Questions about STFM 4MB MMU upgrade

[rubber_jonnie]

I'd suggest you break out the Sidecart posts into a new thread as it's probably unrelated to the RAM upgrade.

It'll be easier to find specific posts about Sidecart that way for visitors to the site.

[danboid]

I'd suggest you break out the Sidecart posts into a new thread as it's probably unrelated to the RAM upgrade.

It'll be easier to find specific posts about Sidecart that way for visitors to the site.

Yes this is what I was suggesting but I couldn't resist squeezing one last post in plus these two quick questions for you RJ:

Shoud I be able to boot into freemint on my STFM (with 4 MB RAM) without loading the freemint desktop too? I just want to run gcc on my ST basically, I don't need a desktop, just a shell. I realise how horribly slow it will be, if I can run it all but its all about just being able to do that rather than building any big programs with it. If I can build hello-world.c I'll be happy. I don't have a VGA adapter for my ST yet so I can't output hi-res video yet.

Do you know of a good guide to instaling FreeMiNT on an A600 or any Amiga? I'd imagine it'll be pretty much the same as instaling it on the ST, you'll just launch EmuTOS in different ways.

I'm done!

[rubber_jonnie]

I'd suggest you break out the Sidecart posts into a new thread as it's probably unrelated to the RAM upgrade.

It'll be easier to find specific posts about Sidecart that way for visitors to the site.

Yes this is what I was suggesting but I couldn't resist squeezing one last post in plus these two quick questions for you RJ:

Shoud I be able to boot into freemint on my STFM (with 4 MB RAM) without loading the freemint desktop too? I just want to run gcc on my ST basically, I don't need a desktop, just a shell. I realise how horribly slow it will be, if I can run it all but its all about just being able to do that rather than building any big programs with it. If I can build hello-world.c I'll be happy. I don't have a VGA adapter for my ST yet so I can't output hi-res video yet.

Do you know of a good guide to instaling FreeMiNT on an A600 or any Amiga? I'd imagine it'll be pretty much the same as instaling it on the ST, you'll just launch EmuTOS in different ways.

I'm done!

Honestly, I don't know enough about Freemint to say yay or nay, and there are folks with more experience who can help.

For me, personally, I tried it on my Mega STE, but with the GUI it took too much RAM and I could barely do anything with it. TBH with something like Pure C you don't really need FreeMint, it'll run under TOS.

IIRC there is a downloadable image somewhere, but I can't recall how I did the install as it was such a long time ago.

[danboid]

Yes this is what I was suggesting but I couldn't resist squeezing one last post in plus these two quick questions for you RJ:

Shoud I be able to boot into freemint on my STFM (with 4 MB RAM) without loading the freemint desktop too? I just want to run gcc on my ST basically, I don't need a desktop, just a shell. I realise how horribly slow it will be, if I can run it all but its all about just being able to do that rather than building any big programs with it. If I can build hello-world.c I'll be happy. I don't have a VGA adapter for my ST yet so I can't output hi-res video yet.

Do you know of a good guide to instaling FreeMiNT on an A600 or any Amiga? I'd imagine it'll be pretty much the same as instaling it on the ST, you'll just launch EmuTOS in different ways.

I'm done!

Honestly, I don't know enough about Freemint to say yay or nay, and there are folks with more experience who can help.

For me, personally, I tried it on my Mega STE, but with the GUI it took too much RAM and I could barely do anything with it. TBH with something like Pure C you don't really need FreeMint, it'll run under TOS.

IIRC there is a downloadable image somewhere, but I can't recall how I did the install as it was such a long time ago.

I realise there are native Atari C compilers that will run will less RAM, faster etc but I'm only bothered about gcc.

There is a preconfigured ST distro of FreeMiNT called ST Mint that boots under Hatari here:

https://subsole.org/st_mint

I'd like a similar thing for the Amiga. The FreeMiNT forum is sure to know if there is an Amiga equivalent.

[danboid]

Quickly replying to myself, as I often tend to do:

Shoud I be able to boot into freemint on my STFM (with 4 MB RAM) without loading the freemint desktop too?

