EmuTOS - a new FOSS OS for the Atari ST, compatibles & emulators

[liam_on_linux]

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...

Click to view

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

Comments

[liam_on_linux]

> I guess these are analogous to AROS and Haiku as opensource re-implementations of closed source OSs of yesteryear.

I think EmuTOS is closer to the source material, as it were.

While the Atari TOS sources weren't leaked (AFAIK!) the thing about the GEM stack is that it's very modular, in layers, and all the inter-layer calls were well-documented. So in the later ST era, it was common to re-implement bits of the TOS/GEM stack, for performance or features, and make it possible to run it with the rest of the original stack.

That's how AFROS eventually happened: someone collated a near-complete stack made of replacement which happened to be FOSS-licensed, and worked out what was missing. A couple of people/groups were prevailed upon to make their old modules FOSS, and voila, a whole GEM replacement made from FOSS.

Then all they needed was the bottom level, the kernel. Equivalent to IBMBIO.SYS + IBMDOS.SYS.

That was the genesis of EmuTOS.

But AFROS is an all-singing all-dancing modern true-colour multitasking TOS replacement, whereas the EmuTOS people just set out to recreate something functionally equivalent to, and compatible with, the original Atari TOS2/TOS3.

> I think alongside the kiwi68k there are some 68k boards on retrobrewcomputers dot org but I think tend not to have graphics etc..

Oh really? I must have a look.

> Always seems a shame that no one makes the cpu anymore. You can buy a brand new z80 or 6502 but it seems 68k family is gone forever (outside of fpga, anyway)

Not quite!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NXP_ColdFire

http://firebee.org/fb-bin/index

[tpear]

OK - I thought nxp had abandoned coldfire in favour of their ARM based stream of microcontrollers, will have to check again.

Firebee looks fun - might take a look at that over the w/e.

[liam_on_linux]

You can still buy new 8051-compatible processors. :-)