ARAnyM 0.9.4 Beta 2 review

ARAnyM comes from Atari Running on Any Machine and is virtual machine software for running the Atari ST/TT/Falcon OS. It is a virt

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Petr Stehlik

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ARAnyM comes from Atari Running on Any Machine and is virtual machine software for running the Atari ST/TT/Falcon OS.

It is a virtual machine software for running the Atari ST/TT/Falcon operating systems (TOS, FreeMiNT, MagiC and others) and TOS/GEM applications on any kind of hardware - be it an IBM clone (read it as "PC", an Apple, an Unix server, a graphics workstation or even a portable computer.

We started this project to fill the demand of modern applications, games, demos and multimedia for higher CPU/graphics power. Quite frankly, you can't expect that 9-17 years old Atari hardware will replay fullscreen DivX movies, encode sound to Ogg Vorbis in real time or just compile a new FreeMiNT kernel or SDL game in a reasonable amount of time. Is that a reason to give up on Atari TOS/GEM altogether and switch to another platform/OS? No! ARAnyM is here to give you the much asked CPU speed, large amount of RAM, huge colourful graphics and anything else you need to keep running your favorite TOS/GEM applications.

We would like you to think about ARAnyM as about yet another TOS clone, similar to Medusa, Hades or Milan, but actually much cheaper and way more powerful. Our goal is to create a distribution installable from a floppy/CD that would turn any PC machine into full featured Atari power machine. If we were a hardware vendor we could even sell computers that would boot directly to TOS desktop! That could help all the remaining Atari users that wish to upgrade their aging machines.

Here are some key features of "ARAnyM":
MC68040 compatible CPU (including optional MMU!)
MC68881 compatible FPU
JIT Compiler for CPU and FPU (speeds up CPU+FPU up to 10x!)
ST-RAM 14 MB
Fast-RAM configurable 0-3824 MB
Host accelerated fVDI graphics (large highcolor/truecolor resolutions)
Access to Host OS filesystems using BetaDOS or MiNT native XFS driver
Ethernet networking via host using MiNT-Net XIF driver
TOS 4.x XBIOS compatible sound (16-bit 48 kHz stereo sound)
Parallel port (bidirectional)
MFP, IKBD, ACIA, VIDEL, BLITTER, FDC, IDE, DSP MC56001

Please note that most hardware emulation is there just to make TOS booting possible. It is not our goal to create an emulator of existing Atari machine. Don't expect that ill-designed applications will work as they would on original Atari machine. Still, our compatibility ratio is much much higher than any of the TOS clones achieved so far.

ARAnyM has been intended to run primarily on Linux/x86 but thanks to libSDL and effort of some ARAnyM team members it currently runs on the following platforms and operating systems:

All 11 Debian GNU/Linux platforms
MS Windows/x86 (Cygwin)
NetBSD/x86
OpenBSD/x86
MacOS X/PPC
Irix/SGI
Solaris/Sun Sparc
FreeMiNT/m68k (in progress)
FreeBSD/x86 (in progress)

Please note that ARAnyM is tested and fully working on the Linux-ia32 only. Some of the other platforms/systems might not have all features enabled or might suffer from some bugs that are caused by limitations of the particular host operating system.