Upgrading / Aranym and the miniPack

Upgrading:

Other computing systems get upgraded from time to time.  'New' operating systems to replace the 'outdated' or no longer supported systems.  Almost every year there's a new release of mac os, and slightly less frequently the release of a re-versioned and re-imagined windows.  Android and other mobile phone users complain when they can't immediately get the latest versions of their operating system.

Of course there are a few expectations and hopes we all want from a system upgrade.  Perhaps, most importantly, that it will be 'pain free', that we get to keep all our data, and that our machine can still boot - ie; that we don't turn it into a brick.  The expectation with an aranym system is that I can make a reasonable backup (preferably off site) and then go back to the old setup if everything goes wrong.

So the next expectation is that everything that already worked will still work.. The so-called backward compatibility.  There are no promises with the mainstream operating systems, but they do tend to try fairly hard to not break anything intentionally.  I haven't tried running any windows 3.1 software on windows 7, but I know that mac os 9 software and now power pc software won't be running on Mac OS 10.7 or 10.8.

Our expectation for Gem / emuTos / Freemint is much higher: anything that uses the published interfaces should continue to run.. Otherwise, we call it a bug and hope that there's a patch released.

A final expectation is perhaps the most important for testing new releases.. in that we hope to be able to understand the process, and that it takes few steps, and takes little time, in that it is not such a huge undertaking that we postpone it indefinitely.  I suspect that many windows XP and vista users haven't gone to the latest available option because of the expectation that it is complicated, time consuming and slightly worrying... What will need re-installing from scratch, what software will just disappear.

We have an advantage then, that our upgrades are faster (because the operating system is just the operating system), simpler (because we can just move or rename disk images / edit configs and reboot), and more reliable (well at least simpler to revert if it just doesn't work).

So what am I doing and why... Basically I've been chickening out of upgrading, and the more often I do it, the more easy and quick it becomes, and the more often others do it, the more likely we have more reliable systems, and the more likely we can report problems that happen from one version to the next, so that these problems can be fixed.  By showing how quick and easy and understandable it is, the better.

You can also use the same software if you don't have an existing working setup and just start from scratch.

So here is my plan..

* Download the latest of everything from the following two sites:

Emulator: http://sourceforge.net/projects/aranym/files/aranym/

Image of the os: http://eureka.atari.org/miniPack.zip

 - This image of the os should includes the latest Emutos rom, the latest stable mint release, the latest xaaes (the bit that runs gem programs), and hopefully fvdi (the bit that does fonts and graphics).  

[Unfortunately the miniPacks are not obviously versioned so what you end up with may be more modern than what I get.]

* Backup the old config.  Also note that the old boot disk might be worth backing up.

* Install the 'boot disk' from the miniPack (by copying the image and editing the aranym config to use it).

* I also want to include as much of my previous mint config as possible, so I will be copying my /mint/xxx/mint.cnf over as well:

So here goes:

start: Backup the old config:

 Copy 'config' and '/mint/' folders to a new directory. Zip them up. login to box.net. upload.

 4 meg zip file uploaded 

0h 05m Open the minipack.zip and take a look.

 in Aranym_files rename 'disk.img' to 'miniPack.img'

 Add a folder in the Aranym config area called 'miniPack' and copy all the files over.

 Copy the new config one directory up and 

Edit the Config:

wherever there's a reference to xxx.img add miniPack in front:

[GLOBAL]

EmuTOS = miniPack/etos512k.img

[IDE0]

Present = Yes

IsCDROM = No

ByteSwap = No

ReadOnly = No

Path = miniPack/miniPack.img

Add back 'drive_c' (a folder on my machine) as a hostfs: (so I can fix the mint.cnf how I want it)

[HOSTFS]

E = drive_c

0h 17m Boot to desktop and

(tried with MacAranym present in the miniPack.. failed with the following message:

 FATAL ERROR. You must reboot the system
[update 2012 Oct 11 - there's a new release of MacAranym JIT 0.9.14 and that has probably been bundled with the latest minipack]
)

0h 25m tried with MacAranym fresh download..

 and boots ok.  I noted that there's a problem with the keyboard, but I'll fix that later.

