Dear Atari Community!


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

EmuTOS 0.8.1 --- September 18th, 2005


INTRODUCTION

EmuTOS is a single-user single-tasking operating system for the 32 bit Atari
computers and emulators. It can be used as a replacement for the TOS images 
typically needed today for using emulators and it is also running on some
real hardware, like the Atari Mega STE. All the source code is open and 
free, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).



CHANGES SINCE LAST RELEASE

- Improved GEM desktop (more comfortable, many bugs fixed, ...)
- New translations: Spanish and Greek.
- Most parts of the VDI have been rewritten in C for better maintainability.
- Nearly all Line-A functions have been removed/disabled (deprecated API).
- EmuTOS can now be compiled with GCC 3.x, too.
- graf_shrinkbox() and graf_growbox() have been enabled again.
- form-alert boxes now also work in ST low resolution.
- The AES behave much closer to the original Atari AES than before, so much
  more old programs are working now.
- And lots of other bug fixes and minor improvements

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 developement. It is really written from
scratch and implements nearly all of the TOS 1.0 BIOS functionality, and a
bit more, like e.g. harddisk access.

The GEMDOS part is based on Digital Research's GEMDOS sources, which were
made available under GPL licence 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
- 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 (partitially)
- ACIAs, IKBD protocol, mouse
- MegaST Real-Time Clock (set clock not tested)
- NVRAM (including RTC)
- 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/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36560

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

    http://sourceforge.net/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 Mailinglist 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.


Your EmuTOS development team.

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