Re: [MiNT] Alternatives to ColdFire: what about the ARM platform and imx515 Genesi Developer Program

[Vincent Rivière <vincent.riviere@freesbee.fr>]

penbox@tiscali.it wrote:
> How much work would it be necessary to free MiNT 
> from TOS dependencies, to let it run natively on an hardware different
>
> from original Atari's?
> Otherwise, could EmuTos be ported to new 
> hardware to run MiNT on top of it?

I had a look at EmuTOS recently.
I'm pretty sure that the "core" part would be not so complicated to port to 
other hardware. However, a lot of low level routines should be rewritten.
The VDI part is mostly written in 68000 assembler, in a very complicated and 
written in an unreadable way, it is totally unportable. The best choice 
should be to rewrite it from scratch, or use something else (fVDI ?).
I don't know about the AES part. But Olivier Landemarre has written MyAES 
from scratch in a very portable way, it could be ported to any platform easily.

About the FreeMiNT kernel: no idea.

> Is it a though work to add a 68k 
> emultor for the old binaries to tun on the new platform?

If all the OS functions are implemented, it will be easy to take an existing 
68k emulator and wire it into that OS.


So I definitely believe all of that is possible, it is just a matter of time 
and interest.

--
Vincent Rivière