the EmuTOS header logo
A screenshot from the desktop of EmuTOS
Screenshot of EmuTOS. Click to enlarge.

Welcome! EmuTOS is a Free operating system for computers based on Motorola 680x0 or ColdFire microprocessors. It features functionality similar to TOS, which powered the Atari ST and its successors between 1985 and 1994.

EmuTOS is extremely flexible. It can run on real hardware as a ROM replacement, bootable floppy, standard executable, cartridge... It is available in 12 languages for 14 different variants. Of course, it also runs happily on any Atari emulator such as ARAnyM, Hatari, or Steem SSE. As Free Software, it can also be recompiled from sources to be completely customized.

The EmuTOS project started in 2001, and it is still being actively developed. Some parts originate in old open-sourced code from Digital Research, while other parts have been developed from scratch. There is no code written by Atari in EmuTOS. It is distributed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2).

EmuTOS is Free Software, so it is better than TOS in several ways:

It can be freely used and redistributed with emulators that respect the GPL licence. This allows users to run legacy third-party software on emulators without requiring copyrighted Atari ROMs, thereby avoiding legal issues.

It supports more features and more hardware than Atari TOS.

It is actively developed and supported.

Just like TOS, EmuTOS is a small but complete single-tasking operating system. If you wish to go further, EmuTOS can be used as a stub to run FreeMiNT, a much more powerful multitasking kernel. When used with emulators, EmuTOS and FreeMiNT provide a completely Free environment to run modern Atari software.

EmuTOS is mainly designed to run on traditional Atari hardware (ST, TT, Falcon) and emulators of that hardware. But it is versatile enough to run on clones (Suska, MIST, FireBee...) or quite different hardware such as Kiwi, ColdFire Evaluation Boards, or even Amiga.

If you need assistance in using EmuTOS, would like to suggest a new feature, want to contribute, or just enjoy this project, feel free to join the EmuTOS mailing list to get help.