0h 28m Copy over their mint.cnf from the 'C:/mint/' to 'E' so I can edit it on my mac [otherwise use qed].

If you can access drive 'E' then copy anything from the mint folder that you'd like to keep to the 'C' mint folder (if they've left room).

Editing the mint.cnf:

- Take your time over comparing and merging the new file from the .img and the existing from previous configuration.  As I have plenty of references to 'D' then I need to

- Add back drive 'D' ([partition 0] entries) -- see previous posts on how to create a 'D' from scratch.

- copy over ext2.xfs to 'C:/mint/'

And do a proper shutdown before I start up again (to get the aranym config file read properly).

To check this is working how I expect,

In toswin2 select 'start shell'..

0h 40m To fix the keyboard.. open two windows (double click the 'C' drive icon twice):

  C:/mint/

and 

  C:/mint/keyboard/your_choice/ (I chose Britain)

Copy your keyboard.tbl to the C:/mint/ window

 and Reboot (ie; just from the desktop).

.. And we're done ..

Comments on the current releases of the available emulators (as tested on an intel mac os 10.6.8)

MA jit - broken in 9.14

MA MMU - Too slow to consider running for any length of time

MA jit IEEE - 9.13.2 works well. CPU usage high

With thanks to:

http://aranym.org/

François Le Coat (preparer of miniPack) : http://eureka.atari.org/miniPack.zip

Also of interest: (examples of aranym tuned specifically suitable for different tasks such as doing a better falcon emulation)

http://aranym.lutece.net/

EasyMiNT again...

After using aranym+freemint for a while I found I didn't have any space left on my development ext2 partition. I suspect there are much easier ways of sorting this out, but here's what I did.. Basically this was just to get the basic 'sparemint' rpm distribution installed (basic unix filesystem) + a few extra utils.

So my starting point is a drive C (gem) and drive d (512meg ext) partitions. Somehow I have previously downloaded a system that boots to the emutos desktop but running mint. I have easymint: em.170 which I suspect is from the file EM_170.zip downloaded from massi Soft.

I'd reconfigured the system to boot from E. which actually turned out to be fine because my 'C' boot up didn't work, it also appears that EasyMiNT requires a working mint.

Before you re-run easymint - the installer,

-check that there are a bunch of files in c/em.170/pakete/

Files are *.tar and *.list.

-delete the tmp folder in c/easymint/tmp -- this tells easymint that it needs to start again from scratch.

The problem I had was that I wanted to replace drive D with a bigger one. So I had to create a blank ext2 partition. You can save yourself so much time by using either the built in one in aranym but instead I installed something on the mac called "Ext2FS_1.4d4"

All that was just so I could type dd and mkfs according to these instructions..

So after all that pain I had a working 1.5 gig ext2 partition.. for the record:

>dd if=/dev/zero of=./gigtest.img bs=1024k count=1536

>/usr/local/sbin/mke2fs ./gigtest.img

but mostly there must be an easier way (eg; find a debian machine and tar.gz the results..)

So the extra pain was that there were alot of trouble editing files on the C drive so that I could re-run easymint. And more pain trying stuff where drive C just wouldn't boot up.

Oh, the final result... (if only the terminal would let me copy and paste)..

>df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

c:/ 250M 225M 25M 90% u:/

d:/ 1.5G 329M 1.1G 22% u:/

e:/ 37T 23T 14T 62% u:/

r:/ 262M 8.0k 261M 1% u:/

u:/ 1.5G 329M 1.1G 22% u:/

So it looks like the base install uses 329 meg.

