Exist any Intel x86 port of Atari TOS?

[Cyprian]

There's an archive of old GEMDOS source code at dev-docs with comments going back to early 1985. You'll find these names in there:
*
** JSL Jason S. Loveman
** SCC Steven C. Cavender
** LTG Louis T. Garavaglia
** KTB Karl T. Braun (kral)
*

SCC Steven C. Cavender:
https://mcurrent.name/atarihistory/tram ... ology.html

July: Digital Research and Atari software engineers together commenced work on ports of CP/M-68K, GEM, and Dr. Logo to a new computer hardware platform to be developed at Atari. The Digital Research team, led by engineering project manager Lou Tarnay, would include Steve Schmitt (Dr. Logo), Steve Cavender (GSX and operating systems), Lowell Webster (GEM services and the GEM desktop), and Rich Greco (project architect). (Digital Dialogue Feb85)

February: Atari TOS developers abandoned the CP/M-68K component for the new GEMDOS, also by Digital Research. (source)

"(source)" points to https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n ... sofst.html

Yet Atari still had much work ahead of them. In February, GEMDOS was nearly complete and Atari had to make a crucial decision: should they continue with CP/M 68K or to move on to GEMDOS? Leonard explains: "That was an extremely difficult decision to make. CP/M-68K had been around several years; it was a well-known, well-understood, relatively well-accepted existing operating system. GEMDOS was a completely brand-new, untried, untested, incomplete operating system. However, it also offered significantly higher performance and gave the full hierarchical file system that CP/M-68K simply did not have. It was quite a difficult decision to make, but I think we went in the right direction going with GEMDOS."

and

GEMDOS, while not written as an MS-DOS clone, nonetheless was modeled on MS-DOS. There is nearly a one-to-one correspondence between GEMDOS operating system calls and those of MS-DOS, and the mechanism for storing files on disk is identical--which is why ST disk drives can read IBM disks

[1st1]

GEMDOS was made more MS-DOS-compatible to make it much easier to set GEM ontop which already was in developement for MS-DOS.

Years back I found the source code in Borland Turbo-Pascal of a masterpiece of MS-DOS software to crunch arround in FAT filesystem. It took me less than 2 hours to make it compile-able and workable in TOS in ST-Pascal. Most work was to replace text mode IBM character strings to something nice in ATARI characters and a few little/big endian conversions, and replacing cursor position commands with VT52 sequences. But the main algorythms worked out if the box to check and manipilate in the file system, My plan was to convert it to a GEM program, but then I found Diskus file&disk monitor which was able to to the same things, so I stopped.

This conversion was only possible because of the similarity between MS-DOS and GEMDOS. Function numbers and parameters for calling these functions were just the same, only the method of jumping into the OS is different, trap here, interrupt there.

[1st1]

Big difference between CP/M and MS-DOS is file system, up to CP/M 2.2 it can not support folders and not more than 64 files per (root) directory.

The biggest difference between cp/m and DOS is actually not the filesystem, but they way DOS handles memory and processes. In cp/m, you have the TPA which starts at 0x100 on 8088/z80 machines. This means that when you load a program under cp/m, it's always loaded to this address and the program owns the entire TPA (size of TPA is available in a system variable). With (GEM)DOS you have proper memory management and relocatable binaries. But both DOS and GEMDOS still uses the term "TPA" (transient program area), and when a program is loaded it's allocated all available (OK, biggest available block of) memory just like cp/m does.

True, but the file system oviously was one of the most important reasons to swap from CP/M 68K to MS-DOS. The other was that it made porting GEM to ST more easy. TOS memory/process handleing is different from both, because TOS does not run on a Z80 (with bank switching when having more than 64k) or an 8088/8086 (with 64k data and program segmentation) but on 68000 which has no such limitations below of 16 MB adress room.

By the way, did you know there have been (rare) 68k machines running MS-DOS clones? Sharp X68000 is maybe the most well known one. Unfortunatelly I don't find the website which describes the other system.

Maybe it is the german "Proteus Supermikro" computer running "Concurrent-DOS-68k"
https://www.computerwoche.de/a/supermik ... 8k,1171465
http://www.computer-archiv.de/comp0712.htm

Fun fact: DRI trieed to market GEM DOS for 68K separately from ATARI: https://www.computerwoche.de/a/digital- ... os,1170513

[1st1]

I was going to ask the question... it seems to me that GEMDOS is based on DR-DOS

sounds reasonable
anyway DR-DOS was based on MS-DOS

Not really. They did not copy and modify. DR-DOS was DRI's own MS-DOS compatible developement, originally based on DRI's CP/M-86.

