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- MiNT is Not TOS: A Multitasking Operating System Extension for the Atari ST
-
- Copyright 1990,1991,1992 Eric R. Smith. All rights reserved. See the file
- "copying" for conditions of redistribution.
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Features of MiNT that are incompatible with TOS (some might regard these
- as bugs):
-
- Processes may have only 32 open files each.
-
- Not all information needed by Fsfirst is contained solely in the DTA
- area, nor is the DTA set up the way TOS does. Programs that manipulate
- the DTA directly will probably break.
-
- Some low level disk utilities may get very confused if asked to operate on
- a pseudo-drive like U:, or on a non-tos filesystem.
-
- Doing a Dsetpath() call on a path that includes symbolic links may also
- result in the current drive being changed, if any of the links point
- to a different drive.
-
- The BIOS I/O routines on devices 0, 1, and 2 may be redirected by
- redirecting file handles -3, -2, and -1 respectively, i.e. they are
- no longer guaranteed to access the same printer, rs232, and console
- (although they do by default). Similarly, BIOS device 3 is controlled by
- file handles -4 (input) and -5 (output) and so it might not always refer
- to the MIDI port.
-
- Filenames that are 4 characters long, with a ':' in the 4th position,
- are assumed to be device names and are translated into references to U:\DEV
- i.e. "con:" means "U:\DEV\CON". TOS doesn't always do this translation,
- it seems, because I can recall creating files named "con:" in the current
- directory (not that I *wanted* to, which is the whole point of MiNT's
- feature).
-
- All CTRL-ALT-function key combinations are reserved by MiNT.
-