EmuTOS News

Dear Atari Community!

We are happy to announce the first beta release of EmuTOS.

INTRODUCTION

EmuTOS is a singleuser singletasking operating system for the 32 bit Atari
computer emulators. It is thought as a replacement for the TOS-images you
usually need today for using emulators and it is also running on some real
hardware, like the Atari Mega STE. All is open and maybe it is also running
on totally new machines in the future.

EmuTOS is beeing developed for more than a year now and is licensed under
the OpenSource Gnu General Public Licence (GPL).

DESCRIPTION

EmuTOS is basically made up of four parts:

- The BIOS, which is the basic input output system
- The XBIOS, which provides the interface to the hardware
- The BDOS, which are the high level OS routines, what you know as GEMDOS
- The shell command.prg we use, as long we have no GEM

The BIOS and XBIOS code is our own developement. It is really written from
scratch and implements nearly all of the TOS 1.0 BIOS functionality, and a
bit more, like e.g. harddisk access and STE sampled sound. A few things
like printing, midi and serial stuff is missing for now, but may be
implemented somewhere in the future.

The GEMDOS part is based on Digital Research's GEMDOS sources, which were
made available under GPL licence in 1999 by Caldera. None of the graphical
parts like VDI and AES are implemented. Instead we plan to use fVDI and an
extra AES, like XaAES (just on MiNT) which together with a desktop make
the GEM you all know and love.

Since EmuTOS just implements the TOS's functionality, you might want to
use MiNT on it in order to run more modern software. EmuTOS is not an
alternative to MiNT. But EmuTOS is the only free base OS to boot MiNT.

EMULATION AND FUTURE PLATFORM

EmuTOS and MiNT cooperate well. For the future we plan, that both can make
use of a yet to implement standard native call interface for emulators.
When running EmuTOS in an emulator, this interface will provide access to
use the power of the underlying OS kernel. It may allow using modern 3D
graphics cards, will provide fast native filesystem access and will enable
you to use networking with all bells and wistles - and many things more
you always dreamed of.

This is, what EmuTOS is made for: A free OS, that can evolve. Progress has
been fast up to now, because we have a small, but enthusiastic development
team and are eager to see EmuTOS running with GEM and all.

HARDWARE

Making EmuTOS running natively on a new hardware platform is more or less
just a question of driver support for EmuTOS. The same for MiNT, if you'd
like to have it running over EmuTOS.

This is the currently supported Hardware:

- CPU support for m68000, m68010, m68020, m68030, m68040
- FPU detected
- Memory controller (both ST and Falcon)
- Monitor type detection (mono or not)
- WD 1772 Floppy disk controller (write track not tested)
- DMA controller
- MFP
- PSG
- ST shifter
- STE shifter (partitially)
- ACIAs, IKBD protocol (mouse not tested)
- MegaST Real-Time Clock (set clock not tested)
- NVRAM (including RTC)
- DMA sound

AVAILABILITY

EmuTOS has its home at sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos

A ready made EmuTOS image or the source can be downloaded from:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36560

It is always available in source form from our CVS server at:

http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=36560

If you are just curious or would like to help us develop this nice little
OS, you are invited to subscribe to our Mailinglist for developers at:

http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=36560

Hope, you like EmuTOS. If you have any suggestions or comments, we always
like to hear the good and also the bad things about it.

Your EmuTOS development team.

--
written by Martin Doering
http://emutos.sourceforge.net/