EmuTOS for Amiga
 

Hello.

I'm proud to announce that EmuTOS is now available for Amiga.
It is an operating system compatible with the Atari ST original OS.
As a result, you can run clean Atari ST programs on Amiga hardware, provided that they only use the OS and not the Atari hardware.

EmuTOS is provided as a Kickstart ROM replacement.
You can download the latest snapshot there:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/emut.../CVS-20120623/

It runs fine on WinUAE, in monochrome video mode, and with IDE hard disk support.

For the details, you can have a look at the readme.txt inside the emutos-amiga-*.zip archive.

This will probably be useless, but anyway, that's cool :D

Seems interesting, thanx!!

The other project I was interested in was KickTOS.
Would love to try that on my A1000..
Did that ever get a release of any kind?

Anyway, thanx. Haven't played with the ST too much, but it looks interesting.

desiv

Hi BlankVector,

Thanks for sharing this news with us here. :)

Very cool!

Interesting stuff, and thank you :)

Just curious though, can this be used on a real amiga as well, or is it soley for the emulator realm? I dont mean to discredit your work, but Im not sure I see much point if it doesnt run on real amigas as well :) (why wouldnt someone just use something like STonX, Hatari, or Steem for example instead?)

That's really incredible. I'm interested how (and if) it works on a real hardware. Unfortunately, now I am away from my amigas, but I'll test as soon as possible.

I don't know much about TOS internals, but maybe I could help adding support for some Amiga hardware. I wrote a few drivers for the NetBSD :).

They need floppy support implemented for the amiga. Colour support would be nice too :)

> That's really incredible. I'm interested how (and if) it works on a real hardware.

I seem to remember that programming TOS on Atari works as follows:

move.w #<parameter>, -(sp) ; push function parameter onto stack
move.w #<function number>, -(sp) ; the function you want to call
trap #21 ; call tos function
add.w #4, sp ; correct stack

the "trap" is like a user interrupt, on both the ST and Amiga you can set a handler for it something like eg move.l #handler, $80

and <function number> might be 1 for open file, 2 for close file, etc in which case a simple tos emulator would look like this:

void handler(int function_number, ...)
{
if (function_number == 1)
{
// put code for open file here
}
else if (function_number == 2)
{
// put code for close file here
}
}
etc

very cool project, with the only problem that most of the worthwhile ST applications would hit the hardware in some way and not be pure TOS/GEM. My guess is that the neochome paint program will not work, however perhaps the "Magic Shadow Archiver" for atari .msa disk images will work?

Correct about the TOS calls above however MSA won't work yet because there's no floppy support. What would be cool would be do get Emutos running as a process in Amiga OS in the same manner as shapeshifter.

That'd be very cool :)
Im not hugely familiar with atari's 16bit computers beyond playing with them on emulators, so excuse my ignorance, but what's the relationship between tos and gem? Does it parallel kickstart/WB, or is gem more akin to a kickstart replacement?
Ultimately I guess Im trying to find out if the above hypothetical scenario would allow a person to use some Falcon software? (this is assuming the falcom uses, or can use Gem?)

What to do with the .img file ?

The IMG is the Kickstart Replacment.

Yes, I know but how to kick it (on real hw)? I tried with BlizKick without success...

I dont know, i have only test it with winuae.

This is awesome news, I hope we can run it as a process like Shapeshifter some day too... at the same time as Shapeshifter would be nice. I'd like to show off running three OSs at the same time. :p

I'm going to try and see if I can get it running on the ACA1230.

TOS is the bios and console mode part of the OS and GEM is the gui.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_TOS

There is an emu tos build for the Falcon too.

Exactly! When I saw the KickTOS video 2 years ago, I realized that the ST-High video mode (only 1 bitplane) was compatible with the Amiga Playfield hardware. So I thought that EmuTOS should work... and it does :)

It should work on real Amiga hardware, but you will have to replace the Kickstart ROM :nuts
Also, the keyboard may not work correctly because I didn't send the acknowledges (not required by WinUAE).

For Atari machines, EmuTOS is also shipped as RAM version, to be loaded from floppy or hard disk without having to replace the ROM. It works fine on ST hardware. We could easily do the same for Amiga, if someones writes a loader.

Don't search any good reason for the existence of EmuTOS for Amiga. I did it because it's cool, no more :cool

Definitely, you are welcome! Feel free to examine the sources (the Amiga specific parts are really tiny), and you can join the emutos-devel mailing list for further work.

Yes, floppy support is really a key missing feature.
However, EmuTOS supports only FAT12/FAT16 filesystems, so it is probably not worth supporting traditional Amiga floppies.
And I'm not sure if Amiga emulators support Atari floppy images (similar to PC ones).

About Color video modes, unfortunately I'm not sure if they could work (without additional drivers, of course). The Atari hardware uses interlaced bitplanes every 16 pixels, and I'm not sure that the Amiga Playfield hardware is able to handle that :confused

True. But the latest Atari compatible machines (Milan...) were not so much compatible with the original ST hardware, so clean programs finally appeared. Those ones should work fine on Amiga.

It will probably never work. It uses ST-Low color video mode, rasters...

If MSA only uses the BIOS to access the floppies, it should also work on Amiga as soon as a floppy driver is available.

I don't know BlizKick, but if you explain me what it does I may be able to build a custom EmuTOS for it.

Converting the Atari ST screen mode in realtime can be done, its not exactly speedy, but if someone wanted to run GEM in colour, it isn't a problem.

Obviously on base 68000 systems it'll be slow, but on faster machines, its not really a problem at all, its a very simple routine to write and you simply wait for the main routine in TOS to finish writing to the ST screen, and then convert in realtime to an area set aside in Amiga chip ram to display a 16 colour screen.

I was trying to get Magic to run under Shape Shifter some months ago with no success.

This may well be the solution to that problem. No Magic OS per say, but access to Atari apps, yes!

The VDI should already support contiguous bitplanes. It probably wouldn't be a huge lot of work to make the destination screen use contiguous planes or interleaved line by line. This is just a guess however. The Amiga blitter couldn't be used in an ST style screen mode either. It lacks a programmable x increment. Not that emu tos has blitter support in the VDI yet :)