Sunday, May 5th, 2024 Atari System V Release 4.0 ========================== I spent the weekend in the Moravian city of Olomouc, where I attended Atariada 2024[1], the largest local meetup of users, developers, and fans of Atari computers. As for the 8-bit scene, there is for me nothing better than Sinclair: ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Z88 - you name it. I even love the Sinclair QL, which was 68k-based (68008 to be precise) but that platform never even started, not here in the middle of Europe. On the other hand Atari ST and compatibles, that's a totally different story; that was a big thing in the 1990s, and it is no surprise that Atariada is a larger event than any other single-brand oriented convention here in the Czech Republic. The main goal of my visit was to finally make my Atari Falcon 030 work. I spent last year trying to replace the failed hard drive with a Compact Flash card in the IDE adapter, but Falcon's IDE bus is too picky about the "5V-tolerant-but-internally-3.3V" logic of the CF card, so except a few models of Sandisk, nothing works without data losses. Every Falcon user I ever spoke to about the problem told me to get an SD-IDE adapter, so I bought one and planned to install it into the machine and spend the weekend populating it with software. But then Krupkaj[2] started his Atari TT with the never officially released Atari System V Release 4.0[3] and I had to test it. The whole effort of porting Unix to Atari TT is a bit mysterious. Both main Atari competitors of the era - Apple and Commodore had the possibility of Unix on selected machines (Apple had A/UX on Quadras, Commodore had the Amiga 3000UX), so it was only logical to join the crowd. They spent several years on the task and then never released the final product, just a developer release. Despite that the system is a bit sluggish on the 68030 in TT it is otherwise fully working. The kernel is monolithic; it has no ability to load driver modules, so it is re-linked on every boot according to the current hardware configuration. X11 is not hardware-accelerated, so it takes a pretty high portion of CPU time. There are also some interesting apps. Xfm2 is a WYSIWYG GUI editor where you can create the whole application window and save it as a resource to be used in your own code. There are also some libraries that should provide a means of porting TOS/GEM applications to Unix. And then there is all the CLI software that was part of Unix systems at the time, including a C compiler (GCC1 in this case). I created a screenshot[4] using the standard xwd tool, but then we found out that we have no way of transferring it outside the system. System V is unable to read MS-DOS-formatted floppies, and both serial ports refused to cooperate in our effort. So I dumped the whole hard drive into a binary image with dd and then tried to find the xwd screenshot using hexeditor and the bytes in the header that were supposed to be there according to xwd specifications. Unfortunately, the file was fragmented[5], so I had to save a much bigger junk from the disk image into an xwd file and then manually cut and glue everything together in GIMP, but it was worth it. At least there is a record of what I did when I didn't install my Falcon. And btw, if you want to look at some photos from the event, you can do it here[6], the guy in photo #14 is me. [1] http://atariada.cz/index_en.html [2] http://www.krupkaj.cz/sblog/index.php [3] http://atariunix.com [4] gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2024-05-06_atari_system_v.png [5] gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2024-05-06_asv_mess.png [6] http://www.krupkaj.cz/xgal/album.php?show=Atariada2024 .