Announcement FreeMiNT 1.14 BETA

[Sven Karlsson <f92sk@efd.lth.se>]

Hi!

FreeMiNT 1.14 BETA is now acessable for download from my homepage (see url in 
signature). I have added the readme.1st file from the archive which should be 
read before using FreeMiNT 1.14.

Regards
	Sven Karlsson
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Student of Engineering Physics at Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden

Soft- and Hardware developer @ Istari Software
Current project: Code ,an interactive development tool for video
	game consoles including Editor,Debugger and Assembler
	Fenix, a new OO OS for Atari compatible computers.
E-mail: f92sk@efd.lth.se or tomten@df.lth.se
WWW: http://www.efd.lth.se/~f92sk
        

This is FreeMiNT 1.14 BETA:

FreeMiNT 1.14 has virtual memory which use a dedicated 
swappartition. The swappartition is created by the doswap
utility included in the distribution.

MiNT now also have a new recognised "nameparameter". If you rename
mint.prg into mntnm.prg or mintnm.prg and run it from the autofolder
then both memory protection and virtual memory will be disabled.
Virtual memory is only enabled if memory protection is disabled,
you have a swappartion installed,you have enough memory in your 
computer and have a true 68030 in your computer.
Memory protection is turned off by for example renaming mint.prg
into mintnp.prg and running it from the autofolder.

VM will not work with 040,060 or 020 with 68851 coprocessor. It
will only work with a true 030 with mmu. It will not work with a
68EC030 or similar processor.

WARNING: The specific type of 030 is not tested. The VM will try
to run and will crash on a EC030. If you have such a processor
you should always run MiNT with both memory protection and VM
turned off!

I strongly suggest you to make a backup of your harddisk before
experimenting with VM. Bevare that this version is a beta and is
not tested on all systems. It is tested on a plain 8 MHz 2.5 meg
520ST and a TT clocked at 32 MHz with 4 meg ST-ram and 4 meg TT-ram
using a Quantum 850 meg Trailblazer scsi harddisc fitted to the internal
TT scsibus and using AHDI V5.00 as harddisc driver. It is not tested on
any other machine and may perhaps not run on other machines. Although
that is highly unlikely.

VM larger than 64 meg is not supported and doswap will complain
if you try to install a larger swappartition than 64 meg.

By default all TT-ram and all ST-ram but 4 meg is used as page
memory ie only 4 meg ST-ram will be left. This can be changed
if the symbol ST_LEFT_AFTER_VM in mem.h are changed to the amount
of ST-ram needed. On a TT you can set this as low as 1 or 2 megs if
the program flags on your applications are properly set. On a Falcon
you might want to have more ST-ram free.


Version 1.14 (ie VM extension) was made by Sven 'il Profesore' Karlsson.
Patches from 1.12.5 to MiNT 1.12.6 were collected by Charles 
Briscoe-Smith <cpb4@ukc.ac.uk>.  Versions of FreeMiNT up to and 
including 1.12.5 were collected by Michael Hohmuth 
<hohmuth@inf.tu-dresden.de>

21th of September 1996


/*
 * This file belongs to FreeMiNT.  It's not in the original MiNT 1.12
 * distribution.
 */

This is an attempt in helping to re-synchronize the MiNT source tree
between the MiNT Mailing List folks.  This effort has previously been
known as "MH-MiNT".

Please note that FreeMiNT is unsupported.  There is no warranty.  See
the file COPYING for details.

Please report bugs to the MiNT mailing list <mint@atari.archive.umich.edu>

The supplied binary is compiled with gcc 2.3.3.

WARNING: This is only a beta. There is a binary version in this distribution
but it is only meant for people who are willing to risc their harddisc in the
quest to find all bugs. The VM extension took 3 days to write. It has been
tested only on the machines listed above during 2 weeks. There are probably
configurations that will lead to problems. You should backup all your vital
data before trying this piece of software. It is stable on my TT but I do not
take any responsibility for any lost data or damaged media or hardware.

NOTE: The reltime clock in my TT has stopped working. Since I have not fixed
it yet a lot of files have strange timestamps.

Regards Sven Karlsson, Istari Software