Author: Michael Bernstein (dslb-084-058-175-151.pools.arcor-ip.net)
Date: 10-08-2008 00:03
Hi,
> FreeMiNT project.
> It's open source,
> it's still actively developed,
> it's free och charge.
and its only a GEMDOS replacement.
At top of MiNT you need GEM with a VDI and AES which was capable to support the multitasking of the underlying GEMDOS (MiNT). For both parts there are free parts: fVDI (which lacks some printer drivers as far as i know) and XaAES.
At the bottom you need drivers which build the BIOS and XBIOS.
So if you want to boot MiNT, you first have to build a minimal TOS which was capable to process the auto folder. A good start was EmuTOS because it was much more easy to modify the source code than to patch a existing TOS from Atari. MiNT was nearly hardware independant so maybe there was no need of modifications. Than you may need VDI drivers for your graphic hardware. The AES is also hardware independant.
You see, there is nothing wrong with a start of porting TOS and GEM to a new hardware. You need both.
Concerning the idea to use X86 hardware, there was another point. Should the OS run inside a 68k emulator or native? If it should run native, which was the better and faster choice, you have more work to make MiNT running as a GEMDOS replacement. Otherwise you can run MiNT with a minimum of work.
