Sunday, May 5th, 2024

Atari System V Release 4.0
==========================

I spent the weekend in the Moravian city of Olomouc,  where I attended
Atariada 2024[1],  the largest local  meetup of users, developers, and
fans  of Atari  computers.  As for  the 8-bit scene,  there is  for me
nothing better than Sinclair:  ZX81,  ZX Spectrum,  Z88 - you name it.
I even love the Sinclair QL, which was 68k-based (68008 to be precise)
but  that platform  never  even  started,  not here  in the middle  of
Europe.  On the other hand Atari ST and compatibles,  that's a totally
different story;  that was  a big thing  in the 1990s, and  it  is  no
surprise that Atariada is  a larger event  than any other single-brand
oriented convention here in the Czech Republic.

The main  goal  of my visit  was  to finally make  my Atari Falcon 030
work.  I spent last year trying to replace  the failed hard drive with
a Compact Flash card in the IDE adapter,  but Falcon's IDE  bus is too
picky  about  the  "5V-tolerant-but-internally-3.3V" logic  of  the CF
card,  so except a few models of Sandisk,  nothing  works without data
losses. Every Falcon user I ever spoke to about the problem told me to
get an SD-IDE adapter, so I bought one and planned  to install it into
the machine and spend the weekend populating it with software.

But then Krupkaj[2]  started his  Atari TT  with  the never officially
released Atari System V Release 4.0[3] and I had to test it.

The whole  effort  of porting  Unix  to Atari TT is  a bit mysterious.
Both main Atari  competitors of the era -  Apple and Commodore had the
possibility of Unix  on selected machines  (Apple had A/UX on Quadras,
Commodore had  the Amiga 3000UX),  so it was only logical  to join the
crowd.  They spent  several years on the task  and then never released
the final product, just a developer release.

Despite that  the system is  a bit sluggish  on the 68030  in TT it is
otherwise fully working. The kernel  is monolithic;  it has no ability
to load driver modules, so it is re-linked  on every boot according to
the current  hardware configuration.  X11 is not hardware-accelerated,
so it takes  a pretty  high portion  of CPU time.  There are also some
interesting apps.  Xfm2 is a WYSIWYG  GUI editor where  you can create
the whole application window  and save it as  a resource to be used in
your  own code.  There  are  also some  libraries that  should provide
a means of porting  TOS/GEM applications  to Unix.  And then  there is
all  the  CLI software  that  was part  of Unix systems  at the  time,
including a C compiler (GCC1 in this case).

I created  a screenshot[4]  using the standard  xwd tool,  but then we
found out that we have no way  of transferring it  outside the system.
System V is unable to read MS-DOS-formatted floppies,  and both serial
ports refused to cooperate  in our effort.  So I dumped the whole hard
drive into  a binary image  with dd  and then  tried  to find  the xwd
screenshot using  hexeditor  and  the bytes  in  the header  that were
supposed to be there according  to xwd specifications.  Unfortunately,
the file was  fragmented[5],  so I had to save a much bigger junk from
the  disk image  into  an xwd file  and  then  manually  cut and  glue
everything together in GIMP,  but it was worth it. At least there is a
record of what I did when I didn't install my Falcon.

And btw,  if you want to look  at some photos from the event,  you can
do it here[6], the guy in photo #14 is me.

[1] http://atariada.cz/index_en.html
[2] http://www.krupkaj.cz/sblog/index.php
[3] http://atariunix.com
[4] gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2024-05-06_atari_system_v.png
[5] gopher://i-logout.cz/I/phlog/posts/2024-05-06_asv_mess.png
[6] http://www.krupkaj.cz/xgal/album.php?show=Atariada2024

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