Author: Mr. B.B.C. (pD9E88914.dip0.t-ipconnect.de)
Date: 06-14-2003 13:59
First of all, MiNT is a GEM-Unix-derivative. It is not a part of the TOS system, it is ONE TOS system.
The common TOS/GEM system consists of these parts:
TOS with the subsystems BIOS, GEMDOS and XBIOS
GEM with the subsystems VDI, AES and GDOS
There are also tiny branches like LineA, which is a very unusual part of VDI.
GEM is the graphical enviroment put upon TOS. Both are more or less separated, i.e. you should write an application based upon GEM, and can port it than to another GEM e.g. the IBM PC GEM.
But unfortunately many things where impossible to be done in GEM, especially sound output. So most applications, lead by computer games, are only running on certain systems.
GDOS is an almost newer part of GEM. As the Atari ST appeared on the market, the GDOS implementation was not yet finished. It is responsible for printer and display driver management.
And only with the commercial NVDI enhancment came the first real usable GDOS implementation.
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The most important problem today is, to get a faster TOS computer.
The Coldfire is with 170 up to 300 MHz rather slow compared to today's PCs. But it is sensible. Most AtariTOS software is written and compiled for MC68000 CPUs.
In many cases there is no way to recompile the software, so the moving to x86 will lead to that that you throw away almost your whole software collection, and the new TOS platform won't have much software.
The Coldfire CPU is MC68000 compatible and so you should be able to save the most applications and to keep the operating system almost with no changes.
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Aranym, "Atari running on any machine", is a project that uses an emulator upon Unix, to allow to boot GEM on IBM PC and PowerPC.
But this requires still to boot e.g. Linux or MacOS X before.
On the other hand, you are able to do things in GEM like playing DivX videos, which is unbelievable on today's TOS computers.
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So if you want to get TOS working on PPC or x86 you still will need a kind of (MC680xx) emulator.
But the goal should be, that you can boot in a few seconds into GEM, and not Linux or something and run an emulator within.
So TOS and GEM have to be compiled for the destination CPU, i.e. x86 or PPC. All parts of TOS and GEM even do have been written as OpenSource, so it would be rather easy to port them to other hardware platforms.
But this is still a lot of work. Further, a nearly new project would be the integrated "phantom" emulator for running 68k applications like native ones.
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