[HN Gopher] EmuTOS - Free OS for Atari ST and more
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EmuTOS - Free OS for Atari ST and more
Author : lproven
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-09-18 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (emutos.sourceforge.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (emutos.sourceforge.io)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Just want to say the amount of amazing work that goes into this
| project is fantastic. They've taken the original Digital Research
| x86/PC GEM/GEMDOS sources and.. reworked them to basically
| duplicate all the work Atari did back in 1984/85 on their ST/68k
| port. Plus bug fixes. Plus pretty much all the feature work Atari
| did after that. Plus modernizing the code generally. Plus their
| own new features. Plus making it work on ColdFire systems (eval
| boards & the Firebee). Plus making it work on the Amiga and other
| 68k systems. All the while keeping it compatible, fitting in a
| 192k ROM.
|
| It _started_ as a ROM image for ST emulators (hence the name) but
| has actually become an excellent open sourced GPL 'd GUI
| operating system for 68k computers, obviously especially the
| Atari ST.
|
| It's a labour of love and the project maintainers do a great job.
| It's better than Atari's original ROM TOS while still maintaining
| absolutely excellent compatibility.
| tfrutuoso wrote:
| Glad to see these old computers getting some love.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Although of little commercial value, this shows the power of an
| open platform. Current smartphones are thousand times more
| powerful than the old Atari ST, nevertheless, you won't be able
| to do anything useful or fun with them a few years after support
| ends because you can't easily replace its software/rom/firmware.
| justapassenger wrote:
| justapassenger wrote:
| lproven wrote:
| I think you're missing the point.
|
| 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.
| chris_j wrote:
| Re [7] and the MiNT kernel/OS:
|
| If you're interested in running MiNT on your old Atari
| hardware (or emulator) then https://freemint.github.io/ is
| the project website.
|
| And if you want to run it on the Aranym emulator then
| EasyAraMint is a good place to start:
| https://sites.google.com/site/beebox68k/operating-
| system/os/...
|
| I only recently tried FreeMiNT for the first time. It's a
| really weird feeling to come back to the Atari platform and
| see something that looks familiar but has been updated and
| dragged, if not into the present day then into the late 90s
| at least. Gone is most of the CP/M heritage of the original
| TOS; instead, it's a UNIX-like OS with a lot of the GNU
| userland. For me, using it is exciting like using Linux in
| the late 90s was exciting. It just leaves me feeling rather
| sad that Atari exited the computer market before the OS was
| quite ready and the community had to finish the job.
|
| (And if you're wondering how this is relevant to EmuTOS,
| well, EmuTOS is used as part of the boot process.)
| justapassenger wrote:
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's good to hear that Amiga users are finally getting
| their act together and doing the open source thing after
| years of fighting over who was going to make a few pennies
| off the dated corpse of AmigaOS.
|
| In the meantime, your tone is inappropriate for a post
| about an open source volunteer run project. And, no, the
| original title was not inaccurate or misleading. EmuTOS
| runs on Amigas and works fine on them. That you have some
| chip on your shoulder that someone might accidentally run
| it instead of AmigaOS (?! as if) is your own concern.
|
| Finally, as for TOS being some woefully inferior garbage
| product that AmigaOS dwarfs in its inelegancy is
| ridiculous. It's fairer to say that both are products of an
| early 80s mindset just in different ways.
|
| Yes, AmigaOS has proper multitasking. But it also had no
| memory protection for a long time (ever?), and from I
| remember doesn't use the 68k's TRAP syscall mechanism to
| perfom syscalls. It had no real standard GUI toolkit to
| start. It had some real sexy stuff, but also some missing
| stuff.
|
| TOS/GEM was not multitasking, and was built to run things
| single process apart from the cooperative multitasking in
| desk accessories; _but_ GEM explicitly has APIs designed
| for a multitasking environment and was built to do so
| _later_. Interprocess mailboxes and events. Concepts of
| process /workstation handles, etc. Hooks that later
| revisions to the OS built on. Why didn't they do it right
| away? Because at that point, on an 8mhz 68000 with 512kB of
| RAM this was, frankly, mostly silly.
|
| It's nice the Amiga did multitasking, and the hardware was
| clearly awesome. But the lack of timeslicing (and the cheap
| beautiful monochrome monitor, DOS compatible floppies,
| etc.) actually made the ST more appropriate as a
| productivity machine in the context of e.g. music studios.
|
| Other poster is right: leave the weird sectarian platform
| battles in the 80s. It was silly then but it looks even
| more ridiculous now.
| vidarh wrote:
| > It's good to hear that Amiga users are finally getting
| their act together and doing the open source thing
|
| AROS has been around since the 90's. I remember when
| Aaron Digulla first posted about it on
| comp.sys.amiga.misc around ~'93 or so. It's not instead
| of the fighting over AmigaOS, but in addition to it.