ST Guide - Hyp file viewers

In the Atari scene these days you will find documentation for Atari software in .hyp format. The traditional program used to view these is ST Guide. I found a german demo of the program called 'stguide.zip' which contained:
ST-GUIDE.APP
ST-GUIDE.HYP
ST-GUIDE.INF
ST-GUIDE.REF
I might claim I got it from here but I can't be sure.
Update 21-July-2009 There is another version of this downloadable from 16/32 systems on the downloads page. direct download

Installation:
Just unzip the files and possibly make a copy of ST-GUIDE.APP, renaming it as ST-GUIDE.ACC and put it in the root folder.
It also would be possible to associate files with the extension .HYP with ST-GUIDE.APP in your favourite desktop. (Tos 2.06 upwards makes this easy)

I also found a file called stgde101.zoo (zoo.ttp -extract stgde101.zip) which has nothing to do with ST Guide but is:
'TAG - The Atari Guide' by Keith R. Marshall and is part of the 'galactic guide' project. Its file viewer is called STGuide. (Its probably more than just a file viewer...)

HYPView

The next option I've seen recommended is HYPView, available from here. They have screenshots and I tried out version 0.40.0
And so I tried it out, and in 640x480x16 colours, it started and didn't seem too terrible, in that I got as far as selecting a .hyp file to view, but it didn't
actually display anything.
So then I tried putting the hyp files into C:/gemsys/guides/
and that didn't make much difference. I also note that when I exited the program the keyboard stopped working. So that sounds like a bad crash.
If anyone has better success with this program I'd love to hear from you :-)

The other alternative for Windows users is to use winguide:
http://frankrueger.dnsalias.net/old_homepage/#winguide

This worked well for me and only the menus are in german. There appears to be an option to save your .hyp file as a .html file. I tried it and it works. You end up with lots of .html files (one per page) and a few additional images too. Unfortunately I started this post with the aim of getting gdos working too, and we've gone sideways.

Back in the original ST-Guide, it expects you to have installed a 'font selector' to let you change the screen font used to display stuff. This might be useful so you can look at a helpfile while also looking at your code/work/whatever if you could only choose a smaller font.

Font Selectors

In theory you will want a working selection of fonts already installed, however I'm going the simple solution first because gdos (and alternatives) may be a bit tricky.
So I found the file fontsel.zip, this contained:
FONTSEL.HYP - german .hyp file
FONTSEL.PRG
FONTSEL.REF
FONTSEL.TXT - german documentation
FONTSEL.ENG - english translation of the documentation
INSTALL.ENG - english installation instructions for the impatient

Basically, the simple way to install it is to put FONTSEL.PRG into the auto folder and reboot. Then in STGUIDE, you can select from a range of built in 'SYSTEM' fonts. They are very dull monospaced ones, but have the advantage of being quick to display.
Also of note in the german documentation is a list of other font selectors, which I'll copy and paste for your reference here (thanks to winguide):

UFSL von [Michael Thänitz]:
der Prototyp, [UFSL-Schnittstelle]

xUFSL von [Stefan Rogel]:
erster Nachfolger von UFSL mit erweiterter Schnittstelle

FontSel von [Holger Weets]:
kompakter Nachfolger von UFSL, Updates von Ch. Zwerschke

[Calvino] von [Dirk Haun]:
moderner Nachfolger von UFSL, neue [xFSL-Schnittstelle]

[HuGo!] von [Stefan Rogel]:
Nachfolger von xUFSL mit [xFSL-Schnittstelle]

Font-Selektor aus "Magic" von [Peter Hellinger]:
Bestandteil von Magic (nicht von MagiC!)

Font-Selektor aus "ACSpro" von [Stefan Bachert] und [Oliver Michalak]
Bestandteil (Objekt) von ACSpro

[FontSelector] aus "EnhancedGEM" von [Christian Grunenberg]:
neues Konzept, [Font-Protokoll] mit GEM-Nachrichten

[FONTselector] von [Hayo Schmidt]:
aus dem AES-Font-Loader-Paket, FOse-Schnittstelle

Unfortunately the links didn't go anywhere, so it's a case of typing in the names of the authors and seeing what comes up in google.

