One of interesting features of improved TOS 1.04/1.62

[ParanoidLittleMan]

This obviously just missed attention. Of course, it's me to blame for it in first place. Should promote it better, more ...

Now I correct that my error:

 

Imagine that you can play adapted (patched, if you like it more) games from your mass storage (UltraSatan or whatever) on Atari ST(E)s with only 512 KB RAM. Or 1MB games (those which will not run from floppy on 512 K machines) on ST(E) with 1 MB RAM. And all it faster than with usual "RAM swap" solutions like HAGA, ULS . The key is in RIA - Raw Image Access - low level hard disk driver code in TOS ROM . That will do it much faster and more flexible than installed hard disk driver SW. And it is even possible to have return to Desktop from game, saving statesaves. Because that can go on Flash card (hard disk) too, no need for extra RAM .

 

Edited December 18, 2018 by ParanoidLittleMan

[Justin Payne]

Well, I'm sold. Is there anything you need from the community?

[TheNameOfTheGame]

That sounds like a great system! Are you working on RIA currently or is it in planning stage?

[ParanoidLittleMan]

That sounds like a great system! Are you working on RIA currently or is it in planning stage?

ROM code is finished. What can be made better, lot better is supporting SW . What can see in video is very basic, simple APP for mounting active virtual disk images. But that part can be improved later, without need to change ROM code, so no need to reprogram EPROMs, send them via snail mail .

[pixelmischief]

PLM: Would it be possible to change the role of TOS to simply initialize the hard disk and then boot TOS from there? My understanding is that early STs loaded TOS from floppy, so the concept can't be altogether foreign. If we could start running the OS from the disk, work on improvements and paths to upgrade would get much easier. No wonder the entire industry evolved in that direction.

[ParanoidLittleMan]

That's already done with SW like RAMTOS, SelTOS .

In case of improved TOS 1.04/1.62, combos with 2.06 - quote from presentation WEBpage:

"Third way would be running improved TOS from RAM (top RAM for better compatibility) . I add this because someone already wanted such version. I can say that it is possible, I did it already and tested. RamTOS can not deal with this, only with regular TOS versions. However, running from RAM, even if there is 4 MB of it in machine is not same as running TOS in ROM. Some things will not work (well) - like Virtual Floppy, statesaves . And is of course less compatible with some SW."

Surely updating some OS is much easier when it runs in RAM, and loads from disk. But whole Atari ST design is pretty much ROM TOS based, lot of SW performs deleting of whole upper RAM area, and you just can not prevent it without changing SW code in every SW - what means lot of time in tracing, testing etc - for every SW separately. There is no way to have RAM area protection with 68000 CPU, like it exists in later CPUs - so can protect OS in RAM from accidental or intentional writes/changes .

 

Btw. the reason why early TOS was on floppy is: in first place it's size - it simply did not fit in 192 KB space. It was pretty much early version, with bugs, missing features - Atari needed to start sales, but OS development was slower than HW development. Shipping machines with unfinished OS in then expensive (6 chips) ROMs would be waste of money and not to good advertisement.

[pixelmischief]

Got it. Thanks for the explanation.