EmuTOS for Amiga

[amiman99]

Hi, I have tried the emutos-amiga-floppy-0.9.12.zip as a kickstart on my A1000, and it's not booting at all.
I have tried my old EmuTOS disks and they work fine.
Can you check on that?

P.S. v0.9.10 is not working also.

Thanks

[BlankVector]

The correct EmuTOS for A1000 is inside emutos-amiga-rom-0.9.12.zip. Then extract emutos-kickdisk.adf. It is named like this because it is "EmuTOS ROM like A1000 Kickstart disk".

On the other hand, emutos-amiga-floppy-0.9.12.zip is a RAM version of EmuTOS as bootable floppy, for any Amiga (like a floppy game). For testing, you can even run it on A1000, if you put it inside the drive just after having booted the normal Kickstart disk.

[amiman99]

Originally Posted by BlankVector

The correct EmuTOS for A1000 is inside emutos-amiga-rom-0.9.12.zip. Then extract emutos-kickdisk.adf. It is named like this because it is "EmuTOS ROM like A1000 Kickstart disk".

On the other hand, emutos-amiga-floppy-0.9.12.zip is a RAM version of EmuTOS as bootable floppy, for any Amiga (like a floppy game). For testing, you can even run it on A1000, if you put it inside the drive just after having booted the normal Kickstart disk.

OK, I'll try it again. Thanks

It's been a long time since I tested the EmuTOS. I wanted to try new one with a new floppy disk code.

[amiman99]

So it works right now with the correct image.
I did find something strange, the desktop is shifted at least by quarter screen downwards for some reason.
The version from 2013, that I had laying around is fine, but the new one is shifted. See pictures.

I'm using NTSC A1000 with 512kb Chip RAM and 8MB fast RAM.

I also noticed that the old version was showing around 288KB of ST-RAM and v0.9.12 shows 512KB of ST-RAM,Cool!

[BlankVector]

Originally Posted by amiman99

So it works right now with the correct image.

Good I think I will rename/repackage those floppy images, because it seems to be confusing for users.

Originally Posted by amiman99

I did find something strange, the desktop is shifted at least by quarter screen downwards for some reason.

The version from 2013, that I had laying around is fine, but the new one is shifted. See pictures.

This is really strange, I've never seen such thing before. I may have forget to initialize some video register...
Hint: Go to the menu "Options > Change resolution" and see if changing resolutions there improve the situation.
*EDIT* It will not. See below.

Originally Posted by amiman99

I'm using NTSC A1000 with 512kb Chip RAM and 8MB fast RAM.

Ah. NTSC. This is currently unsupported (as I focused on PAL for simplicity). I know that at least the system timings are wrong (benchmarks will report wrong speed). I have just reproduced your problem with WinUAE NTSC mode. So that will be easy to fix. I have just added NTSC support in my TODO list.

Originally Posted by amiman99

I also noticed that the old version was showing around 288KB of ST-RAM and v0.9.12 shows 512KB of ST-RAM,Cool!

This is because old EmuTOS versions only displayed the amount of free RAM. New versions display the total amount of RAM. You can still see the free amount of RAM in "Options > Desktop configuration".

BTW, are your 8 MB Fast RAM properly detected as Alt-RAM on the EmuTOS welcome screen?

[amiman99]

Originally Posted by BlankVector

BTW, are your 8 MB Fast RAM properly detected as Alt-RAM on the EmuTOS welcome screen?

Yes, it shows my 8MB.

[BlankVector]

Hi, EmuTOS 1.0 has been released
It is an important milestone for Atari ST/TT hardware.

Regarding to Amiga-specific features, there is only 1 improvement from the previous release, but a big one. This is a major bugfix. Sometimes, EmuTOS crashed with a register dump while moving the mouse. This has been fixed in EmuTOS 1.0. So this new EmuTOS is rock solid on Amiga.

Get emutos-amiga-rom-1.0.zip or emutos-amiga-floppy-1.0.zip there:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/emu...es/emutos/1.0/

[mtb]

Really nice. Tried on a real A500 rev5 with kick 1.2, 512kb + 512kb, loaded from gotek.

[amiman99]

Is there a compatibility list of Atari ST programs that run on EmuTOS?

[BlankVector]

Originally Posted by amiman99

Is there a compatibility list of Atari ST programs that run on EmuTOS?

(short answer: no)

EmuTOS on Atari hardware: runs most Atari ST software, except a few know ones listed there. Generally, this is because those old software have bugs, use bad programming practices, or use undocumented private TOS details incompatible with other TOS versions. As a rule of thumb, clean Atari software works like a charm on EmuTOS for Atari.

EmuTOS on Amiga hardware: can only run Atari ST software that would also work on EmuTOS on Atari hardware, AND support monochrome mode (or 16-bit color fVDI driver on WinUAE / Vampire), AND never access the Atari hardware directly, AND only use BIOS features currently implemented on Amiga. This excludes most games. But this allows a few GEM-only programs. A big exception is the FreeMiNT multitasking kernel which *is* supported on Amiga. So most FreeMiNT software will also work on Amiga (GEM programs or command-line tools from Linux).

There is no current list of Atari programs compatible with EmuTOS for Amiga. I only know a few. But feel free to start such a list, that will be useful for everyone.