Installing GDOS or.. getting a nicer looking font system to work.

On the one hand, there is plenty of information about GDOS.. On the other hand, who wants to use the original GDOS that needs lots of manual editing of assign.sys files, and then trying to guess which resolution you're in. And all that for bitmapped (non-scalable) fonts. There must be an easier way..

Here is an example assign.sys to remind you of how horrible it all is:
example.txt

So I'll be needing some fonts named in the style XXYYNN.FNT where NN is the font size in points, while YY is the 'name' of the font eg; Times Roman might be TR...

I'll also be needing something like gdos.prg for the auto folder, and screen.sys? possibly as a 'screen' driver. Not sure about that one, I know you do need one for any printers you have.

A Shortcut..
I cheated and went straight for fontgdos, from "Atari Explorer Online Volume 1 Issue 03" which contained two accessories: FONTGDOS.ACC and FSM.ACC (I put both of these in the root of C:) and also FONTGDOS.PRG which I put in the C:/AUTO/ folder. One of these desk accessories lets you choose the folder for your fonts and select which fonts are associated with which screen resolution or printer (ie; you don't want printer fonts to be in your screen section of assign.sys, otherwise you might get a size 13 printer font - which would look huge on screen and then a 14 point screen font which then looks tiny -- worse still FONTGDOS may just crash, because it can.)

For whatever reason gemulator was being difficult and assign.sys would not save no matter what I did. Eventually I figured out how to disable drive A: and changed the boot device to C: and then everything went a bit smoother.

Finally the next stage was finding some real fonts.. I found the file gdsfonts.zoo and that had a few fonts to choose from. I installed almost all the ones with HI at the end of the names. And then it liked to stop working entirely, gdos wouldn't show any of the fonts I'd chosen. I opened up the ASSIGN.SYS file and got rid of the font starting with a number. Then everything was fine and I was able to view STGuide files with a different font to the system one. (see the screenshot)

This post has been a little longer than I expected, but the point is that once you've got the hang of getting a couple of fonts installed, you can probably consider using some of the more graphical atari programs that like scalable fonts, AtariWorks is one I'll be trying out, if I can find it.. Also I might see if I can find my old copy of fonty, a realtime font generator..

Some reference information:
For a really interesting and way too in-depth article about GDOS (and the various ones you could use to use true-type fonts and therefore save yourself from only having 4 fonts available in 4 different sizes!) and also get real printer drivers (possibly-- not sure if there's a useful 'image' driver or 'pdf' driver), have a look at
this and read about Speedo GDOS (v 5 upwards) and NVDI 3.0 and above. Both of these programs offer to let you use true type fonts (ie; the ones that come with windows ;-) and let you scale them to any old size, so of course this would be useful if you were for example trying to view web pages from the internet)
I haven't been able to try either and I think it might be a bit difficult to get hold of this commercial software.. As I previously mentioned.. if you wanted to use Papyrus or Atari Works, you'd benefit immensely.

In addition this site 16/32 Systems has other interesting software. (16/32 Systems, 156 Maidstone Road, Chatham, Kent ME4 6EN). The site was last updated at the end of may this year, so I think prices and products are up-to date. He writes:

28 May 2009
Top Ten Products Sold in 2009 so far

1 - Iron Soldier for the Atari Jaguar
2 - Cybermorph Empty Box
3 - Chips Challenge for the Atari Lynx
4 - Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story for the Atari Jaguar
5 - European Soccer Challenge for the Atari Lynx
6 - Atari Ring Binder
7 - Bubsy The Bobcat for the Atari Jaguar
8 - 1Mb Ram
9 - Desert Strike Box
10 - Yatsuna 1 - The Alchemy Cubes