[MiNT] Mint as ROM?

[Martin_Doering@mn.man.de]

Hello!

I'm new to this list and have a few questions. (Be careful - I did not use
an Atari for years...   ;-)

It's years ago, that I owned an Atari. Since that times TOS/Mint has
changed heavily. I do not own an ST and never will again. But I try around
a lot with STonX in the last time. I got some patches to access the
undelying Linux FS via an Mint Filesystem driver. This works for Mint 1.14,
as I was told. And I think, there can be done much more. But my biggest
problem is:

I have to use the original Atari ROM (which I have lying around in a box -
yes I still own them and also some custom chips) to get STonX running, and
then Mint changes a lot of the GEMDOS functionality for it to work.
Wouldn't it be much more elegant to start Mint directly as an OS? Burn it
in a EPROM, or use it (as me) as an tos.img for STonX?

So - I know the new functionality Mint brings to me, but on what underlying
routines does it depend? Line-a? The GEMDOS filesystem stuff?

In the moment STonX uses a trick of an emulated cartridge, which is started
before/while starting TOS. It patches the original TOS for to work with
STonX. It would be fine, if I/we could use an adapted Mint kernel directly.
Then - for example - I could use the Linux Filesystem interface from
scratch in StonX, without first using GEMDOS. Also I would not need to
emulate ST hardware I never would need, like old soundgenerators, graphics
chips etc. The emulation could be running in a much more straight forward
way.

What do you think?

---
Martin Döring