Re: [MiNT] New MiNT distribution is n.. ..pro

[Petr Stehlik <joy@sophics.cz>]

On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Jo Even Skarstein wrote:

> But that's not what I want! I don't want to have a different OS in the
> background, I want the PC to boot directly into a 68k-emulator and
> boot MiNT on that.
> There's no OS in the background, all hardware is controlled directly by
> MiNT

We have discussed this some time ago in our Czech Atari mailing list. I
always convinced the other people that it's too much trouble to write a
new operating system for a PC hardware.

Just imagine - you would have to write something like DOS in the first
place (so you could access the HDD and perhaps VGA). Then, you would have
to write a Atari HW emulator (perhaps a STonX/Gemulator source could be
re-used here). Say you would got it running somehow on VGA 640x480x16 plus
PIO HDD. And now you would have to start writting tons of drivers for just
about everything - PCI slots, tenths of video cards, sound cards, network
cards plus various subtle differences on the motherboards, CPUs
(AMD/Intel/Cyrix) etc etc. You would end up with basically Linux kernel, I
believe, you would just move all the hardware things directly to MiNT. So
even the hardware drivers would run under an emulated CPU? Weird, slow,
dangerous.

I believe it's easier to get a stripped down Linux distribution and
install an Atari emulator on top of it (a new emulator that would allow
you to access the underlying hardware, as I was talking about in a
different mail).

Petr