XaAES

Last updated

XaAES is a graphical user interface for the OS kernel MiNT (now known as FreeMiNT), and is aimed at systems that are compatible with 16/32 bit (hence ST) Atari computers such as the ST, TT or Falcon. The combination of MiNT and XaAES is the natural successor to MultiTOS.

Contents

History

XaAES - The beginning

XaAES is a free AES (Application Environment Service) written with MiNT in mind, originally developed by Craig Graham (Data Uncertain Software) back in September 1995. Taken from the XaAES beta6, here is a snippet of the readme.txt in which Craig explains his motives for initiating XaAES:

"After using MultiTOS, then AES4.1, I became frustrated at the lack of a decent GUI to use the real power of the MiNT kernel - X Windows is all very well, but I can't run GEM programs on it. MultiTOS (even AES 4.1) is too slow. Geneva didn't run with MiNT (and, having tried the new MiNT compatible version, I can say it wasn't very compatible - at least AES 4.1 is quite stable, if a little slow). MagiC lives in a very fast, very small world all its own, with no networking support, few programs written to exploit it."

NOTE: MagiC later became available on Mac OS (and still later on the x86 PC) with built-in networking, and network drivers also began to appear for the Atari ST. A lot of MagiC software was MiNT compatible, and vice versa, but that came later than the time period of the above quote.

Craig worked actively on XaAES until 1997 when he stopped the development, at that time a plethora of applications were already usable under XaAES.

In 1998 the project was taken up by Swedish programmer Johan Klockars. He had been involved already during Craig's maintainership and at this point he stepped forward after a period of inactivity.

Johan's work resulted in several bugfixes which eventually were released as Beta7+. Shortly after this beta Johan also made the decision to hand over the project to someone else. This time it really seemed like XaAES had hit the end of the road, with no one interested in taking up the project again.

After a period of complete standstill Dutch coder Henk Robbers took over the project in November 1999. During Henk's maintainer-ship loads of progress was made, and XaAES went from interesting to becoming rather usable and showing great potential. The visual appearance was made to look closer to that of N.AES, as this was the obvious reference target - the AES that at the time was the GUI for FreeMiNT. XaAES also become a lot more robust although the response for key and mouse input was still somewhat of a problem.

Odd Skancke (aka Ozk) continued the development of XaAES, and together with Frank Naumann (then FreeMiNT maintainer), XaAES graphical improvements (skinning) were released with FreeMiNT 1.16. Alan Hourihane, as then FreeMiNT maintainer, was left to do bug fixes until round 2009, when after a resurgence of interest in the FreeMiNT OS, XaAES was then maintained and extended considerably by Helmut Karlowski (who maintains his own branch), especially in the area of Atari TOS application compatibility.

XaAES goes CVS

In early 2003 Henk Robbers (of AHCC fame, also makes XaAES beta6 source available) decided it was time to let someone else carry on his work, as he wanted to move on to other computing issues. When Henk went looking for someone who could take care of the continued development, the idea that XaAES should be part of the FreeMiNT project was suggested. After all, it was developed to be an AES for MiNT exclusively, and since FreeMiNT is being administrated via CVS, anyone could access the sources and contribute.

The move to CVS was made possible thanks to great efforts from the FreeMiNT maintainer Frank Naumann, who made the necessary changes to allow XaAES to compile under gcc. In earlier XaAES builds, one of the major problems has been the somewhat irregular response to mouse buttons. This was reworked by Odd Skancke (aka Ozk), something that also resulted in a complete rewrite of the XDD. The moose.xdd (mouse device driver) is now coded in C too, just like the rest of the XaAES code.

Development was later moved from AtariForge to an SVN repository at SourceForge, and from there to the publicly browsable FreeMiNT Git repository on GitHub. [1]

XaAES - A FreeMiNT kernel module

In order to get a clean and fast XaAES, the best solution turned out to be changing XaAES into a kernel module. To achieve this goal a completely new API was constructed, and it was quickly apparent that the new kernel module offered massively improved performance. Most noticeably, the response time was significantly improved, resulting in a much more snappy and responsive experience when trying to click a button to see live window redraws, etc. All in all, XaAES reached a whole new level after being integrated this tightly with FreeMiNT and as of the 1.16.1 FreeMiNT release it must be considered highly usable. With the implementation of window shading the list of missing features was getting short.

(This section is used on Wikipedia with permission from http://xaaes.atariforge.net Archived 2003-05-27 at the Wayback Machine )

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the graphical user interface</span>

The history of the graphical user interface, understood as the use of graphic icons and a pointing device to control a computer, covers a five-decade span of incremental refinements, built on some constant core principles. Several vendors have created their own windowing systems based on independent code, but with basic elements in common that define the WIMP "window, icon, menu and pointing device" paradigm.

