancements and replacement modules and so on, mostly based on the FreeMINT multitasking OS, to create a complete multitasking GEM OS for advanced STs.
It mainly targets the ARANYM emulator.
The one bit that wasn't free was basically the ST ROM - TOS itself. TOS shared ancestry with both DR's CP/M-68K and what later became DR-DOS. A very rough description is a DOS-like kernel and drivers for the ST hardware, with floppy drive support, just enough to launch the GEM desktop. No command line.
The AFROS project wrote their own ROM, and back when I was actively looking at ARANYM, they described it as something like "just enough ROM to boot our OS, and not very compatible with actual ST software".
Well what I didn't know until this evening is that the EmuTOS project has taken on a life of its own and they released v1.0 about 6 months ago. It's a complete single-tasking GEM replacement for STs: in other words, a whole replacement ROM. It replaces the BIOS and OS kernel and all of the GEM stack, and that part is based on Caldera's GEM code.
They have something that is built in GCC, can just about fit into the smallest ST ROM chip (192kB) and is broadly compatible with Atari TOS 3. For later models it can go into a bigger ROM chip which gives you a command-line and even multi-language support.
Or you can boot it from floppy, or you can load it as an app from real Atari TOS if you have enough memory. You can even boot it on Amigas, with some restrictions currently.
I'm really impressed. I found this very interesting viewing.
Source etc: is on GitHub. There's a slightly dated Wikipedia article too.
There are or were other ST OSes around. A popular one was called MagiC, and at least part of this has been made FOSS recently. It came with emulators to allow it to run on macOS and Windows. Snag: it's largely in assembler, apparently.
But EmuTOS is slightly different from things like AFROS, FreeMINT or MagiC, inasmuch as it's able to run on original unmodified STs (and the Amiga!) and can be freely distributed with emulators.
A company called Atari still exists and still holds the old copyrights, so the original Atari ROMs are not strictly distributable.
Incidentally, I found this via the m68k.info page, which hosted another presentation this weekend, on the Sinclair QL OS descendants Minerva and SMSQ/E.
Not really any relevance to GEM etc. but may be of interest to folk - it was to me.
I found that because I was asking if there were any 16-bit homebrew computers these days, and was told about the amazing Kiwi 68K.
Click to viewThis is a great ~40min intro to EmuTOS.
Nowadays there are two different all-FOSS OSes for STs, compatibles & ST emulators.
I knew about AFROS and have played with it -- it's a compilation of various ST GEM enhancements and replacement modules and so on, mostly based on the FreeMINT multitasking OS, to create a complete multitasking GEM OS for advanced STs.
It mainly targets the ARANYM emulator.
The one bit that wasn't free was basically the ST ROM - TOS itself. TOS shared ancestry with both DR's CP/M-68K and what later became DR-DOS. A very rough description is a DOS-like kernel and drivers for the ST hardware, with floppy drive support, just enough to launch the GEM desktop. No command line.
The AFROS project wrote their own ROM, and back when I was actively looking at ARANYM, they described it as something like "just enough ROM to boot our OS, and not very compatible with actual ST software".
Well what I didn't know until this evening is that the EmuTOS project has taken on a life of its own and they released v1.0 about 6 months ago. It's a complete single-tasking GEM replacement for STs: in other words, a whole replacement ROM. It replaces the BIOS and OS kernel and all of the GEM stack, and that part is based on Caldera's GEM code.
They have something that is built in GCC, can just about fit into the smallest ST ROM chip (192kB) and is broadly compatible with Atari TOS 3. For later models it can go into a bigger ROM chip which gives you a command-line and even multi-language support.
Or you can boot it from floppy, or you can load it as an app from real Atari TOS if you have enough memory. You can even boot it on Amigas, with some restrictions currently.
I'm really impressed. I found this very interesting viewing.
Source etc: is on GitHub. There's a slightly dated Wikipedia article too.
There are or were other ST OSes around. A popular one was called MagiC, and at least part of this has been made FOSS recently. It came with emulators to allow it to run on macOS and Windows. Snag: it's largely in assembler, apparently.
But EmuTOS is slightly different from things like AFROS, FreeMINT or MagiC, inasmuch as it's able to run on original unmodified STs (and the Amiga!) and can be freely distributed with emulators.
A company called Atari still exists and still holds the old copyrights, so the original Atari ROMs are not strictly distributable.
Incidentally, I found this via the m68k.info page, which hosted another presentation this weekend, on the Sinclair QL OS descendants Minerva and SMSQ/E.
Not really any relevance to GEM etc. but may be of interest to folk - it was to me.
I found that because I was asking if there were any 16-bit homebrew computers these days, and was told about the amazing Kiwi 68K.