Dear Atari Community!


We are happy to announce a new public release of EmuTOS:

EmuTOS 0.9.4 -- March 6, 2015



INTRODUCTION

EmuTOS is a single-user single-tasking operating system for the 32-bit Atari
computers, clones and emulators. It can be used as a replacement for the TOS
images typically needed today for using emulators and can also run on some
real hardware, like the Atari STe, 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 0.9.3

Major changes:
- Compile with -O2 by default for best optimization.
- New emutos-m548x-bas variant to support BaS_gcc on ColdFire Evaluation Boards.
- Less RAM usage: 94 kB saved from previous release.
- EmuDesk: Added feature to display text files.
- EmuDesk: Added feature to move files/folders with Control key.

Other changes:
- Renamed the emutos-m548x variant to emutos-m548x-dbug to avoid confusion.
- BIOS: Fixed floppy drive motor remaining on if there was no floppy.
- BIOS: Do not disable IKBD mouse and joystick on startup.
- BIOS: Added basepage information in panic messages.
- BIOS: Added missing standard ST glyphs from the 6x6 system font.
- BIOS: Fixed _FDC cookie initialization.
- BIOS: Improved floppy routines and media change detection.
- BIOS: Fixed application cartridge initialization address on 32-bit address bus.
- BIOS: Limit IDE interfaces to 1 for non-Firebee hardware.
- BDOS: Check for special device names in Fopen() and Fcreate().
- BDOS: Do not check Fopen() mode (R,W,RW) in Fread()/Fwrite() - just like Atari TOS.
- BDOS: Fixed file date/time incorrectly changed by a cross-directory rename.
- VDI: Select right default fonts, according to vertical screen resolution.
- VDI: Fixed aspect ratio values returned by v_opnwk().
- VDI: Fixed crash due to text blit outside screen area.
- VDI: Fixed v_pieslice() & v_ellpie() which did not draw small slices.
- VDI: Fixed vqt_extent() output for 270° rotation.
- VDI: Fixed vst_rotation() to behave like TOS3/TOS4.
- AES: Improved File Selector.
- AES: Make most dialogs inner border 1-pixel wide.
- AES: Fixed bug that caused accessories to stop responding after a few resolution changes.
- AES: Fixed alert buttons which could overlap icons.
- AES: Fixed 7up hang on exit.
- EmuDesk: Always display file/folder countdown when copying/deleting.
- EmuDesk: Improved error messages.
- EmuDesk: The total number of items in all open windows is no longer limited to 400.
- EmuDesk: Allow desktop copy/delete operations to be interrupted by UNDO key.
- EmuDesk: Increase horizontal spacing for window icons in some resolutions.
- EmuDesk: Fixed the width of the menu items in all languages.
- EmuCON: 'type/cat' can now display correctly files with UNIX line endings.
- EmuCON: Added 'more' command.
- EmuCON: Allow the user to interrupt 'cp/mv' commands.
- Lots of various improvements and bugfixes.

Have a look at changelog.txt for more detailed information.



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 1.0 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 v1.04 level. They work in all the graphics modes
of the original Atari ST, 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 somewhat better than the original one, but not as nice as
the one in TOS 2 or higher. It is still quite usable, and 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.

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 PLATFORM

EmuTOS and MiNT cooperate well. Both can utilize Native Features
(NatFeats) interface for emulators:
    http://wiki.aranym.org/natfeats/proposal

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 Atari hardware:

- CPU support for m68000, m68010, m68020, m68030, m68040, m68060, ColdFire V4e
- FPU detected
- 68030 MMU and cache
- Memory controller (both ST and Falcon)
- Monitor type detection (mono, RGB or VGA)
- DMA controller
- WD 1772 / AJAX Floppy disk controller (write track not tested)
- MFP
- PSG
- ST shifter
- STe shifter
- VIDEL
- ACIAs, IKBD protocol, mouse
- MegaST Real-Time Clock (set clock not tested)
- NVRAM (including RTC)
- Blitter (Blitmode() just returns HW status)
- Microwire
- SCC
- IDE
- ACSI
- The Native Features interface to some degree

Currently unsupported hardware features:
- DSP
- MFP #2
- TT 256-colour palette

EmuTOS is also available on some non-Atari hardware:
- Amiga (WinUAE, Amiga 1000, Amiga 1200 with Blizzard 1260)
- ColdFire Evaluation Boards (M5484LITE, M5485EVB)



AVAILABILITY

The EmuTOS home page is:

    http://emutos.sourceforge.net/

The project home is on SourceForge:

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/

The latest releases can be downloaded from:

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/files/emutos/

Development snapshots allow you to test the current development progress:

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos/files/snapshots/

The latest sources are always available from our CVS server at:

    http://sourceforge.net/p/emutos/code/

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://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emutos-devel


We hope that you like EmuTOS. If you have any suggestions or comments, we
always appreciate to hear the good and also the bad things about it.


The EmuTOS development team.

-- 
Originally written by Martin Doering
http://emutos.sourceforge.net/
