Atari ST Free Operating Systems - Vincent Rivière
Channel: foss-north
Date: 01/05/2018

The Atari ST was released in 1985, with a simple but efficient operating system: TOS. Later, a multitasking kernel named MiNT was adopted by Atari, and finally released as Free Software under the name FreeMiNT. GCC was ported to FreeMiNT and allowed to compile many other GNU software for the Atari platform. Emulators appeared in the '90s. As Atari TOS is still non-Free, independent developers created EmuTOS: a Free TOS clone based on open-sourced components. GCC was later upgraded to newer versions, and ready-to-use binaries of the cross-compiler were made available for Ubuntu, Cygwin, and more. This brought a new impulse to the platform. EmuTOS and FreeMiNT are still actively developed nowadays. They have been improved over the ages, and extended to support special features of emulators as well as extra hardware. They even support non-Atari hardware, such as Amiga and ColdFire processor. Moreover, development environment has been modernized to use GitHub facilities and Travis CI for automatic builds. This is a good example to see how modern tools can advantageously be used for development on old platforms.

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Vincent Rivière has always loved computers, and the Atari ST was his first own one in 1992. He learned a lot on that machine, specially assembly language and operating system internals. Then he studied Unix and Windows development in C/C++. He worked as software engineer in several companies. Later, he became interested in cross-development, and came back to the Atari ST as training target. He ported old GCC patches to newer compiler versions, and that was the starting point of new adventures with contemporary Atari communities. Especially, he was the project manager of EmuTOS between 2010 and 2015. EmuTOS is a Free operating system compatible with the original Atari one. Combined to the FreeMiNT multitasking kernel, it extends Atari-like operating systems to unsuspected levels, such as support for GNU/Linux software and exotic hardware.

Vincent currently works as software developer at the IT department of University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He develops and deploys web applications related to student management, mainly using Java, Oracle Database and MySQL. 

http://foss-north.se/2018/speakers-and-talks.html#vriviere