| Different people.
|
| > Because at that point, on an 8mhz 68000 with 512kB of
| RAM this was, frankly, mostly silly.
|
| The Amiga showed it wasn't silly at all. We used the
| multitasking heavily. I _usually_ had multiple
| productivity apps up at once, alongside music players and
| other stuff.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The MagiC stuff was unfortunately just opened sourced 15 or
| more years too late.
|
| And also, AFAIK, it's mostly written in assembler.
|
| It would be a gargantuan task to turn it into something that
| other people could maintain and contribute to, I suspect. Let
| alone get it running nicely on ColdFire etc. etc.
| lproven wrote:
| Re the timing, yes, I agree. But, remarkably, it was still
| on sale for a long time. I think I obtained an eval or
| review copy of it at some point, but I didn't really know
| what to do with it -- my ST experience is fairly minimal.
| :-(
|
| I suspect, but do not know, that part of what killed it
| might have been the Mac OS X migration to Intel (and around
| the same time, Windows' move to 64-bit). I think MagiC ran
| on PowerMacs and used some of the OS's 68K-to-PowerPC
| translation somehow, but that stopped working after Snow
| Leopard.
|
| I didn't know what it was written in, but I can say I'm not
| shocked. ;-)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I was kind of hoping maybe there'd be stuff in their VDI
| implementation that the EmuTOS people could maybe work
| from to maybe improve some VDI performance or
| flexibility. But I don't think it got on anybody's radar.
|
| Now you have me browsing through their VDI sources, damn
| you! https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-
| Sources/-/tree/m...
|
| :-)
|
| And yes, I believe MagiC naturally didn't survive the
| transition from PowerPC to x86. I'm surprised it survived
| 68k to PowerPC, TBH.
|
| I never used MagiC back in the day, it came after my
| Atari days were over. But I've played with it since and
| it's really quite impressive. Definitely an imaginable
| alternative Atari timeline there.
| snvzz wrote:
| TOS is literally a dogshit, brain-damaged OS design. But I
| still appreciate being able to run the open emuTOS on my Amiga.
|
| And while I like AmigaOS, dos.library (TripOS-derived) is awful
| and doesn't match the rest of AmigaOS. Of course, it still is
| better than anything TOS and its CP/M heritage, but I wouldn't
| dare call it good.
|
| V36 onwards, dos.library was made much more sane, but it
| unfortunately has to still be compatible with older
| dos.library, forever.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's not dogshit, it's appropriate to the resource
| constrained use cases of the time.
|
| But also, "TOS" really means three separate cooperating
| things:
|
| 1. GEMDOS, which is sorta the bastard child of MS-DOS and
| CP/M but foisted onto the 68k. And yeah, it's a bit
| braindamaged; it has the feeling of something DR threw
| together to get GEM working on non-MSDOS environments ASAP,
| and there's parts of it directly copied from CP/M 68k, I
| believe. But it also made porting from DOS and CP/M really
| easy.
|
| 2. VDI, an actually quite nice (for the time) graphics
| abstraction system with a concept of multiple devices and
| 'workstations' (drawing endpoints). E.g. same syscalls could
| in theory drive a monitor, a plotter, a laser printer, etc.
| Mostly incomplete on the ST, but the underlying concept
| actually quite nice and not really seen on the PCs til a long
| time later. I am not sure the Amiga had an equivalent.
|
| 3. AES ("application environment services"); concepts of
| event mailboxes and events and messages, higher level
| application APIs, mixed up with a rather low-level (but at
| least consistent) GUI toolkit. Unfort, it's really what I'd
| call the syscall-side of a UI toolkit, missing the... user
| space side. It's asbent the right abstractions to make using
| it _easy_ (handling redraws, standardized event loops /
| registering common event handlers, etc).
|
| Anyways, I'd argue actual GEM -- the last two parts -- was
| actually quite elegant. Just never finished. And also it had
| to fit in a 192kB ROM.
|
| Atari actually made some real good strides in the early 90s
| to finish it off ("MultiTOS" based on MiNT etc). But too
| late.
| DominoTree wrote:
| I can't say enough good things about this project and its
| developers. A year or two ago, I decided to write a driver to
| allow EmuTOS to use the RTC found in Jookie's excellent
| UltraSatan hard drive emulator.
|
| They took the time to do a bunch of hand-holding on the mailing
| list, and worked with me until the driver, along with some minor
| restructuring to how things were handled with external RTCs, were
| working and merged.
|
| I use it pretty-much exclusively on my (currently 8) ST variants.
| It's a much nicer desktop experience, and brings all sorts of
| cool features to the table such as (some level of) FAT32 support.
| It's also been ported to a crazy list of M68K systems including
| the Apple Lisa.
|
| Development is still very active, and things are being improved
| and added all the time.
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