9 ms·

EmuTOS – Free OS for Atari ST and more

123 points by lproven 4y ago

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
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.
DominoTree 4y ago
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.
justapassenger 4y ago
- snvzz 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - snvzz 4y ago
      I read programming books from the era recently, as I never had an ST and was curious about it, and wrote some code to play with it (with vasm and hatari). It turned out much worse I had thought it'd be. Of course, my issues are mainly with GEMDOS (CP/M isn't great, but the 68k port sure is awful) and with the call conventions used everywhere (e.g. stack for function call parameters, use of traps for VDI). GEM (the non-VDI part of it) and only GEM is reasonable, and not actually good. Just not brain-damaged.
- lproven 4y ago
  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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagiC And MagiC is now FOSS: https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources 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 https://github.com/totalspectrum/atari-mint And it has distros, such as AFROS: https://aranym.github.io/afros.html https://aranym.github.io/afros.html Which you can run on x86 kit: https://aranym.github.io/ 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.
- justapassenger 4y ago
tfrutuoso 4y ago
Glad to see these old computers getting some love.
marcodiego 4y ago
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.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Motorola m68k @ 8mhz = ~1.4 MIPS vs ARM Cortex A72 @ 18,375 MIPS So actually 13000 times more powerful just in that one metric (instructions per second). Though of course it's more than that, as throughput in memory access, and concurrent operations and 64-bit math etc obviously much faster.

123 points by lproven 4y ago

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.

DominoTree 4y ago

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.

justapassenger 4y ago

snvzz 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    I read programming books from the era recently, as I never had an ST and was curious about it, and wrote some code to play with it (with vasm and hatari). It turned out much worse I had thought it'd be. Of course, my issues are mainly with GEMDOS (CP/M isn't great, but the 68k port sure is awful) and with the call conventions used everywhere (e.g. stack for function call parameters, use of traps for VDI). GEM (the non-VDI part of it) and only GEM is reasonable, and not actually good. Just not brain-damaged.
lproven 4y ago
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 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagiC And MagiC is now FOSS: https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources 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 https://github.com/totalspectrum/atari-mint And it has distros, such as AFROS: https://aranym.github.io/afros.html https://aranym.github.io/afros.html Which you can run on x86 kit: https://aranym.github.io/ 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.
justapassenger 4y ago

tfrutuoso 4y ago

Glad to see these old computers getting some love.

marcodiego 4y ago

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.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Motorola m68k @ 8mhz = ~1.4 MIPS vs ARM Cortex A72 @ 18,375 MIPS So actually 13000 times more powerful just in that one metric (instructions per second). Though of course it's more than that, as throughput in memory access, and concurrent operations and 64-bit math etc obviously much faster.