TOS 1.04 Desktop
TOS is The Operating System in your Atari. The very first TOS came on a boot floppy disk, but normally it is on a ROM memory chip inside your Atari.
The big advantages of putting the operating system on a ROM chip are that starting the system is incredibly fast and that memory is saved. But it also makes upgrading TOS hard, since one has to physically replace the TOS ROM chip by a newer one.
It is possible, though, to use other TOS versions without unscrewing your Atari, by loading software images of TOS (tos.img) during boot time. You need a program for this in the AUTO folder, like tosboot.prg. The exception that proves the rule and doesn't need any other programs, is a version of TOS 3.01 called american.prg that will run directly from the AUTO folder. Besides the tosboot program, you need the software image of your desired TOS version: these images are lying around on the internet, for example try Little Green Desktop. More than 1 MB of memory is also very welcome if you still want to do something useful, since the TOS will now be loaded into the precious memory of your Atari... Most of the software versions of TOS will survive a reset (but obviously not an OFF/ON).
Below you can find a short description of the different TOS versions, but first some useful programs with which you can experiment with TOS.
Exercise: try using ST-Zip under TOS 2.06 booted with TOS 1.04 started from ROM TOS 1.02 :-)
| seltos |
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Author: Pera Putnik (homepage). Seltos lets you boot from a software img of TOS that you have to put in the same directory as the seltos program. It will let you choose from the TOS images it found in its directory. After your choice it will reboot and load the chosen version of TOS. |
| colortos |
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Authors: Ronald Andersson and Guillaume Tello (homepage). |
| autosort |
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Author: Eugene F. Solhan. This very handy utility re-sorts the programs in your AUTO-folder. It is the physical order on the storage medium that determines the order in which AUTO folder programs are started by TOS. |
| ST-Zip 2.6 |
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Author: Vincent Pomey. ST-Zip lets you depack the archive files *.zip used above. Make sure that your browser downloads this as a binary file. |
Below, a brief decription of the different versions of TOS, from version 1.00 up to version 4.92.
TOS was first brought out in 1985 with the first Atari ST's that saw the light. It was brought to you on a floppy disk that time, version 1.00. Later this version was also available on ROM.
In those times, memory was very sparse and thus expensive. That's why Atari corp. decided to ship the TOS on ROM. A further advantage of this was a very quick start up of the system. A big disadvantage was that it was difficult to upgrade The Operating System, one had to replace the ROM chip inside the computer for that. New in version 1.02 of TOS is that it can handle the Blitter chip, which makes drawing to the screen very much faster in some cases. The Blitter chip was introduced in the Mega ST series of computers in 1987.
This version of TOS is sometimes called "Rainbow TOS" because of the beautiful colourfully animated Atari logo that pops up when you choose the 'info...' item in the 'Desk' menu. You can see it at the beginning of this paragraph. On top of this, TOS 1.04 greatly speeds up harddisk accessing and is the only TOS able to control the largest monitor ever brought out by Atari, the SM194 with 1280x960 monochrome resolution.
This TOS was an intermediate release for the Atari STE series of machines. It has support for the new DMA stereo soundsystem in these machines. It features the same animated "rainbow" Atari logo as TOS 1.04. Some very early STEs were shipped with the less reliable TOS 1.60 .
This is the final TOS developed for the ST(e) series machines. It was shipped with Mega STE machines. It supports high-density floppies and can handle nonstandard screen resolutions. A side effect of the HD-floppy support is, that 720kB drives start making a 'grinding' noise; this is fixed by running the AUTO program hd_fdc.prg. The GEM desktop is much better configurable and enables dragging icons onto the desktop, drag and drop, help functions and handy key shortcuts to the menu items. It still shows B/W icons, but by means of an auto folder program called colortos.prg also the TOS 4 colour icons deskcicn.rsc can be loaded. You need a ROM TOS 2.06 for this, though.
Hallvard Tangeraas has written an excellent users guide (in HTML) for TOS 2.06, you may download it here.
This is the final TOS for Atari TT computers (which have a 32 bit MC68030 processor). Is very similar to TOS 2.06. Early TTs came with the less reliable TOS 3.01.
This is the TOS for the Atari Falcon030, with support for the specific hardware (e.g. the DSP chip) of this special computer. GEM has nice colour icons on the desktop, and a 3D look. Early Falcons came with TOS 4.01 or 4.02. The functionality is much like TOS 2.06.
This is a never finished -but useable- beta release of a multitasking TOS (MultiTOS). The fancy desktop is very similar to TOS 4.04.