Microsoft Windows is a product line of proprietary graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and sub-families that cater to particular sectors of the computing industry – Windows (unqualified) for a consumer or corporate workstation, Windows Server for a server and Windows IoT for an embedded system. Defunct families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone, and Windows Embedded Compact.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GEM (desktop environment)</span> Operating environment created by Digital Research

GEM is a discontinued operating environment released by Digital Research in 1985. GEM is known primarily as the native graphical user interface of the Atari ST series of computers, providing a WIMP desktop. It was also available for IBM PC compatibles and shipped with some models from Amstrad. GEM is used as the core for some commercial MS-DOS programs, the most notable being Ventura Publisher. It was ported to other computers that previously lacked graphical interfaces, but never gained traction. The final retail version of GEM was released in 1988.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oberon (operating system)</span> Operating system

The Oberon System is a modular, single-user, single-process, multitasking operating system written in the programming language Oberon. It was originally developed in the late 1980s at ETH Zurich. The Oberon System has an unconventional visual text user interface (TUI) instead of a conventional command-line interface (CLI) or graphical user interface (GUI). This TUI was very innovative in its time and influenced the design of the Acme text editor for the Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MiNT</span> Alternative operating system kernel for Atari ST

MiNT is a free software alternative operating system kernel for the Atari ST series. It is a multi-tasking alternative to TOS and MagiC. Together with the free system components fVDI device drivers, XaAES graphical user interface widgets, and TeraDesk file manager, MiNT provides a free TOS compatible replacement OS that can multitask.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphviz</span> Software package for graph visualization

Graphviz is a package of open-source tools initiated by AT&T Labs Research for drawing graphs specified in DOT language scripts having the file name extension "gv". It also provides libraries for software applications to use the tools. Graphviz is free software licensed under the Eclipse Public License.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Window manager</span> Type of system software

A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunction with the underlying graphical system that provides required functionality—support for graphics hardware, pointing devices, and a keyboard—and are often written and created using a widget toolkit.

Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a software interface for Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems that lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the FUSE module provides only a bridge to the actual kernel interfaces.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atari TT030</span> Personal computer by Atari

The Atari TT030 is a member of the Atari ST family, released in 1990. It was originally intended to be a high-end Unix workstation, but Atari took two years to release a port of Unix SVR4 for the TT, which prevented the TT from ever being seriously considered in its intended market.

Larn is a roguelike video game written by Noah Morgan in 1986 for the UNIX operating system. Morgan's original version of Larn remains part of the NetBSD games collection.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Git</span> Distributed version control software system

Git is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively.

The Atari Coldfire Project (ACP) is a volunteer project that has created a modern Atari ST computer clone called the FireBee.

CVSNT is a version control system compatible with and originally based on Concurrent Versions System (CVS), but whereas that was popular in the open-source world, CVSNT included features designed for developers working on commercial software including support for Windows, Active Directory authentication, reserved branches/locking, per-file access control lists and Unicode filenames. Also included in CVSNT were various RCS tools updated to work with more recent compilers and compatible with CVSNT.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SpareMiNT</span> Software distribution based on FreeMiNT

SpareMiNT is a software distribution based on FreeMiNT, which consists of a MiNT-like operating system (OS) and kernel plus GEM compatible AES.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atari TOS</span> Operating system of the Atari ST range of computers

TOS is the operating system of the Atari ST range of computers. This range includes the 520ST and 1040ST, their STF/M/FM and STE variants and the Mega ST/STE. Later, 32-bit machines were developed using a new version of TOS, called MultiTOS, which allowed multitasking. More recently, users have further developed TOS into FreeMiNT.

MagiC is a third party and now open-sourced multitasking-capable TOS-compatible operating system for Atari computers, including some newer clone systems manufactured later. There are also variants that run as part of Mac and PC emulation environments, as well as on macOS Intel-Mac computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TortoiseHg</span>

TortoiseHg is a GUI front-end for Mercurial that runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Longene</span> Linux distribution

Longene is a Linux-based operating system kernel intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows and Linux. As of 1.0-rc2, it consists of a Linux kernel module implementing aspects of the Windows kernel and a modified Wine distribution designed to take advantage of the more native interface. Longene is written in the C programming language and is free and open source software. It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Redox (operating system)</span> Operating system written with the Rust programming language

Redox is a Unix-like microkernel operating system written in the programming language Rust, which has a focus on safety, stability, and performance. Redox aims to be secure, usable, and free. Redox is inspired by prior kernels and operating systems, such as SeL4, MINIX, Plan 9, and BSD. It is free and open-source software distributed under an MIT License.

References