[Freemint-list] Interesting github project / ressurection

[Vincent Rivière]

On 24/01/2017 09:27, Miro Kropáček a écrit :
> as a pure coincidence I've found this on github:
> https://github.com/e8johan/tosemu -- it's something like wine combined
> with aranym, seems quite active.

IIRC, I already spotted Johan's TOSEMU some time ago. Or maybe I confuse 
with Keli's ParaTos, I don't remember well.

I see on the readme that TOSEMU was inspired by my 68Kemu. It is also 
based on the Musashi 68000 emulator (the one used by MAME).

The funny fact is that my 68Kemu was actually a fork of an older project 
of mine called RunTOS. And the purpose of RunTOS was... exactly the same 
thing as TOSEMU. So finally we have 3 projects with the same purpose: 
RunTOS, TOSEMU and ParaTos. Probably the proof that it was a good idea ;-)

IMHO, that concept is *the* ultimate thing to do. A system like Wine 
which allows to transparently run TOS programs on a host OS, without the 
burden of a full-blown hardware emulator. It is the way I would like to 
run old Atari software nowadays (if any). Combined to a JIT CPU 
emulator, it would provide ultimate speed. And full memory protection.

Speaking about RunTOS, this was a very alpha project. Mainly a proof of 
concept. I only implemented a very minimal set of GEMDOS functions, 
partially, but IIRC this was good enough to run LHarc without arguments 
and see its help message. As completing that project was a huge task, I 
never went further. And it was so dirty and experimental that I didn't 
consider to share it. Also, at that time, the legal status of Musashi 
was unclear. This was very long ago, before I got interested in GCC or 
EmuTOS. I even started to write my own 68000 emulator before using Musashi.

TOSEMU (as well as ParaTos) seems to be a good project, as it is written 
from scratch around Musashi. And we see that at least one other people 
has contributed. IMHO, the most important fact is that project has *unit 
tests*. And I see that it already uses Travis CI (it has a .travis.yml). 
So new features can be safely developed and refactored, without the fear 
of breaking something. Definitely, the most sane and modern approach.

Long live to all of those new projects!

-- 
Vincent Rivière