Editorial

MiNT has born 18. May 1990, thus next year, last year of XXth century, will complete first decade of its existence. All that time it has been under continuous development, still getting better and better.

However, it seems, that MiNT documentation, which apparently was being prepared by Atari Corp., stopped evolving in 1994. sharing the well known, unfortunate cases with the concern itself, and has never been finished. Fortunately, it survived in a form of several manual pages and partially edited, partially messed up text files, automatically distributed along with subsequent system releases, which by the time got a nice name of Liberty, FreeMiNT.

As suggested above, despite the sad fact that the fall of Atari has become reality, MiNT continuously evolved, thus - year by year - the original documentation more and more needed an update. Since the legal disclaimer included by Atari (see previous page) does not seem to forbid updates (or, in their wording, modifications), I got an idea of a revised release of the original (unreleased in printed form) MiNT Programmer's Manual. I hope that words REVISED EDITION printed at the cover page is a notice prominent enough to satisfy the lawyers, isn't it?

Well, anyway. The original texts haven't been modified very much by me. However, this reedition, apart from a greatly reduced Number Of Capital Letters Used In Stupid Places Exactly Like Here, also fixes some minor typing mistakes and slightly clarifies more obscure sections (like for example the chapter II, section 5, which still needs some development to be less Laconic).

The most important change is, that quite some portion of the preserved text has been repositioned to better match themes of main chapters, like the mentioned section 5 of chapter II has been moved from inside of former Appendix A. The Appendix A itself has now become chapter V. (larger portion of redundant mess has been removed from there at the occasion), the Appendix E is now chapter VI., the huge subsection of chapter II is now a completely separate chapter III. ... et cetera et cetera. From this point of view, this edition indeed introduces noticeable changes.

However, the FreeMiNT stuff is still not covered, except for chapter VII(1), I am planning to subsequently add this, as well as incorporate a detailed information about all (currently supported) MiNT calls and form them into a (big) chapter, that is not here yet. I also feel that the whole document lacks tips about most common programming techniques for MiNT applications. Sections about programming FIFOs, shared memory and debuggers already exist, but that's obviously not everything MiNT can do. Also chapters discussing user/process groups would be nice.

To do all that, I need your help. If you want to participate in the recreation of MiNT manuals, just mail me.

Konrad Kokoszkiewicz
draco@@atari.org.pl
Warszawa, 14.I.1999.

An up-to-date version of the same text has become chapter VIII, Supplying time zone information of the companion hypertext FreeMiNT for absolute beginners (aka "MiNTFab"), which is part of the official MiNT kernel distribution (since version 1.15.5), and also can be found at the YESCrew homepage as an archive on it's own.

Edgar Aichinger
eaiching@@t0.or.at
Vienna, 29.II.2000.