Conference 7.286::atarist

	Louis Richard,

	There was an article in a recent Atari ST User Magazine with
	some details on KAOS. Apparently it was developed by three
	German guys, to improve on TOS 1.4. Some of it's features 
	appeared in TOS 1.6, but is is much smaller in size and 
	considerably faster at most operations.

	Atari Germany were interested, but the guys in Sunnyvale 
	didn't even bother to reply to the letters they were sent.

	I'll dig out the magazine and have a go at scanning in the 
	article, if you need more info, and the moderator doesn't
	object. Alternatively I can photocopy the pages and pop them
	in the internal post to you.

	Brian.

    Louis,
    
    if you have a TOS 1.4 you can get a patch kit to burn your own
    KAOS eproms.
    
    There are some dealers around who will burn them for you.
    

>	There was an article in a recent Atari ST User Magazine with
>	some details on KAOS.

Good somebody brought this up!  I wanted to start a note about this since I
have read the first article about KAOS, but I never took the time.
According to ST User Magazine (a very good magazine!) KAOS is an EXCELLENT
product.  The one sensible thing for ATARI Corp. to do would be to go contact
these guys, buy KAOS and make it the official TOS.
I do not have any personal experience with KAOS but from what I have read it
is HOT!  I think some company offering a 68030 board is using KAOS as well.
In fact KAOS made it possible for that board to run at a higher speed.

Please make this product known in the US (and try to wake up Atari Bros.) !!

Beat Kappert

    Haha so that product does have something...
    
    Could you Brian, give us more, or the publication date..., or issue
    number..., or an address where the KAOS "patch" may be found? 
    
    Thanks in advance
    
    	Louis Richard

	
	Re .-1

	I think it was in the April ST-User, in the World Wide review section.

	I'll bring it into the office tomorrow afternoon and see if I can
	scan it into a file to include as a reply to this topic.

	Brian.

	The article reads as follows. It was publicly available in the
	magazine, so I guess there is no problem with entering it here.

	KAOS COMING FROM GERMANY

	(First few paragraphs refer to Auto-folder overload, the 40
	  folder problem and TOS Bugs/Fixes/Patches)

	It then continues :-

	What if all these patches and Auto Folder utilities were 
	consolidated into a cleaned up version of TOS.A version which has 
	been completly rewritten in assembler, to spped up general operation
	and which has had incorporated into it, some of the features of 
	TOS 1.6 and NeoDesk.
	This is precicsely what three German hackers Dirk Katzschke,Normen
	Kowalewski and Andreas Kromke have come up with. KAOS 1.4.2 is a 
	full replacement for TOS 1.4, compatible with all 680X0 accelerator
	boards, and it will soon be launched as a commercial product.
	Why isn't it launched by Atari itself ?? According to the three
	authors, Atari Germany showed interset, but the Sunnyvale HQ of the
	Atari Corporation never even replied to any correspondence, and seems
	to have told Atari Germany to stay clear of such third party
	meddling with the ST's operating system.
	So what are the benefits of KAOS ? The authors claim to have purged
	more than 80 different bugs from TOS 1.4 and completely overhauled
	the BIOS,XBIOS,GEMDOS and AES. Screen operations, such as drawing
	dialog boxes are twice as fast & disk access is 40% faster than plain
	unadulterated 1.4
	The entire character set including foreign & graphic characters, can
	be used from the keyboard.the keyboard repeat and delay times have
	been changed to more appropriate values,the TOS line editor expanded,
	text entry into dialog boxes is simplified, a DOS-like "Abort/Retry/
	Ignore error handling option introduced and the size of the operating
	system reduced by 20K.The KAOS TOS is now fully compatible with
	GEM versions 2.2 & 3.
	Together with NVDI (Virtual Device Interface - from Bela Computer)
	a KAOS equipped ST shows an impressive turn of speed.the Quick Index
	benchmarking utility returns values of 234% for TOS text,185% for TOS
	string,130%for TOS scroll and a massive 826% for GEM dialogs when
	compared with Atari's TOS 1.4
	According to tests in the German computer press, KAOS has proven 
	fully compatible with most hardware/software thrown at it.
	Just to make sure, the authors have incorporated an option to
	disable parts ok KAOS, should there be incompatibility problems.
	First Word Plus, for example, doesn't appear to get on with the
	modified keyboard scan codes. 
	Availability details are not yet known, but watch this space,
	(i.e. World News in the magazine)

	Note.
	The NVDI article quotes a price of around 35 pounds, and a
	contact for Bela Computer on 010-49-6196-481944

    
    The price for KAOS, including a 100 pages manual, is 65.- DM (~40.-$)
    here in Germany. I think it's distributed by Markt & Technik Verlag.
    It comes on a floppy in a form that you also may program EPROMS with
    the code.
    
    Bernd
    
    

Will a program written under Kaos run under normal TOS?

Also, must the floppies be burned into a ROM or can you run it like the old 
TOS-ON-DISK?

Steve

    
    
    KAOS is absolutely TOS 1.4 compatible, but some programs take care on
    TOS bugs on their own. So it might happen that a known bug is fixed
    twice, by the program and by KAOS. This sometimes causes problems.
    (Neodesk for instance does some fix with the screen refresh. If you 
    run Neodesk together with KAOS and grow up a window, the old borders
    are still visible in the new window until you press ESC to do another
    refresh).
    But as a previous reply stated KAOS has an option like "incompatibility
    mode" in the menuebar which switches off most KAOS features so that it
    acts like normal TOS 1.4. This is in KAOS version 1.4.2. I have not
    seen it running yet because I still have this old PD version from last
    year.
    As far as I know this new version comes in both forms: to boot from
    floppy and the code to burn in EPROMS on the disk. But I'm not sure
    about that.
    I will buy KAOS 1.4.2 as soon as I'm finished with my hardware
    struggles. I'll then tell you more about it.
    
    Bernd
    
    
    

    
    Hi, 
    
    The next question is, since KAOS supports 68XXXX chips, does anyone
    have a cheap source of adaptor boards so as to upgrade the 68000?
    
    (IT must be cheeeeeeeap thought!)
    
    
    Pat K.