To TOS or MultiTOS? Or even OtherTOS?

[MegaSTEarian]

Hi everyone, been away from the Atari scene for while and I’m lost a bit.
I got a MegaSTE recently. It came with all bells and whistles (FPU, HDD), I ordered a Nova adapter and I’m waiting for the -hopefully compliant- graphics card.

Now, what I’m asking is a TOS/GEMDOS replacement or add on to allow for multitasking, hdd support (hopefully bigger than 1/2GB partition support will be provided) which is nice to the eye but also stable and robust. Ideally it’s memory footprint would be minimal and would load quickly from the hdd.
Games compatibility is a requirement as well.

What should I look for? I would appreciate installation instructions as well.

PS: Not sure if this is the right place in the forum for this post, please move it if it is not.

[AdamK]

Nothing matches all that requirements.

[MegaSTEarian]

Hi AdamK, thanks for your response

Requirements are (in order of significance):

Hdd support -big partition support is a nice feature but not a hard requirement- and Multitasking.
Stable and relatively quick
Compatibility with games
Eye candy
Small memory footprint

[Playmobil]

EasyMint or VanillaMint... But it's not very games friendly... But using XBoot3, you can start in plain TOS or Mint easily.

[MegaSTEarian]

VanillaMint seems to be for TT and Falcon only or for Ataris with accelerator cards. Will check EasyMint.

[Playmobil]

Hoo Yes ! MegaSTE is 16Mhz & 4mb, right ?

[MegaSTEarian]

Hi Playmobil.
Yes, with an FPU (if that makes a difference) and HDD.

[joska]

You have three options, two of them are MagiC or FreeMiNT. I personally run FreeMiNT on my MegaSTE, but I must admit that MagiC would normally be a better choice on a 4Mb machine. It use a bit less RAM and it's quicker. There is plenty of eye-candy and it does support big partitions. But regardless of which one of these you use you must be prepared to reboot into plain TOS for games. Also, the internal SCSI host adapter in the MSTE is limited to 1Gb only. There are patches but these only works with special drivers.

The third option, and one which I have used quite a bit on my MonSTEred STE is Geneva on top of EmuTOS. EmuTOS is very nice, with built-in harddisk driver and excellent disk support. Geneva 006 on top of that adds a fast and highly configurable multitasking AES. It also use far less RAM than both MagiC and FreeMiNT.

VanillaMint seems to be for TT and Falcon only or for Ataris with accelerator cards.

Correct, 68030 and upwards.

[ThorstenOtto]

You could theoretically use also Freemint on an MSTE (there are pre-configured snapshot packages available on https://github.com/freemint/freemint/), but with 4MB, you won't get very far.
I would suggest Magic, which uses much less RAM, and is also free now (see https://github.com/th-otto/MagicMac). Geneva is also an option, but it is still not free, and it is a multitasking-AES that runs on top of a single-tasking gemdos, so is not quite the same.
And as joska already said, be prepared that you will need a completely different setup for games. Generally, they don't like multitask-environments very much, and even if they work, it would just slow them down.

[MegaSTEarian]

I will start with Magic then and see how I can move from there on.

The trick to boot to a stripped plain vanilla TOS/Gem environment is to block disk booting on for the MSTE to boot for the disk/disk image, right?

[ThorstenOtto]

The easiest is to use boot managers like Xboot3. Once you have set up the configurations, you can easily switch between them.

[MegaSTEarian]

--------->Googling Xboot3<-----------

[gstoll]

Geneva is also an option, but it is still not free

I don't test the archive, but I thought it is free now. You can download it from Dan Wilga (Gribnif Software) homepage:

http://www4.pair.com/gribnif/downloads/geneva/

[Playmobil]

--------->Googling Xboot3<-----------

Search inside Atari-Forum, there is a patched XBoot3

[ThorstenOtto]

I don't test the archive, but I thought it is free now. You can download it from Dan Wilga (Gribnif Software) homepage:

Ah right. I mixed that up with the sources, which were promised to be made available, but still aren't.

[emcclariion]

magic on 4mb and even that is tight on memory with nova, get a monster card and I would go for free mint

[joska]

Geneva is also an option, but it is still not free, and it is a multitasking-AES that runs on top of a single-tasking gemdos, so is not quite the same.

Geneva is very underrated IMO. Yes, it is "only" a replacement AES but it does it's job incredibly well. For a low spec machine it's the best choice I'd say. It use a lot less RAM than MagiC and MiNT, it's highly configurable with compatibility settings on application level. Compatibility is superb, even old sh*t that refuses to work under MagiC works perfectly fine. Speed is also very good. I'm using it on my MSTE now, and with NVDI, Geneva, Teradesk and a couple of accessories loaded there's 3.2Mb free RAM.

[8bitguy1]

Geneva is very underrated IMO. Yes, it is "only" a replacement AES but it does it's job incredibly well. For a low spec machine it's the best choice I'd say. It use a lot less RAM than MagiC and MiNT, it's highly configurable with compatibility settings on application level. Compatibility is superb, even old sh*t that refuses to work under MagiC works perfectly fine. Speed is also very good. I'm using it on my MSTE now, and with NVDI, Geneva, Teradesk and a couple of accessories loaded there's 3.2Mb free RAM.

I'm curious which versions of each of those you've gotten to live harmoniously together.... I always had challenges getting all three to work on my accelerated STE.

[MegaSTEarian]

Gotten curious myself now. TerraDesk added to my list.

[joska]

I'm using NVDI 2.51, Dan Wilga's 2017 release of Geneva and Teradesk 4.08.

[MegaSTEarian]

Isn’t the NVDI Version quite old?

[joska]

*All* versions of NVDI.PRG are old

I prefer 2.51 on ST's, it use a lot less RAM than later versions with GDOS and it's just as fast as the newer versions.

[ThorstenOtto]

*All* versions of NVDI.PRG are old

All versions that you know of. But not this one

[joska]

Interesting. What's new?

[ThorstenOtto]

Functional: not much. But it does not need to be installed and registered, you can just copy it to the auto folder.