EmuTOS – Free OS for Atari ST and more

Just want to say the amount of amazing work that goes into this project is fantastic. They've taken the original Digital Research x86/PC GEM/GEMDOS sources and.. reworked them to basically duplicate all the work Atari did back in 1984/85 on their ST/68k port. Plus bug fixes. Plus pretty much all the feature work Atari did after that. Plus modernizing the code generally. Plus their own new features. Plus making it work on ColdFire systems (eval boards & the Firebee). Plus making it work on the Amiga and other 68k systems. All the while keeping it compatible, fitting in a 192k ROM.

It started as a ROM image for ST emulators (hence the name) but has actually become an excellent open sourced GPL'd GUI operating system for 68k computers, obviously especially the Atari ST.

It's a labour of love and the project maintainers do a great job. It's better than Atari's original ROM TOS while still maintaining absolutely excellent compatibility.

I can’t say enough good things about this project and its developers. A year or two ago, I decided to write a driver to allow EmuTOS to use the RTC found in Jookie’s excellent UltraSatan hard drive emulator.

They took the time to do a bunch of hand-holding on the mailing list, and worked with me until the driver, along with some minor restructuring to how things were handled with external RTCs, were working and merged.

I use it pretty-much exclusively on my (currently 8) ST variants. It’s a much nicer desktop experience, and brings all sorts of cool features to the table such as (some level of) FAT32 support. It’s also been ported to a crazy list of M68K systems including the Apple Lisa.

Development is still very active, and things are being improved and added all the time.

Although of little commercial value, this shows the power of an open platform. Current smartphones are thousand times more powerful than the old Atari ST, nevertheless, you won't be able to do anything useful or fun with them a few years after support ends because you can't easily replace its software/rom/firmware.

Glad to see these old computers getting some love.