Mint runs on new platform!

[steve@mctavish.demon.co.uk (Steve Woodford)]

Hi Minters,

You may recall that about 3 weeks ago I mentioned in a post to
this list that I was trying to port Mint to a VME based system.
Well I'm happy to say that the port is pretty well complete! In
fact I'm using it to write this message, and I'll be using it
to send the message too, since I also have mintnet up and
running!

I've nicknamed the port 'VMiNT', in recognition of the VMEbus.
It goes quite well with my name for the simple TOS emulation I've
written, called 'VTOS'.

VMiNT has been reasonably stable for just over 1 week now, and
I'm confident enough that I've moved the source onto it to
continue development, not that it needs much more. It already
has all the standard Mint features enabled, such as memory
protection, bios device support, loadable filesystems and device
drivers etc. To give an indication of how compatible VMiNT is
with Mint on a stock ST, I copied the *binaries* for the Gnu C
compiler from my ST onto the new system. Guess what, they ran!
The first thing I did, though, was use it to recompile a native
version of the compiler!

There is one major incompatibility which does give a couple of
problems for some executables: the system variables do not start
at 0x0400, as in normal TOS. Unfortunately, the debugger PROMS
use this area, so I was forced to assign the system variables
starting at 0x4400. In practice, few programs rely on system
variables, but Mintlibs digs around in them looking for Mint
cookies etc, and usually defaults to the TOS domain when it can't
find them. I'm slowly recompiling everything, however, to run
native.

If you have a spare Motorola MVME147S cpu board lying around,
you're welcome to a copy of VTOS, and the diffs (when I get
'diff' compiled!) relative to FreeMint1.12.4.

Next on the list is X-windows; I've got a nice VMEbus graphics
card just begging to be used...... ;-)

Cheers, Steve