liam_on_linux: (Default)
https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

I have an ST, and an Amiga, but I didn't use either back in the day. But I think this is amazing work and really impressive.

So I stuck in on HN and some pillock went "yah boo TOS sucks Amiga is better" like it was 1986. I paraphrase. I am unimpressed.

In fact, while I don't want to be mean, you're missing two or possibly three different points... among which are the reasons I posted this link.

[1] It's not that TOS is less advanced than AmigaOS. Yes it is, and anyone who knows them realises that, but that's not the issue here. The issue is that this FOSS project has brought these two platforms together after about 35 years, and that's both really technologically impressive and also just plain fun.

[2] It means in principle that Amiga owners can run Atari apps, and the ST had some impressive apps.

[3] AROS is great but it's an x86 OS. It doesn't readily run on classic Amigas, or even especially well on the handful of later PowerPC Amigas, AFAIK. It also doesn't run natively on modern RISC hardware, like say the Raspberry Pi.

[4] But because it doesn't, that's prompted the creation of another really cool FOSS project, Emu68 -- a native 68K emulation environment for Arm, something comparable to Apple's nanokernel for running Classic MacOS on PowerMacs.

https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68

[5] Creating an OS that's as good or even better than the original while running on original hardware is impressive. Improved localisation opens it up to more people. That's good. It enables reviving vintage kit more easily, and expanding it. That's great.

You were so busy mocking something that you didn't stop to consider all the good sides.

[6] We know TOS was limited. We all know that. OTOH its simplicity enabled this. Its simplicity also was part of why the ST survived as a musicians' tool of choice for decades after it went out of production: super low latencies for music, and so on.

But others knew that TOS was limited, which drove a 3rd party OS market, with products such as MagiC:

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

And MagiC is now FOSS:

https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources

Which is good, but OTOH, it's not attracted much interest or development, AFAICS...

Whereas EmuTOS is now on v 1.21 and is seeing new releases several times a year. This is great, and is one reason I posted it.

[7] The limitations of TOS are also what prompted the development of MINT, and that's FOSS too, and it's quite mature:

https://github.com/totalspectrum/atari-mint

And it has distros, such as AFROS:

https://aranym.github.io/afros.html

Which you can run on x86 kit:

https://aranym.github.io/

All of which is amazing work.

So, yes, while you just wanted to do some advocacy, you missed a huge amount of great work by a committed community.

Not cool, dude.

Leave the Amiga-v-ST hate in the 1980s where it belonged. It wasn't very welcome then. They're both great computers. But hey, then the fans were children, so they can be excused.

In 2022, they can't.
liam_on_linux: (Default)
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.

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