EmuTOS: A Modern FOSS Replacement OS for the Atari ST – and the Amiga Too

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • Emu68

    M68K emulation for AArch64/AArch32

  • 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.

  • 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.

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  • atari-mint

    MiNT is Not TOS: a multitasking OS for the Atari ST

  • 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.

  • lisa-gemdos

    GEMDOS for the Apple Lisa

  • FWIW having seen the sources for both, GEMDOS isn't based directly off CP/M68k. There are commonalities, and some bits of code shared (executable format for one) but they're entirely separate codebases.

    The first platform to run GEMDOS on 68k was the Apple Lisa. That was the dev machine DR used.

    That's been resurrected in the past few years: https://github.com/cheesestraws/lisa-gemdos

    And in fact EmuTOS itself now boots on the Lisa again.

    I have a feeling the stack-based calling convention may be influenced by the dev period on the Lisa? The reason I say this is that I know Mac OS Classic used this scheme as well: push all args to stack and call TRAP. I suspect because of this that the Lisa did as well, though I couldn't tell you for sure since hardly any docs are out there for that. Atari was not unique in choosing these scheme.

    Now, why Apple did this, I don't know. Maybe it's because they wrote everything in their own bespoke Pascal and that was something about their compiler?

    I am not sure an x86 version of GEMDOS really ever existed so doubt it came from there.

    FWIW you got me interested, so I'm reading the CP/M68k sources right now and from the bits I've read, I do see the stack based calling convention there, as well:

      _bios2:

  • circle

    A C++ bare metal environment for Raspberry Pi with USB (32 and 64 bit) (by rsta2)

  • Natively would be amazing but a vast amount of work.

    The way Apple moved classic MacOS from 680x0 to PowerPC was to write a tiny kernel emulator, with an API to run native stuff on the metal, and run more or less the whole OS under emulation, profile it and just translate the most speed-critical bits.

    That's a lot of work for a FOSS project but given the performance delta between 1980s 680x0 and 2020s ARM, total emulation of the whole thing should be perfectly fine. It's how the PiStorm Amiga upgrade works.

    https://amigastore.eu/853-pistorm.html

    So all I envision is something like Aranym:

    https://aranym.github.io/

    ... running on top of Ultibo, say:

    https://ultibo.org/

    Or maybe Circle:

    https://github.com/rsta2/circle

  • pTOS

    Port of EmuTOS to the ARM architecture.

  • I tried booting an RPi in big-endian and I was unable to get it to work. Maybe there's a way. I'm not an ARM expert, so.

    It's probably more reasonable simply to boot directly to a bare metal 68k emulator -- one that doesn't emulate any hardware other than the CPU but passes through to the underlying video etc hardware -- and host a fork of EmuTOS there.

    There is this project : https://github.com/kelihlodversson/pTOS

    Which appears similar to what I had attempted, myself.

    You might also look at RISC-OS. It runs (single core) on a modern Pi. And it's kind of similar to GEM/TOS in terms of era and style.

    It is kind of a shame that ColdFire is dead. It held promise.

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