Dear Atari Community!


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

EmuTOS 0.8.6 -- November 8th, 2011


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 Mega STe or the FireBee. All the source code
is open and free, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).



CHANGES SINCE LAST RELEASE

- Support for FAT16 partitions up to 2 GB
- Support for the ColdFire V4e CPU (allows running ColdFire TOS programs only)
- Support for the FireBee computer
- Experimental Falcon IDE driver (currently only enabled on the FireBee)
- LMC1992 initialization on STe/TT
- Better memory detection on cold boot
- Fixed the XBIOS time functions for the various hardware clocks
- Key repeat now produces key clicks
- Improved the register dump when a program crashes
- VFAT long filenames are now safely ignored
- Support for drives from A: to Z:
- Malloc() now returns blocks aligned on 4-byte for better performance
- The BIOS console now supports the 256-color modes (but the VDI still doesn't)
- The text cursor does not blink when it moves
- Fixed the STe BIOS default palette
- Fixed the VDI default palette
- Fixed the VDI functions for drawing arrows
- Better searching for RSC files
- Added desktop support for GTP executables
- Desktop windows can be scrolled using arrow keys
- Better initial icon placement on the default desktop
- Fixed the position and size of the windows when reloading the desktop
- Allow resolution switching in ST color modes
- Fixed the BCD build date in the ROM header to DDMMYYYY format
- The 192 KB ROMs are provided again
- The special ARAnyM, FireBee, floppy and RAM versions are now provided
- Support for compilation using GCC 4.6.x
- New languages: Russian and Italian
- A lot of other minor bugfixes and cleanups

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


DESCRIPTION

EmuTOS is basically made up of six subsystems:

- 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, what you know as GEMDOS
- The VDI, the virtual device interface - means the screen driver
- The AES, the application environment services or window manager
- The desktop, which is the graphical shell to the user

The BIOS and XBIOS code is our own development. It is really written from
scratch and implements nearly all of the TOS 1.0 BIOS functionality, and a
bit more, like e.g. hard disk access.

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. They work in all the graphics modes of the original Atari
ST. On some emulators EmuTOS can be patched to work with much bigger
screen resolutions without any problems.

The desktop is not as nice as the original one, but is pretty usable
now for a start. You are free to use a more advanced desktop
replacement any time, like TeraDesk for example.

Since EmuTOS just implements the TOS's functionality, you might want to
use MiNT on it in order to run more modern software. EmuTOS is not an
alternative to MiNT. But EmuTOS is the only free base OS to boot MiNT.



EMULATION AND FUTURE PLATFORM

EmuTOS and MiNT cooperate well. Both can make use of a standard native
call interface for emulators.
EmuTOS itself still uses this new standard native interface for all its 
supported native functions. When running EmuTOS in an emulator, this
interface will provide access to use the power of the underlying OS kernel.
It may allow using modern graphics cards, provides fast native filesystem 
access and will enable you to use networking with all bells and whistles - 
and many things more you always dreamed of. This all will at first get 
possible on the ARAnyM platform.



HARDWARE

Making EmuTOS running 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 hardware:

- CPU support for m68000, m68010, m68020, m68030, m68040, m68060, ColdFire V4e
- FPU detected
- Memory controller (both ST and Falcon)
- Monitor type detection (mono or not)
- WD 1772 Floppy disk controller (write track not tested)
- DMA controller
- MFP
- PSG
- ST shifter
- STE shifter (partially)
- VIDEL (minimal)
- ACIAs, IKBD protocol, mouse
- MegaST Real-Time Clock (set clock not tested)
- NVRAM (including RTC)
- Falcon IDE (experimental, enabled on the FireBee only)
- The native feature interface to some degree


AVAILABILITY

EmuTOS has its home at SourceForge:

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

A ready made EmuTOS image or the source can be downloaded from:

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

It is always available in source form from our CVS server at:

    http://sourceforge.net/scm/?type=cvs&group_id=36560

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:

    http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=36560


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/en/
