Announcing ready to use freemint sd card images for the ST

[marcello]

Incredible. I've just downloaded the new version. Can't wait to try it
Thank you!!

Thank you too, you have a *tremendous* blog ! Keep digging these Atari Gems !

[marcello]

A small bump to mention I have released ST Mint 1.2
The biggest change is that now there is a working unix shell,the MirBSD Korn Shell, the same shell which ships on Android Phones.
After booting on a 4MB ST, there is still one megabyte of RAM available. Enough to play the klapauzius adapted Defender of The Crown !

[AtariCrypt]

Ohhh I have to try this!! (and THANKS for your kind comment!!)

[Gaiyan]

A small bump to mention I have released ST Mint 1.2
The biggest change is that now there is a working unix shell,the MirBSD Korn Shell, the same shell which ships on Android Phones.
After booting on a 4MB ST, there is still one megabyte of RAM available. Enough to play the klapauzius adapted Defender of The Crown !

Ok, this is pretty friggin awesome! Love that shell. Finally MiNT I want to use on my STacy. Well done!

[marcello]

And if you want to play on FreeMiNT, all the HD adapted games that I tested from http://klapauzius.net/ work, except the builtin memory snapshoting feature.
From the PP HD adapted games, the 4 or 5 I tested would not start.

After booting ST Mint on a 4 MB ST, you have 1MB Free RAM, so you cannot play games which require more than that. Enjoying Defender at The Crown at the momment !

[marcello]

Small Bump Up I have now version 1.3 with the following changes:

Fundational:
add Minix git repo as submodule, based on Minix 3.1.8 release, so we have an large source of unix tools producing smaller binaries (50% of GNU coreutils)
rebase on Freemint 1.19 3146e5dc snapshot

Features:
add grep, and term, a serial communication program, from Minix 3

Bugfixes:
use TOS serial driver instead of FreeMiNT serial driver so that we have working serial port communications

As always, download is available from https://subsole.org/st_mint

[qq1975b]

Thank you! A friendly way to try MiNT and be updated easily.

[sporniket]

Seems interesting.

[marcello]

So FWIW I released a new version, 1.4.
Main changes are:
- use the GEMDOS FAT driver instead of FreeMint XFS FAT driver to workaround a FreeMint / Teradesk interaction problem
- a nice desktop background
- uses FreeMint snapshot from April 2022
Detailed changelog in https://github.com/EmmanuelKasper/mck/wiki/Roadmap

As usual you can download ST Mint from https://subsole.org/st_mint

[viking272]

Nice one, thank you for this update!

[stormy]

marcello, on my STe booting from 2.06 everything works, but if I swap to Emutos 1.1.1 (in rom using tos switcher) the system keeps rebooting in an infinite loop when loading xaaes. Do you know why this might happen? Thanks.

[marcello]

that's interesting, could you try the previous version at http://www.subsole.org/static/retrocomp ... .3.img.zip
to see if this older version works
then if the older version works I would open an issue at https://github.com/freemint/freemint

[czietz]

Fwiw, version 1.4 works in Hatari's STe emulation using EmuTOS 1.1.1:

grab0005.png

[czietz]

@stormy: Did you perhaps try to run it in color mode? There, I can reproduce infinite reboot loop. To be fair, the ST Mint website lists "ST High Resolution" as one of the system requirements, so it's not meant for color modes.

Still I figured out the reason. If you remove/comment the line...

Code: Select all

video = 4

... in XAAES.CNF, which forces ST high, you can run it in color mode, as well:

grab0006.png

Although, it might not make much sense, given the limited resolution in the color modes.

[marcello]

Code: Select all

video = 4

... in XAAES.CNF, which forces ST high, you can run it in color mode, as well:
grab0006.png

Thanks @czietz for digging this out. I added a known bugs and limitations at https://github.com/EmmanuelKasper/mck/wiki/Roadmap with this info.
Now by trying to reproduce this, I notice the latest ST Mint build does not work with MegaSTEs :[
Finding the pieces of FreeMiNT which are working correctly on the 68000 is quite a challenge

[czietz]

Now by trying to reproduce this, I notice the latest ST Mint build does not work with MegaSTEs :[

Under Hatari, it hangs here:

grab0008.png

... while loading the SCC driver. This can be worked around by renaming MEGASTE\SCC.XDD (e.g., to SCC.XDX).

Did you test on a real MegaSTE? It could be a Hatari or FreeMiNT bug...

[marcello]

I did not test on a real MegaSTE, however it is also hanging at the same place on my MIST in MegaSTE mode.
Disabling the SCC driver also make ST Mint boot on my Mist, yuhu !

I am not that surprised, that this is needed, I already in the past disabled the Freemint MFP driver to get serial connections working (IIRC in that case Freemint will use the builtin TOS / EmuTOS driver) see this bug report: https://github.com/freemint/freemint/issues/201. The MFP driver issue was reproducible on real HW and Hatari.

[ThorstenOtto]

I guess that the problem is that nowadays, it is rather hard to test drivers for serial interfaces. You cannot do that on emulators (because you'll never know whether the proglem is in the driver, or in the emulator, and also because it is unlikely that any modern platform has a real serial device at all). And for testing on real hardware, there is similar problem: you would need either a modem, or at least a null-modem connection to another machine.

[czietz]

ST Mint 1.4 works on a real MegaSTE, though, with SCC.XDD enabled, of course. So this must be a bug in both Hatari's and MiST's emulation of the SCC - and not in FreeMiNT, itself.

EDIT: Reported to the Hatari-devel mailing list.

[thothy]

Hatari's SCC emulation is very, very incomplete. See here for some details: https://listengine.tuxfamily.org/lists. ... 00018.html

[Eero Tamminen]

What's this item listed in the the "mck" 1.5 roadmap about: "Hatari: improve mount hard disk partition image documentation"?

Hatari manual has table on what interfaces are supported on each Atari HW: https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/doc/manual ... ces_matrix

And there's quite a bit of documentation on hard disk (image) usage:
https://hatari.tuxfamily.org/doc/manual ... sk_support

Information on the partial SCSI support (which was added last) seems to be missing. Is it about that?

[marcello]

blushing to see the names of the Atari scene looking at my humble project

@eero

the Hatari documentation, like the EmuTOS documentation is quite large and good

however the statement "If you want to access the hard disk image partitions also outside the emulation, the disk image needs to have a DOS partition table" in the Hatari doc is not really true anymore, as GNU parted has now AHDI partition support.
cf http://meta.libera.cc/2018/07/inspectin ... image.html

also mtools can access a AHDI partition provided you give the offset in bytes cf https://github.com/EmmanuelKasper/mck/b ... kefile#L54

[stormy]

Code: Select all

video = 4

... in XAAES.CNF, which forces ST high, you can run it in color mode, as well:
grab0006.png

Thanks @czietz for digging this out. I added a known bugs and limitations at https://github.com/EmmanuelKasper/mck/wiki/Roadmap with this info.
Now by trying to reproduce this, I notice the latest ST Mint build does not work with MegaSTEs :[
Finding the pieces of FreeMiNT which are working correctly on the 68000 is quite a challenge

Cheers I'm all good now. I forgot about the whole colour/mono thing. Could I recommend including QED in the st-mint image and have it configured as editor in Teradesk? Cheers

[czietz]

Could I recommend including QED in the st-mint image

But it is already:

grab0009.png

[stormy]

Oh I wasn't expecting it to be in the U:\ drive, but it isn't configured as an editor in Teradesk, so doing that would be nice.