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Questions and Answers for using ATARI TOS / FREE MINT

How Good Is Magic?

Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
11 Apr 2020 11:33


An Serbian Atari fan recommends MagiC as faster and cleaner "FreeMINT"

EXTERNAL LINK 
What is other AtariSTs opinion and could last m68k version run on Vamp?


Michael Farrell

Posts 18
11 Apr 2020 12:38


I've no idea if it could run on the vampire, but it would be amazing if it could!

The sources are freely available too. EXTERNAL LINK 
I ran MagiC on my 1040STFM many years ago, and the main thing I remember about it was it was *fast* but there were some programs that just wouldn't work with it.
It really made an 8Mhz ST feel like a 16Mhz one.
(Where MultiTOS made it feel like a 2Mhz machine!)

It wasn't 100% compatible with TOS, but it did warn about that somewhere.



Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
11 Apr 2020 12:45


Thanks Michael!

So there is a reson why real "Atarians" use it :)

How incompatibile is? IS there a "TOS compatibility" list.

And most important is there a m68k version and does it really on Atari chipset on pure  CPU?


Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
11 Apr 2020 12:46


the main problem stays that only software works that only use OS and not directly hit the hardware


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
11 Apr 2020 12:50


Olaf Schoenweiss wrote:

the main problem stays that only software works that only use OS and not directly hit the hardware

The problem will remain until Yamaha and STE Blitter (anything else needed?) is put to V4, if that is possible or planned at all.

Kind of "OS4 situation".


Olaf Schoenweiss

Posts 690
11 Apr 2020 12:58


I of course do only speak for myself (and not for the team)

my opinion:
I do not believe that it is planned or will ever happen


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
11 Apr 2020 15:52


Olaf Schoenweiss wrote:

  my opinion:
  I do not believe that it is planned or will ever happen

Surely not a priority. But would bring what is left of "Atarians" and expand the crowd. Surely, you can always count on Hatari, or similar, 080-mmx having nuff horsepower to emulate STE. But its never the same. Like I dont feel miggy on my x86 Amikit XE launcher.



Olivier Landemarre

Posts 147
11 Apr 2020 18:19


Vojin Vidanovic wrote:

An Serbian Atari fan recommends MagiC as faster and cleaner "FreeMINT"
 
  EXTERNAL LINK 
  What is other AtariSTs opinion and could last m68k version run on Vamp?

Magic is not faster than freemint + other AES now (XaAES or MyAES)
Magic has for me better design, one thing far better, it is possible to call gemdos from interrupt or signal that is not possible with freemint.
Magic has AES now a bit outdated but really nice and stable, new AES are now faster in event management and more sexy, they are stable perhaps a bit less compatible but XaAES is good too, MyAES a bit less, I don't think it is really usefull because an old software write for singleTOS only probably will not work correctly on multitask system, most issue will be hardware access
Freemint is opensource and most write in C, I don't know exactly for Magic.

freemint + XaAES and MyAES work nice on vampire



Cyprian K

Posts 26
11 Apr 2020 18:35


Olivier Landemarre wrote:
Magic is not faster than freemint + other AES now (XaAES or MyAES)

on stock Falcon and ST, MagiC is faster than TOS and much faster than MiNT



Olivier Landemarre

Posts 147
12 Apr 2020 09:23


Cyprian K wrote:

Olivier Landemarre wrote:
Magic is not faster than freemint + other AES now (XaAES or MyAES)

  on stock Falcon and ST, MagiC is faster than TOS and much faster than MiNT
 

Probably you not test a recent version because already Mint gemdos is faster than TOS, and an aes like XaAES is really faster than TOS AES, new AES have far faster event management than before (I do a lot of test around this, XaAES is performant, MyAES already not too bad but less than Magic in the official version I agree but it is soon a new one to fix this and really it is fast enough to be able to do games to not lost too much time compare to a tos version if correctly manage. Object draw is perhaps faster for Magic, I have to check, XaAES looks quite good, MyAES still quite slow I agree (and I don't know why!). Really there is a lot of progress around freemint this last years, the problem there is no official realease for a long time.

A better point for Magic is memory footprint far lower than freemint, 4Mo is not enough for freemint but with 14 is ok, I think it will be for ever!

But I'm going to try a test with Hatari soon to compare in 8Mhz configuration, I think you could be surprised.




Ingo Uhlemann

Posts 35
15 Apr 2020 12:35


Magic is a great OS made by Application Systems Heidelberg. When magic boots, it replaces TOS with own BIOS, Gemdos and AES routines. It is truthly faster then FreeMint (own test) and works great. Its now Open Source and the kernel is available. For developers it would be possible to port it to every Platforms like Vampire V4.

EXTERNAL LINK 
Only what is necessary is to rewrite the BIOS routines for V4


M Piku

Posts 6
06 Jun 2020 14:28


I know this is resurrecting an old thread but I did want to put out a counterpoint.  I used MagiC for a long time and I have never been able to get it to be stable on anything but a TT.  It will simply just randomly crash.  On this same hardware MiNT can run rock solid steady for weeks to months on end.  MagiC is faster than even current versions of mint IMHO but only marginally so.  It used to be a different story but now not so much.  The main benefit of MagiC is on a 4MB system you had 2.5MB RAM left to work with while with MiNT you had maybe 1MB and the system was essentially unusable.  So MagiC was THE os on these systems.  Now all of my old systems have MonSTer boards and I prefer MiNT with 12MB ram available.  IMHO MagiC has no purpose on a modern system as FreeMiNT/XaAES does so much more.  Now that MagiC is open source though who knows...

posts 12