[tomcat666]

I have tried the latest release 1.0 of EmuTOS and it is great. However basically no programs run on Amiga with 512k chip + 512k slow memory with the ADF version of EmuTOS, even though they *should* run (512k mem free). Not really sure if this is a bug, emuTOS reports ST RAM: 512k and Add RAM: 512k, which is a bit too much because the EmuTOS has to go somewhere, and the programs run fine when having only 512k chip mem and using the emuTOS ROM replacement version (only 512k ST ram reported there, as it should be). A few of these that crash are in the zip here:

http://pc.sux.org/tomcat/ST.zip

So I guess while the ROM replacement version runs perfectly fine on the Amiga with only 512k mem, the Floppy ADF version has a bug which falsely uses also the RAM occupied by EmuTOS as the ST RAM and programs crash and doesnt run fine on Amiga with 512k chip + 512k slow mem.

[BlankVector]

Originally Posted by tomcat666

I have tried the latest release 1.0 of EmuTOS and it is great. However basically no programs run on Amiga with 512k chip + 512k slow memory with the ADF version of EmuTOS, even though they *should* run (512k mem free).

Thanks for your tests. I also use the the EmuTOS floppy on my A500+, but I have 1 Mb Chip RAM.

The memory reported on the EmuTOS welcome screen is the whole amount of RAM installed on the machine and detected. Actual free RAM is not displayed anywhere, even though third-party programs can show it. There are 2 memory pools in TOS/EmuTOS : ST-RAM (Amiga Chip RAM) and Alt-RAM (Amiga Slow RAM, Zorro RAM, and others). On Atari machines, Alt-RAM only appeared late with Atari TT hardware. All old Atari software before the TT can only use ST-RAM... by default. Actually, almost all of them can run in Alt-RAM, but to enable that some flags in their program header need to be patched with an external program. This is not a problem on Atari machines, because when Alt-RAM is available on the hardware (i.e. TT), there is always a lot of ST-RAM.

On Amiga, the situation is different. There is not much Chip RAM, and Fast RAM extensions are common. Other fact is that, currently, the EmuTOS floppy can only run in Chip RAM. So as you guessed, the 512 KB of Chip RAM contain both a copy of the EmuTOS ROM (almost 256 KB) + some RAM needed by EmuTOS (I can't remember how much), so there is not much free space for programs. And as old programs can't use Alt-RAM by default, it fails. Note that the situation is similar on Atari 520 ST (only 512 KB of RAM) when running the EmuTOS floppy.

The solution is to patch the programs headers to enable Alt-RAM support. I don't know Atari programs to do that, but there are certainly. Personally, I use GCC cross-tools to do that, or an hexadecimal editor.

So there is no mystery.

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by BlankVector

Other fact is that, currently, the EmuTOS floppy can only run in Chip RAM.

Thank you for the explanation. What is the reason that EmuTOS can only run in Chip RAM ? If that can be overcome and EmuTOS would go to fast ram it would make most programs work fine on 512k + 512k systems

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by BlankVector

Personally, I use GCC cross-tools to do that, or an hexadecimal editor.

Trying to find info on which bytes to edit in the PRG to make this work but cannot find it anywhere. Any info on this would be appretiated.

NOTE: Figured it out Offset $19 of the PRG file must be changed to $06 to make it work. And so far it works on all of the PRG's I have tried. Thanx for the info!

[phx]

There is a 32-bit flags-field at offset $16 in the TOS-executable header. vlink knows about the following, which may be ored together:
-tos-fastload: $01
-tos-fastram: $02
-tos-fastalloc: $04
-tos-global: $10
-tos-super: $20
-tos-readable: $30
-tos-private: resets $10 and $20
When you see it as a single byte it would be offset $19, correct.

[BlankVector]

Indeed, thats the right information! However, I recommend to put the value $07 at offset $19 (GCC does that). More than Alt-RAM support, if adds the fastload bit. This prevents the OS to clear the whole ST-RAM when a PRG is started. That initial clear of unused space is useless, and can take more than 1 second on a 4 MB ST. So the value $07 is optimal in most cases.

BTW, the EmuTOS floppy can only run in Chip RAM because does not include address relocation. Chip RAM always start at address 0, while other Amiga RAM kinds can start at various addresses. Solution will be to add relocation information in EmuTOS-RAM versions (including Amiga floppy). I think I will do that some day. Other solution is to hardcode the FastRAM address when building EmuTOS. We do that in the Vampire-optimized variants, for a lightspeed experience

[tomcat666]

Originally Posted by BlankVector

Solution will be to add relocation information in EmuTOS-RAM versions (including Amiga floppy). I think I will do that some day.

That would be great. And really GREAT job on the EmuTOS for amiga Who would of thought that one day we would be running ST programs "natively" on amiga

[Tomislav]

Originally Posted by BlankVector

BTW, the EmuTOS floppy can only run in Chip RAM because does not include address relocation. Chip RAM always start at address 0, while other Amiga RAM kinds can start at various addresses. Solution will be to add relocation information in EmuTOS-RAM versions (including Amiga floppy). I think I will do that some day. Other solution is to hardcode the FastRAM address when building EmuTOS. We do that in the Vampire-optimized variants, for a lightspeed experience

Floppy on Amiga is accessed by Amiga chipset and Amiga chipset only access Chip memory. That means that floppy data must be in Chip memory.

[BlankVector]

Originally Posted by Tomislav

Floppy on Amiga is accessed by Amiga chipset and Amiga chipset only access Chip memory. That means that floppy data must be in Chip memory.

Sure. But EmuTOS takes care of that, whenever its main code resides in Chip RAM, Fast RAM or even ROM

[tomcat666]

Actually you are better off setting the value to $03 and not $07 because if the programs first allocate FAST mem and they allocate the bitmap the amiga will not be able to display it. This works much better. $03 will tell the program to load into fast mem and when allocating memory to allocate chip mem.