EmuTOS for Amiga

[BlankVector]

EmuTOS 0.9.0 has been released, with Amiga support, but without AROS routines.

I want to heartily thank everyone here for your help, and specially:
- Toni Wilen, for the absolutely great WinUAE
- Gibs and Amiman99, for their tests on real hardware

Feel free to join the EmuTOS mailing list to contribute to EmuTOS and add further Amiga hardware support

[amiman99]

User name "moulinaie" from AtariAge gave me a link to a Atari ST software that lets you patch PRG programs to run in the FastRAM.
Here it is: http://www.umich.edu/~archive/atari/Tt/flgset.lzh
I patched 2 programs and and it seemed to load. One of them was MTPro32 (Midi software) and other CAD3D. The MTPro32 froze after loading, probably do to none existing MIDI support. The CAD3D loaded and worked until I tried to do View->Superview and then froze.Other then that it works.
This is on A1000 NTSC, with 256KB free ST-RAM and 1.5MB free Fast-RAM.

[emufan]

quick test with "quickstart A500 setup" works fine, i can see the desktop. but i'm not sure which floppy images i can use. i have those 720 kb (.st) and some 800kb images. those do not show up on desktop. winua 2.6.0 beta 9. anyone?

Edit: floppy support not yet working? i try with harddrive.
Edit: tested 1200 config, added pctask hardfile, a windows-folder and a ms-dos cd-image. nothing pop's up on desktop.
can anyone put a known working empty fat16 hardfile (20-30 mb) into the zone? google is of no help, if you need things.

[BlankVector]

Thanks for testing, emufan.

Due to license issues, floppy support (provided by AROS sources) is not enabled in the official binaries. If you want to use it, you have to rebuild EmuTOS yourself using "make amiga AROS=1". You will be allowed to use the resulting ROM, but not to redistribute it. I expect those license issues to be fixed in next release, as soon as I get Toni Wilen's agreement to reuse his code in GPL software.

For IDE disk emulation, you need to associate a harddrive/hardfile to the IDE0 channel.

1) WinUAE "harddrive". Any drive with a FAT16 partition is OK: USB flash drive, CompactFlash, SD-Card... Beware, WinUAE does not lock FAT16 partitions when it accesses them, so if you wrote data in EmuTOS, be sure to unmount the drive from Windows after closing WinUAE, to avoid data corruption. After that, you can mount the drive again and use it as usual.

2) WinUAE "hardfile". You need an image of a full disk, or a single FAT16 partition. With Linux tools, you can create a blank FAT16 image using "mkdosfs" or "mformat". In the hardfile settings, you need to click "Enable RDB mode" otherwise it will not work.
Beware, hardfile seems to have big trouble with the last WinUAE 2.6 betas, use the latest stable release instead.

After that, EmuTOS will detect the C: drive in the welcome screen, then a C: icon will appear on the desktop. Both read and write will work.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by BlankVector

I expect those license issues to be fixed in next release, as soon as I get Toni Wilen's agreement to reuse his code in GPL software.

Oops, I forgot

I just commited update to AROS SVN LICENSE.Author file, it allows relicensing of my AROS changesets in GPL programs.

[emufan]

BlankVector: #2 did the trick. thanks.
looks like there will be a 0.9.1 with floppy support soon. thanks Toni.

[BlankVector]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

I just commited update to AROS SVN LICENSE.Author file, it allows relicensing of my AROS changesets in GPL programs.

Many thanks, Toni
Thanks to your support and Jason's one, I believe I have now everything to legally reuse your work in EmuTOS binaries. I plan to integrate that in EmuTOS 0.9.1, probably next summer. I will continue discussing the license details in the AROS-Exec Forum.

[elpiloto]

is there any way to softkicking the rom file to an a500?

[BlankVector]

Originally Posted by elpiloto

is there any way to softkicking the rom file to an a500?

I'm not familiar with Amiga, but I don't think so.
The situation is the same as softkicking any other kickstart from A500.

[emufan]

Originally Posted by elpiloto

is there any way to softkicking the rom file to an a500?

you need an accelerator/expansion card with a maprom feature or something kipper2k is doing. with such a flashrom kickstart replacement, you can load any kickstart. juts follow the thread, for sure kipper2k will finish this project and offer sets you can buy.

[elpiloto]

thats the point, i ment, if there is any way to softkick the emutos to the ram, no with a board, i tyed mkick and skick from aminet, but the rom file need some complementary files

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by emufan

you need an accelerator/expansion card with a maprom feature or something

What? No!
If you have enough RAM for the ROM image and your A500 has a 2.x kickstart, you can softkick using skick, no accelerator needed. I used to softkick my A600 with 2MB RAM to 1.3 and 3.0 all the time.

elpiloto: until someone makes an RTB file for EmuTOS, it won't work with skick. Try contacting Jean-François Fabre, as the docs say he added RTB files to the package.