[leech]

I was going to ask the question... it seems to me that GEMDOS is based on DR-DOS

sounds reasonable
anyway DR-DOS was based on MS-DOS

Not really. They did not copy and modify. DR-DOS was DRI's own MS-DOS compatible developement, originally based on DRI's CP/M-86.

DR-DOS was actually better than MS-DOS in a lot of ways, but was foiled by MS's anticompetitive practices (they purposefully gimped it by making Win3.x beta builds not work in anything but MS-DOS. By the time the non-beta rolled out, it was too late for DR.)

[joska]

The history of cp/m and DOS is an interesting one. 86-DOS - which MS bought and called MS-DOS - was basically cp/m for the 8088/8086 but with better process/memory management and a better filesystem. You could even run cp/m-programs directly on it if you compiled them for the 8088/8086.

DR-DOS can be traced back to the original cp/m, but I doubt there's much - if any - of the original cp/m code left. An 8086 cp/m called 86 cp/m was released in the early 80's. About the same time mp/m - a multitasking cp/m - was released for the 8080/Z80. Shortly after 86 cp/m picked up some technology from mp/m to become the multiuser Concurrent cp/m for the 8086 CPU family. This evolved into Concurrent DOS, which was compatible to MS-DOS and able to multitask DOS applications. A single-user version called DOS Plus was released, this eventually turned into what we know as DR DOS. Exactly where GEMDOS fits into this I don't know, but as it was developed at roughly the same time as DOS Plus I would guess that there is a connection there.

An example of how closely the original DOS mimiced cp/m is MSX-DOS. This is a disk operating system for MSX computers, released by Microsoft in the early 80's. It is basically MS-DOS 1 for the Z80, and runs cp/m programs without having to do any modifications. It has FAT12/16 support and the command.com shell we know from MS-DOS. I have been an MSX user since the mid 80's, but has never had a disk drive for my MSX until recently. Using MSX-DOS on my Spectravideo brings me right back to school and the 8088/8086 Olivettis we had

[1st1]

brings me right back to school and the 8088/8086 Olivettis we had

m24.jpg

Some of my Olivetti PCs, in total I have about 50 of them, from 8088 to Pentium II. GEM is installed on some of them. The M24 does 640x400 in monochrome...

[leech]

brings me right back to school and the 8088/8086 Olivettis we had

m24.jpg
Some of my Olivetti PCs, in total I have about 50 of them, from 8088 to Pentium II. GEM is installed on some of them. The M24 does 640x400 in monochrome...

Eventually I will have it set up on my PC4. Keep trying to find some way around not having EMM286 working...

[1st1]

GEM doesn't care about EMM driver.

[MegaSTEarian]

It would be really good if there was a port working both as Emulator for older machines so games and app compatibility is warranted but also be able to use all features of modern hardware. Aranym was a quite an ambitious attempt.
The new or ported OS should work mainly with the eyes to the future while, taking advantage of modern hardware power, maintaining compatibility with the Ataris we know.

Would that be an Atari OS though? It would be yes. As much as OS X is OS X for the Apple Hardware.

[leech]

GEM doesn't care about EMM driver.

Yeah, it specifically was because I was going down the road of trying to get the modified Ultima5 working, and the stupid configuration requires something only available with the emm...
GEM is easy to get working, but I also wanted to play with DR-DOS, but that has its own weird issues.

[Cyprian]

Hi!

I want to ask few retrocomputing Os:
Like exist Mac OSX86 project, exist any Intel x86 port of Atari TOS?

Actually it exists and is just called DRI GEM (or PC GEM): https://winworldpc.com/product/gem/1x because most of the TOS is just DRI GEM with MS DOS compatible DOS.

Atari TOS was built from following parts:
- Digital Research Inc GEM (AES/VDI);
- Digital Research Inc GEMDOS;
- Atari BIOS;
- Atari XBIOS;

TOS is a mix of CP/M and DOS. Initially Atari wanted to use GEM on CP/M 68k.

GEMDOS is MS DOS 2.x based. It appeared it was created by DRI employee Jason Lovemana as "Jason DOS" (aka "Project Jason" ) - MS DOS compatible OS:
http://cd.textfiles.com/crawlycrypt1/pr ... /gemdos.15

Why does GEMDOS include some CP/M functions? Because MS DOS 2.x still includes them, since MS DOS 1.x was simply CP/M compliant OS.
There you can find GEMDOS vs MS DOS vs CP/M comparison:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

[mikro]

@Cyprian: the google document is not accessible.

[Cyprian]

@Cyprian: the google document is not accessible.

ok, it should be available now