TOS clones
TOS Clones were developed and manufactured by a number of third parties in the mid-to-late 1990's, in the period after which Atari had withdrawn from the personal computer market but during which there was also a significant (albeit diminishing) remnant user base loyal to the platform. Less active development of clones has continued to today (2011).
All of the clones manufactured since the demise of Atari's computer production fell firmly into the category of higher end machines, in the space where the next generation of TOS machines would have emerged had Atari continued. These machines were based on the 68040 and 68060 processors, and generally had open hardware architectures (at least in comparison to the Atari-built computers) much like contemporary IBM-compatible PC's, with PCI expansion slots for peripherals and upgrades, and 72-pin simm slots for RAM expansion.
An new tendency emerged in the 2010's, in the form of using FPGAs to re-implement old systems as accurately as possible. This is not the same as Emulators, which are software requiring a host computer to work, and tend to simplify aspects of hardware to allow efficient execution, at the cost of reduced compatibility and increased input/output latency. In the opposite, a FPGA implementation can be seen as a real hardware system, able to reach a much better level of compatibility, and to reduce latency to almost zero.
1990's
2000's
- Firebee Coldfire project, as of 2011
- suska Wolfgang Forsters Experiment-S leaded to 3 different classic Atari boards (STE implementation)
FPGA clones
- MiST - a FPGA board implementing old school systems, including the Atari ST
- MiSTer - a FPGA system implementing many 8/16/32 computers, console and arcade platforms
- SiDi - another FPGA board derived from MiST
- MiSTery - an Atari ST/STe core for FPGAs, working on MiST. There's an existing port for MiSTer
- FX Cast - an Atari ST core for MiSTer, 100% cycle-accurate
- zeST - an Atari ST clone for cheap FPGA development boards