Following on from Thordbg's thread about the built in OS in his emulator and given that the only 2 regularly maintained emulators now come with their own 'tweaked' versions of the Atari O.S, It begs the following question
Is there any chance of an Open Sourced Atari platform (not just the A8)
After all i beleive there now exists third party OpenSourced versions of TOS (so called EmuTOS)
And given that Atari++ and Altirra already come with their own versions of the Atari OS we are kind of partway there
And since both EmuTOS and the two A8 emulator OS's support the various ST/STE and A8 upgrades that are programmed into the emulators (i.e. VBXE, Hard drives, Memory expansions, Disk Drive mods and other such things) I think the impetus is there to get the various and all Atari platforms more opensourced, even games systems like the 2600/7800 and also Lynx/Jaguar etc...It might just lead onto more 3rd party development (both hardware and software)
After all, whilst i so of accept that Linux hasn't dismantled M$$$'s dominance of the desktop computer OS, It has really given M$$$ and sony/Nintendo serious competition in the desktop and mobile gaming OS markets (thanks largely to Google opting for Andriod, a linux derivative)
After all, Atari themselves aren't interested in hardware platforms anymore and anyway we don't really need someone like Atari to make an Atari Opensourced platform successful (after all I read somewhere that the original 'flashback' sold 500000 units and with virtually zero marketing or advertising from Atari themselves, given that flashback had to compete with the free to download software emulators for the 2600/7800, in my book that aint bad going considering the piss poor support atari gave it)
To get around the issue of copyrighted hardware (i.e Antic, Pokey and GTIA) I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to reproduce/replicate those chip features without neccessarily infringing copyright
Is there any chance of an Open Sourced Atari platform (not just the A8)
After all i beleive there now exists third party OpenSourced versions of TOS (so called EmuTOS)
And given that Atari++ and Altirra already come with their own versions of the Atari OS we are kind of partway there
And since both EmuTOS and the two A8 emulator OS's support the various ST/STE and A8 upgrades that are programmed into the emulators (i.e. VBXE, Hard drives, Memory expansions, Disk Drive mods and other such things) I think the impetus is there to get the various and all Atari platforms more opensourced, even games systems like the 2600/7800 and also Lynx/Jaguar etc...It might just lead onto more 3rd party development (both hardware and software)
After all, whilst i so of accept that Linux hasn't dismantled M$$$'s dominance of the desktop computer OS, It has really given M$$$ and sony/Nintendo serious competition in the desktop and mobile gaming OS markets (thanks largely to Google opting for Andriod, a linux derivative)
After all, Atari themselves aren't interested in hardware platforms anymore and anyway we don't really need someone like Atari to make an Atari Opensourced platform successful (after all I read somewhere that the original 'flashback' sold 500000 units and with virtually zero marketing or advertising from Atari themselves, given that flashback had to compete with the free to download software emulators for the 2600/7800, in my book that aint bad going considering the piss poor support atari gave it)
To get around the issue of copyrighted hardware (i.e Antic, Pokey and GTIA) I guess it wouldn't be too difficult to reproduce/replicate those chip features without neccessarily infringing copyright