Home Page of TeraDesk 3 and TeraDesk 4
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Project history

TeraDesk (Tera Desktop) is currently the only open-souce desktop available for the 16-bit and 32-bit lines of Atari computers. Its development was started in 1991 by Wout Klaren; development was paused in 1994 at version 1.41.

In the autumn of 2002 TeraDesk was made Open-Source under GPL as version 1.42, and Henk Robbers took over the task of maintenance which soon resulted in the publishing of TeraDesk 2.0 and TeraDesk 2.1

In December 2002, after an exchange of ideas about possible upgrades of TeraDesk, Henk kindly invited me to participate in its further development. The first result of that cooperation was TeraDesk V2.3 in March 2003. After that, we worked together on TeraDesk V3. Many improvements, optimizations and other changes were made.

When Henk decided to move on to other matters, he asked me to finish what was required to publish TeraDesk V3.0 and possibly continue its development; I have tried to do that to the best of my abilities, but Henk's assistance was sorely missed :( ... Since the release of TeraDesk V3.0 in December 2003, the development has been continued mostly by me.

Developers' goal is to maintain TeraDesk as a small, simple, fast and reliable desktop, which is to be functional in the modern multitasking environments and all flavours of TOS-compatible operating systems, and yet to keep, as much as reasonable, familiarity with the original TOS desktop, and be undemanding enough to be run on any 16-bit or 32-bit Atari computer, clone or emulator, even the machines with the small amount of RAM and old versions of TOS. In all aspects, it should be better than the original TOS desktops. It is not intended to be a direct replacement for the excellent but resources-demanding desktops like Thing or Jinnee, but instead is designed to be used where disk space or system memory and speed limitations (or price) make the use of those other desktops impractical (e.g. TeraDesk's size and memory usage is currently only about 1/3 to 1/2 of Jinnee's in a similar setup).

System requirements

Tera Desktop can be used on any Atari ST series computer and their offspring like TT, Falcon, Hades, Milan or emulators, with at least 512 KB RAM. It uses about 200 to 300 KB of memory (depending on the complexity of the configuration). Minimum screen resolution is 320x200 pixels, but use of higher resolutions is recommended.

TT-RAM or Alt-RAM, if installed, is recognised and used by TeraDesk.

Although TeraDesk can be run without the aid of a hard disk, the use of one is strongly recommended.

TeraDesk works with all existing versions of TOS, but it is very much more useful with versions 1.04 (also known as 1.4) and above. Since Version 2 TeraDesk works well in modern multi-tasking environments, such as MagiC, TOS with Geneva, MiNT with Atari AES 4.1, N.AES, XaAES or MyAES, etc. It can be run with memory protection.

Current version

Current version of TeraDesk is 4.02. This release fixes undesired behaviour that was observed when the right mouse button was held pressed for a long time. Also, certain small optimizations were done and some adjustments were made to make TeraDesk compile correctly in AHCC.

TeraDesk 4.02 binary :   All files needed to run Tera Desktop V4.02; Two executables: one is good for all single- and multitasking environments, The other (smaller, with reduced AV-protocol support, limited to FAT filesystem and with some other noncritical but size-saving limitations) is suitable for single-TOS only and is recommended for machines with small amounts of RAM. Hypertext documentation, basic sets of monochrome and colour icons, and a sample configuration file are included (users are encouraged to create their own, more extensive, icon sets and configuration files).

TeraDesk 4.02 source files :   Complete source tree of Tera Desktop V4.02; to be compiled and linked with Pure-C 1.1. Source text of the hypertext documentation is included. (source of the AHCM memory allocation system developed by Henk Robbers is not included, but can be downloaded from here; (binary of AHCM, sufficient to link the executable, -is- included). This archive also includes a text with comments intended to help people translating TeraDesk to other languages.

TeraDesk 4.01 binary :   All files needed to run the PREVIOUS STABLE VERSION of Tera Desktop. This version is provided here for convenience, e.g. in case that a user may have to upgrade some old desktop configuration files which have become too incompatible with the current release. Also, in the unlikely event of something having gone terribly wrong with the latest release, a user can revert to the previous one.

History of changes in TeraDesk 3.* and TeraDesk 4.* :   A listing of changes made throughout the development of TeraDesk 3.* and TeraDesk 4.*; PLEASE READ THIS (at least the section refering to the newest release) before upgrading from a previous release of TeraDesk.

New after this release :   A list of new features, improvements, bug fixes, etc. which were made after the current release and will be available in the next version of TeraDesk.

Nationalized versions of TeraDesk

Some people have kindly undertaken to translate TeraDesk resource files and hypertext help/manual to other languages. Follow the links below, but have in mind that current version of a translation may not be available simultaneously with the release of the English version. Of course, if the English resource file of TeraDesk does not change with a new release (as is often the case), the translated resource files for the previous version can be used.

Please note that the correctness of these translations and the functionality of the resource files is completely under responsibility of their respective authors (if you wish to contact them directly, manually edit the e-mail addresses to remove inserted "-remove-this-" spam blocks).

TeraDesk in Russian : Dima Sobolev has translated TeraDesk into Russian. For more information or any remarks, please contact Dima.

TeraDesk in German : Lars Schmidbauer has translated TeraDesk into German. For more information or any remarks, please contact Lars.

TeraDesk in French : Emmanuel Baranger has translated TeraDesk into French. For more information, please contact Emmanuel (preferably in French).

TeraDesk in Greek : Christos Tziotzis has translated TeraDesk into Greek. For more information, please contact Christos.

Updated on December 25th 2009;