Announcing ready to use freemint sd card images for the ST

[1st1]

blushing to see the names of the Atari scene looking at my humble project

@eero

the Hatari documentation, like the EmuTOS documentation is quite large and good

however the statement "If you want to access the hard disk image partitions also outside the emulation, the disk image needs to have a DOS partition table" in the Hatari doc is not really true anymore, as GNU parted has now AHDI partition support.
cf http://meta.libera.cc/2018/07/inspectin ... image.html

also mtools can access a AHDI partition provided you give the offset in bytes cf https://github.com/EmmanuelKasper/mck/b ... kefile#L54

I think this anyhow true, as long as HATARI runs on a Windows machine.

[elliot]

I can't download the image...

[DarkLord]

On "real" hardware here, my Kubuntu Linux laptop reads my 2 gig SD-cards
from my Mega STe using Mtools... No emulation needed.

[Bikerbob]

I can't download the image...

I tried today and was not able to download it either.

James

[czietz]

Works for me. What I see though: The download is over unencrypted HTTP (and not TLS-secured HTTPS). Perhaps your browser is configured to reject HTTP downloads?

[christos]

Works for me. What I see though: The download is over unencrypted HTTP (and not TLS-secured HTTPS). Perhaps your browser is configured to reject HTTP downloads?

That's probably it since firefox complained here too. but it let me download it anyway.

So, I had a chance to play with it for about an hour today under hatari. So some general remarks about MiNT.

- It's painfully slow on an STE.
- It consumes a lot of memory. XaAES reports 1.3MB free and Teradesk 831K. If I remember correctly from my younger years, Teradesk will report the largest free block. Starting a shell from TOSWIN2 and typing ls can sometimes produce a cannot allocate memory error. But putting it into perspective early STs came with 512K so you have the equivalent of a 1040ST as free RAM so that's not too bad I guess.
- There's a huge delay on typing. I remember this 'feature' since Multitos on my Falcon. Not an issue on a CT63 but it would be nice if this was improved somewhat.

And some observations on the ST Mint distro:

- It's very bare bones. There is no Text Editor installed, there is no Control Panel so it's kind of impossible to edit any settings. I think that the control panel is necessary for using an ST but I can understand there will be issues with RAM and licensing.
- On a related note there is a desktop background image, that's 32Kb that can be returned to the system.
- Lot's of GNU tools are installed which is really nice. Minix might be a nice choice as per your roadmap since I think there is a bit less overhead there.
- Command.tos. Is that TOS' command line? I remember getting a command.prg from ST format which was similar to a DOS shell. Is that it, just renamed to TOS? Why didn't Atari include this in the ST system disks?
- TOSWIN2 is kind of heavy. Did you consider Miniwin? I know it doesn't have all the features, but it could be a better fit for the system.
- Did you consider including something like NVDI/Warp9 or similar to speed up the screen? Screen refresh is painful. (I understand the licensing/RAM issues).

BTW, please don't take anything I wrote as criticism (especially nonconstructive). It's been a long time since I used MiNT or booted TOS for more than starting a demo/game for a couple of minutes and I made these observations. Seriously, if it wasn't for your work, I wouldn't even attempt
creating a MiNT environment for Hatari/my MSTE so thank you for making that effort.

[czietz]

- It's very bare bones. There is no Text Editor installed

Depends on what you mean by "installed". QED is there: viewtopic.php?p=434252#p434252, just not registered in Teradesk as editor.

[stormy]

Well yeah, I said the same since I didn't know QED was tucked away in the ext2 partition... nobody is gonna know that, it really is no effort to have it properly registered in Teradesk and then distribute the image I agree the desktop wallpaper is just a waste of memory, in-fact I think a 'tiled' background could look better and use less memory.

[mikro]

- There's a huge delay on typing. I remember this 'feature' since Multitos on my Falcon.

Unfortunately, this has been reported multiple times. Bugfixing is waiting for someone here: https://github.com/freemint/freemint/issues/242.

[marcello]

Thanks for your comment and suggestions (and welcome the note about constructive criticism
Basically the disk image only contains the 68000 snapshot of the FreeMinT releases, with default conf so that it can boot without having to tweak 10s of files + I added unix tools.

In doing ST Mint I was mostly interested in the Unix part, hence the focus on GNU Tools and Minix. Getting the minix3 serial port communication cross compiled and working was the funniest part.
I also played a good deal of Klapauzius Hard Disk adapted games on it, they all work flawlessly on ST Mint except for the save feature.

Now regarding MultiTOS / FreeMiNT on 68000 there are 3 alternatives more or less:
- original multi tos, said to be quite buggy, not OpenSource
- KGMD working well, but abandoned years ago
- FreeMint latest, slow as hell as you noticed but recent

I choose the latest option so that any bug encountered could be discussed with the FreeMiNT developers.

Just to answer about that Command.com, it came from Minix 1 utility disk.

I fixed the link so now the download os over https, I think some browsers where confused about having a http link on a https page with the same domain.

[christos]

Well, I'll raise another point for the desktop image. Removing it seems to have improved performance. Not sure if others have experienced that as well.

[mikro]

By the way, there are two more things you can do to reduce memory usage:

1. Rename/move "xaaesst.km" to "xaaes.km" (this will enforce using the "st only" build of xaaes without support for advanced graphics resolutions, saving at least 40 KB RAM)

2. Don't use Hatari/OLDTOSFS build (i.e. rename/move mint000.prx back to prg), it eats another 30 KB of RAM, even if the normal build has issues of its own: https://github.com/freemint/freemint/is ... -929974607 (you need to increase the cache size manually if you run into issues)

So you see, together with the desktop image file, you can save good 100 KB of RAM just with a few clicks.