STonC - ST emulator on Curses

2004-01-07
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STonC is a variant of STonX, the Atari ST emulator for Unix/X.

Unlike other emulators intended to run either modern GEM programs, or old ST games, STonC is indended to run operating systems like Minix which do not run on other emulators.

Changes were made in two directions:

expanding the accuracy of emulation at the hardware level
making it easier to port to anything other than Unix/X

this last goal led to the paradoxal choice of the text-only library Curses in lieu of graphical toolset. Despite of this, STonC is surprisingly usable for:

run MiNT, Minix, and text-only TOS progs (like nethack)
develop free TOS replacements like NullTOS or EmuTOS

STonC is covered by the GPL version 2 or later.

Features

emulate an Atari MegaST (same as STonX)
detailed implementation of low-level hardware MFP, FDC, DMA and ACIA
floppy and hard disk emulation works with no native extension (no cartridge, no ROM patch)
can also support the STonX cartridge for native filesystem or huge floppy images.
emulates a vt100 terminal connected to the Atari ST through the serial port
written in a priori portable C, with no library except curses
configurable (reset, manage floppies, ...) using an embedded shell - configurations can be written in stonc scripts to easily maintain a set of test configurations

Non-features

no graphics - STonC can recognise the Atari system fonts and convert the screen bitmap to text; colors are not managed yet (all is printed in black and white)
no mouse, no joystick
no sound
no direct access to host devices - floppy and hard disk emulation is done through images

What is it useful for?

It can be used to:

run MiNT, minix, and text-only TOS progs
play nethack
test and develop EmuTOS
One can also take code for some features and add it to STonX or other emulators.

It cannot be used to

run GEM programs
run graphical games and demos

Download

Latest version is version 0.8.1 dated 2004-01-07. This interim version fixes some bugs since 0.8.0 and also comes with a ready-to-use emutos image.

source code: stonc-0.8.1.tgz (285 kb).

Previous versions:

source code: stonc-0.8.0.tgz (196 kb).

The source code archive comes with a Makefile ready to use on Linux x86 and Cygwin.

It should not be too difficult to have it run on other machines, and I would appreciate any report about successful or unsuccessful attempt.

Support

STonC comes with a readme in doc/README and a manual in doc/MANUAL. Additionnally there is a kind of online help available by typing help from the stonc shell. Last but not least, example configuration scripts are found in the Samples directory.

I also gathered some documentation about running Minix with STonC.

Finally you can mail me.

History

I had done some extensive work on a private copy of STonX to add enough hardware functionality to let Minix run (Minix, unlike TOS, is fully interrupt-driven, so an accurate MFP was absolutely needed, and a ASCI hard disk was useful too).

One day I realised that for a long period of time I had never used the GEM, only the Minix text console and the xterm tty attached to the atari serial port.

At the same time I was occasionally travelling and using a laptop under MS Windows. I wanted to continue working on minix on this laptop, and didn't want to port the whole X stuff that I wasn't really using anyway. So I removed all parts of my heavily hacked STonX that couldn't compile on cygwin, added some code to manage different virtual terminals on top of curses, added a small embedded shell for configuration, and this became STonC.

Then in the beginning of 2001 people on the internet started again to develop on STonX; eventually features added to STonC could be reported to STonX as well. But as I hardly need the graphic STonX presently, and due to lack of time, I will probably not do this anytime soon.