BigBenAussie wrote:
Curious. Never even occurred to me that there'd be Atari ST guys trying to rebuild their platform.
Should have known.
How do we find out more about the Atari ST revival?
Are there websites?
Well sure. What else are we supposed to do with 100MHz of 68060 muscle. Sure the demos and intros can make use of the new power but the reality is there's a small segment of Atari users dedicated to advancing the platform as a useable machine today. This is only possible of course because of UAE and their contributions to the ARAnyM project, and certain Atari hardware developers that remain. The guys left aren't trying to rebuild Atari ST's. ST's are too limited for any of today's needs. But a Falcon with CT60 is a perfect starting block. The ST's still get new code released regularly but it's mostly games and demos. The ST is truely just a playtoy now unless it has a (extremely rare) PAK030 accelerator and video card or something like that. The revival efforts are concentrated around the MiNT OS which is an Atari TOS/unix hybrid sort of system.. I guess kind of like Mac OSX in a way, and this effort is being done on a couple clones like Hades 060, Milan 040, Atari Falcon (with CT60) and TT030 (they've got lots of ram and decent speed) and they are focused with stuff like building an rpm based easy to install unix distribution called sparemint,
http://sparemint.atariforge.net (freemint kernel development is also housed here), highwire web browser -
http://highwire.atari-users.net. and good atari news can be found at
http://www.ataritoday.com which aggregates several sites including mine,
http://portal.atari-source.com.
It would be interesting to see simularities with the Amiga situation.
The similarities are simply that certain things must be implemented from scratch. True shared libs requires virtual mem. When I say true shared libs I mean elf binaries, unix style ld.so, mmap() and the likes. On the Atari side we don't have any, AFAIK there is at least one implementation of unix shared libs on amiga but it's not very standard. Perhaps programmers from both sides could work together to figure out how to overcome these obstacles on our respective system. Though on the Atari side, this is not much of an impossible or even terribly hard, just that only 2-3 people are left in the world that are willing and qualified enough to do the work. I was told once the memory management on the Atari makes it very hard. The linux code for this stuff isnt' helpful, but as both AmigaOS and MiNT would be implementing this from scratch, certain parts and ideas COULD be reuseable - I'm not sure though.
Any chance of convincing Atari(formerly Infrogrames) into producing a piece of hardware? A console with an OS for instance that can be a comp, sorta like we might would want Amiga to do. But the Atari brand is much much more recognised.
Not to be a naysayer, but Atari as _I_ loved it is gone. There will be no computers. Atari is just a cash cow name now, nothing more. I mean sure it's possible but it will be some executive's brilliant idea and I don't think anyone will get far suggesting it to them.
I dare say Atari as a company is more cashed up than Amiga.
Maybe.. Maybe not. Amigas were great machines all along but IMHO the Falcon had the last laugh. On thing that annoyed me always about Atari was the upgrades for the machines are rediculously expensive and there's not many. Look at how long it took just to get 68060, and only one developer and it costs 299EUR. Good video cards for Falcon/TT/Mega STe cost anywhere from $299-$799, etc. And there's very few fastram options for ST series machines, hence a 4 MB limit hence these machines are practically useless to run a unix style environment. Amiga uses always seemed to have it good with upgrades, PCI, 68060, PPC, Amithlon, just better support in general still, so don't fret amiga guys
There's not many Atari guys left, but those that are left, there's a good number of people who want advanced features on their old Atari Falcon's like ethernet, 1600x1200xTC 3d accelerated video, PPC accelerator, etc and they want it because they use their atari for everyday tasks like web browsing, word processing, irc, aim, and the likes.
