Dear Atari Community! We are happy to announce a new public release of EmuTOS: EmuTOS 1.3 -- March 17, 2024 INTRODUCTION EmuTOS is a single-user single-tasking operating system for 32-bit Atari computers, clones and emulators. It can be used as a replacement for the TOS images typically needed by emulators and can also run on some real hardware, including the Atari ST(e), TT, and Falcon, and the FireBee. It can even run on non-Atari hardware such as Amiga and ColdFire Evaluation Boards. All the source code is open and free, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). CHANGES SINCE RELEASE 0.9.4 For a quick summary of changes by release since release 0.9.4, please refer to doc/changelog.txt. For a detailed list of all changes since the project started, refer to the Git repository. DESCRIPTION EmuTOS is basically made up of the following: - 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, often known as GEMDOS - The VDI, the virtual device interface, i.e. the screen driver - The AES, the application environment services or window manager - The EmuDesk desktop, which is the graphical shell to the user - EmuCON2, the command-line interpreter The BIOS and XBIOS code is our own development. It is written from scratch and implements all relevant TOS 3 BIOS & XBIOS functionality, and a bit more, e.g. hard disk access. See doc/status.txt for details. The GEMDOS part is based on Digital Research's GEMDOS sources, which were made available under GPL license in 1999 by Caldera. The graphical parts like VDI and AES are now more or less fully implemented up to TOS v3.06 level. They work in all the graphics modes of the original Atari ST(e) and TT, with some extensions. For example, systems with VIDEL support 256 colours and 640x480 screen resolution. Some emulators can patch EmuTOS to work with much bigger screen resolutions. The desktop is now pretty much the same as the one in TOS 2 or higher (although it is not fully implemented in the 192K ROMs for space reasons). Of course you are always free to use a more advanced desktop replacement like TeraDesk. EmuCON2 is a basic but useful command-line interpreter, written from scratch by Roger Burrows in 2013 to replace the original CLI. Since EmuTOS just implements TOS functionality, you might want to use MiNT on top of it in order to run more modern software. EmuTOS is not an alternative to MiNT, but it's the only free base OS to boot MiNT. EMULATION AND FUTURE PLATFORMS EmuTOS and MiNT cooperate well. Both can utilize the Native Features (NatFeats) interface for emulators: https://github.com/aranym/aranym/wiki/natfeats-about EmuTOS uses this new standard interface for all the relevant native functions supported by an emulator on which it's running. This interface proxies the calls to the underlying host OS so that these features don't need to be emulated. This is both faster and can provide features that would be infeasible on a real machine. It may allow using modern graphics cards, provide fast native filesystem access and enable you to use networking with all bells and whistles - and many other things you might not have even dreamed of. The ARAnyM emulator has the most extensive support for NatFeats. The Hatari emulator supports the basic NatFeats facilities. HARDWARE Making EmuTOS run 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 on top of EmuTOS. This is the currently supported original Atari hardware: - CPU support for M68000, M68030 - FPU detection - 68030 MMU and cache - Memory controller (ST, TT, and Falcon) - TT-RAM - Monitor type detection (mono, RGB, or VGA) - DMA controller - WD 1772 / AJAX Floppy disk controller - MFP, MFP #2 - SCC - PSG - ST shifter - STe shifter - TT shifter - VIDEL - ACIAs, IKBD protocol, mouse - MegaST(e) Real-Time Clock - NVRAM (including RTC) - Blitter - Microwire - IDE - SCSI - ACSI - DSP EmuTOS also supports the following Atari-compatible hardware: - CPU support for M68010, M68020, M68040, M68060, ColdFire V4e, and Apollo 68080 - ICD AdSCSI Plus ST Real-Time Clock - UltraSatan Real-Time Clock - MonSTer expansion card - Magnum ST/STe expansion cards - Storm ST expansion card (RAM and RTC) - Nova/ET4000 and Nova/Mach32 graphics cards - Volksfarben/ET4000 graphics card - Wittich Imagine for the MegaST/ET4000 graphics card - CrazyDots VME graphics card - SD/MMC - The Native Features interface to some degree EmuTOS is also available on some non-Atari hardware: - Amiga (floppy or ROM for any Amiga, including MapROM support) - Apple Lisa (experimental - no binaries provided yet) - ColdFire Evaluation Boards (M5484LITE, M5485EVB) - Vampire v4 standalone board AVAILABILITY The EmuTOS home page is: https://emutos.sourceforge.io/ The project home is on SourceForge: https://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/ The latest releases can be downloaded from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/files/emutos/ Development snapshots allow you to test the current development progress: https://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/files/snapshots/ The latest sources are always available on GitHub: https://github.com/emutos/emutos If you are just curious or would like to help us develop this nice little OS, you are invited to subscribe to our mailing list for developers at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/lists/emutos-devel We hope that you like EmuTOS. If you have any suggestions or comments, we always appreciate hearing both the good and the bad things about it. The EmuTOS development team. -- Originally written by Martin Doering https://emutos.sourceforge.io/