[BlankVector]

Originally Posted by elpiloto

i tyed mkick and skick from aminet, but the rom file need some complementary files

If it is confirmed that the EmuTOS ROM could be theoretically softkicked like that, and if the relevant documentation is provided, I could try to provide those complementary files.

[Amiga1992]

BlankVector, from the docs:

8. File structures
==================

8.1 .RTB file

.RTB file consists of two parts. The first part contains all the relocation
offsets compressed by my own simple algorithm. It is created with a special
program called RTG (relocation table generator) from specially pre-processed
kickstart image. How to get this image, it is my magic and I'll never tell
anybody about it. One note only: generation of 39.046 .RTB took 1 1/2 hours.
(Manual work, + about 10 mins my 7MHz '010 CPU time). Second part contains BCPL
relocation table and it is required for 1.3 ROM only. It was created manually,
analysing dos.library, which is written in BCPL in 1.3. .RTB file is not easy
to create. I don't recommend anybody to try it *without* very good knowledge of
assembly language and machine code (not the same). N.B. Auxiliary tools to do
such work took 1 month to develop.

8.2 .PAT file

Patch file has a very simple structure. It contains pairs of longs. Every pair
represents an offset from kickstart beginning (first long) and the value to
patch (the second one). Bytes and words cannot be patched individually, every
patch must be coded as a long, even with 3 bytes identical with original. When
a longer patch is to be coded, it must be coded as a sequence of these simple
patches. This stupid mechanism will be improved in next release. There is no
order specified, because every patch has its own, fully coded offset. It allows
simple addition of new patches to the existing file. Patch file must be ended
with two longs of zeros.
From revision 3.12, there may be also relocative patches coded. They
differ from a standard patch by the most significant bit of offset, which is set
to 1. In this case, current loading address is added to the patch value before
storing it. This feature is needed for 39.110 patch. For example, to code JMP
start+$7F900 patch to the address start+$100, where start is the current loa-
ding address, use the sequence 000000fe XXXX4ef9 80000102 0007f900, where XXXX
is original contents of ROM at address start+$fe.

N.B. To create patch file, I'm using this algorithm:
1) First, I patch new values directly into the kickstart with a debugger.
2) I load another copy of kickstart into memory (my 6Megs allow this)
3) I write simple program to generate the patch file directly with debugger's
assembler (I'm using Mon 1.55 by Timo Rossi, which seems to be the most
powerful PD debugger known to me). This program is so simple so I never save
it.
4) I save (with the debugger) the table to the disk.

So I guess since he "won't tell", we're all royally fucked. But I am sure EmuTOS can be softkicked.

[Toni Wilen]

Softkicking is simple if rom image is relocatable, just find some free space, load the image, relocate it and do some reset magic. This is tricky because you need to execute reset instruction or you won't see any autoconfig boards but it also unmaps all autoconfig ram and enables chip ram rom overlay.

Check aros-m68k arosbootstrap.c.

[BlankVector]

Ok, from what I understand, the main process is to load the ROM file in RAM, and patch it so it can run from RAM. With some efforts the EmuTOS build process could probably produce those files.

On the other hand, on Atari machines EmuTOS is also provided in a RAM variant (named EmuTOS-RAM or EmuTOS-floppy). That one is designed to be run from RAM, at a fixed address. The same method could be applied on Amiga.

To do that, I just need an AmigaOS bootstrap program which allocates some RAM and loads a data file into it. Ideally, that should be a simple bootblock routine which loads the data from sectors using trackdisk.device or similar.

If someone can provide me such bootblock program in assembly language, then chances are good that we will have an EmuTOS-floppy some day. In other words, that would mean loading EmuTOS from a boot floppy, just like a game. But that eats the RAM.

[BlankVector]

That seems to be exactly what I need:
http://jetsetskippy.blogspot.fr/2012...ootblocks.html

[elpiloto]

Originally Posted by Akira

What? No!
If you have enough RAM for the ROM image and your A500 has a 2.x kickstart, you can softkick using skick, no accelerator needed. I used to softkick my A600 with 2MB RAM to 1.3 and 3.0 all the time.

elpiloto: until someone makes an RTB file for EmuTOS, it won't work with skick. Try contacting Jean-François Fabre, as the docs say he added RTB files to the package.

Hi Akira! we meet here again !

Sorry about my ignorance, but, Whos him? some one related to emutos?

[prowler]

Originally Posted by elpiloto

Sorry about my ignorance, but, Whos him? some one related to emutos?

No, mate... Someone related to skick (follow the link this time ).

[emufan]

Originally Posted by BlankVector

That seems to be exactly what I need:
http://jetsetskippy.blogspot.fr/2012...ootblocks.html

you may look onto the ACC disks. they are in the zone. index file is inside the archive. maybe you can find something usefull there?