[MiNT] This fight

[Mark Duckworth <mduckworth@atari-source.com>]

If I may throw my hand in here,

First of all perhaps I am biased, my personal opinion is that Aranym is
the single most worthy "emulator" (It's a virtual machine, people!) in
existence.  Ever take a look at the pc world?  Fact is many
organizations use virtual machines on IBM mainframes, using vmware or
ibm's proprietary.  They also use vmware to do multiplatform development
from one workstation.  VM's are a concept that's here to stay and Aranym
is one good damn implementation of one if I do say so myself.  I dare to
say VMs are a big part of the future of computing in general.

Now, as far as this discussion goes.  Let's take a look at some other
platforms.  The PC has ACPI and APM (mostly just APM) support for
handling power and sleep and so forth.  The mac has had built in support
for such things from nearly day one.  The Atari in general has lagged,
never having any sort of soft power or power management features
whatsoever.  

Thus, now when such things get implemented there's liable to be a lot of
work to do, and possibly duplicated work.  The fact is, the natfeats
idea is a clever idea that MiNT should support.  Future hardware might
have a natfeat driver that runs (like the ACP machine).  If more than
one Atari emu support natfeats AND it's possible to develop natfeats
type drivers for other actual atari hardware, it should be implemented
into the mint kernel and that's that.

You guys get so huffy having philosophical discussions but what you
don't realize is that anyone who loves or cares about atari will be
buying a clone regardless of whether or not they have aranym for free. 
The allure of seeing just what the "Real thing" is like is too strong. 
Same with Milan still having his Mega STe.  But aranym makes SOOO many
things so much easier.  Look at my falcon hw probs.  Gaim rpms would not
have been possible without aranym because in order to compile an rpm it
has to make it through the build process without you hitting make 4
times to get past internal compiler errors.  No blame assigned, just
saying hardware is getting old, atari hardware has always been dodgy,
isn't it nice to have something else?  Aranym is very very viable so the
MiNT kernel should cater to it at least a tiny bit.

Look at linux.  Hardware mfr's came in an implemented acpi.  Linux
kernel developers didn't say "ah fuck you, we already use apm" no they
implement ACPI.  Natfeats is just another way.  And there's probably
less than 100 people in the world that truly care about this Atari
stuff!  So why not?  Calm down people... you'll lose your hair!

On a side note, when people get so defensive and so agressive about
something, it's usually because they are threatened.  In this case they
are threatened by just how viable aranym really is....  It's scary but
true.   Look at me, I think I am like other atari lovers.  I love aranym
and I will use it.  But I still have my falcon, I will stil get nature
gfx card, and I will still get the ACP machine when finished.  Think of
aranym as a way to show people what they could have had with a CT60 but
ignored when they didn't sign up.  Personally if I went from a MSTe to a
well-setup aranym I'd kick my own butt for not signing up on the ct60
list!

Meh!
Mark
http://portal.atari-source.com