Saturday, December 21, 2019

Opensource Retrocomputing: FreeMiNT on Atari ST

If you have an Atari ST sleeping in the attic, and have an interest for open source Unix, you might be interested to try out ST Mint, a distribution of the FreeMiNT kernel tailored for this platform.

When preparing the last ST Mint release, I noticed that bash needed too much memory for the ST, so I included the sash shell, cross-compiled from the Debian source package.
Funnily enough, although the Atari hardware is physically large and heavy, working on ST Mint feels like doing embedded hardware development: you cross-compile, link with the smallest possible libc, copy stuff on a SD Card, and try to fit everything in 4MB of RAM.