Apparently FreeMiNT does have a text shell:

Unlike under TOS (and derivatives), usage of a GEM shell in FreeMiNT is optional - the system is fully usable even without it. See chapter Text shell for details.

http://tho-otto.de/hypview/hypview.cgi? ... 8&index=64

[rubber_jonnie]

Quickly replying to myself, as I often tend to do:

Shoud I be able to boot into freemint on my STFM (with 4 MB RAM) without loading the freemint desktop too?

Apparently FreeMiNT does have a text shell:

Unlike under TOS (and derivatives), usage of a GEM shell in FreeMiNT is optional - the system is fully usable even without it. See chapter Text shell for details.

http://tho-otto.de/hypview/hypview.cgi? ... 8&index=64

I may try to boot to the Freemint shell on my MSTE, see how different it is without the desktop. I think it should be fine, but you definitely need more RAM if you're going to use it with the desktop.

[stephen_usher]

MiNT started mostly console only, and a UNIX-like environment after all.

I ported a lot of the BSD system utilities and wrote the init(8) program still used in MiNT distributions: https://users.earth.ox.ac.uk/~steve/mintos.html

[danboid]

I ported a lot of the BSD system utilities and wrote the init(8) program still used in MiNT distributions: https://users.earth.ox.ac.uk/~steve/mintos.html

Do you still use it? Have you got a fave distro or do you build it from scratch? I like that vintage web site a lot.

I'm not sure I'll be able to boot it using my sidecart without having real emutos roms.

The first thing I wanted to do with ST Mint was install gcc but because its first partition is only 128 MB I'd have less than 4 MB free disk space in the MiNT partition so I'll have to transfer ST Mint onto a larger partition before I can use that.

However, because I only really want a text shell then I'm probably better installing it from scratch?

[danboid]

EDITED:
EmuTOS versions 1.2.1 and 1.3.0 are available, and I can confirm that EmuTOS 1.3.1 has the ACSI driver. I could boot the computer with the EmuTOS 1.3.1 128KB in ROM emulation mode with an ACSI2STM disk drive connected. After booting, it starts the EmuCON2 command line tool from drive C:\

I've just re-read this and noticed that you say you also had to use ACSI2STM which confirms my suspicion that SideCart can't emulate a cartridge and a hard disk simultaneously.

Is there any hope that future revisions of the sidecart will be able to emulate a cartridge and a hard drive simultaneously? I opened a github feature request for emulating 2 floppy drives for the sidecart yesterday but that likely won't happen for the same reason it can't emulate cartridge and a hard disk.

Is it possible to use the sidecart USB ports for keyboard or mouse support at the same time as using the sidecart to emulate a disk?

[logronoide]

EDITED:
EmuTOS versions 1.2.1 and 1.3.0 are available, and I can confirm that EmuTOS 1.3.1 has the ACSI driver. I could boot the computer with the EmuTOS 1.3.1 128KB in ROM emulation mode with an ACSI2STM disk drive connected. After booting, it starts the EmuCON2 command line tool from drive C:\

I've just re-read this and noticed that you say you also had to use ACSI2STM which confirms my suspicion that SideCart can't emulate a cartridge and a hard disk simultaneously.

Is there any hope that future revisions of the sidecart will be able to emulate a cartridge and a hard drive simultaneously? I opened a github feature request for emulating 2 floppy drives for the sidecart yesterday but that likely won't happen for the same reason it can't emulate cartridge and a hard disk.

Is it possible to use the sidecart USB ports for keyboard or mouse support at the same time as using the sidecart to emulate a disk?

Concurrent cartridge and hard drive emulation (or any other device) will never be an option because it goes against the nature of the device: https://docs.sidecartridge.com/sidecart ... ation-mode

Two floppy drives emulation and floppy eject/insert will be available in the next firmware release (hopefully next week, code is in Github), plus a web management page and more features.

Yes. More USB devices will be emulated in the future -it already emulates an external storage unit to copy files easily. I’m experimenting with raw emulation of the IKBD protocol, something I have already discussed somewhere else but due to the fragmentation of the Atari st hobbyist forums I can’t remember where!