ARAnyM is a software virtual machine (similar to VirtualBox or Bochs) designed and developed for running 32-bit Atari ST/TT/Falcon operating systems (TOS, FreeMiNT, MagiC and Linux-m68k) and TOS/GEM applications on any kind of hardware - be it an IBM clone (read it as "PC" :-), an Apple, an Unix server, a graphics workstation or even a portable computer.

ARAnyM is not meant as an emulator of Atari Falcon (even though it has a rather high Falcon software compatibility and includes most of Falcon custom chips including VIDEL and DSP). ARAnyM is better in the sense that it's not tied to specification of an existing Atari machine so we were free to select the most complete CPU (68040 with MMU) and FPU (68882), add loads of RAM (up to 4 GB), host accelerated graphics (even with OpenGL) and direct access to various host resources including sound, disk drives, optical storage devices (CD/DVD-ROMs), parallel port and more.

Some of us like to think that ARAnyM is yet another TOS clone similar to Medusa, Hades or Milan, but actually much cheaper (because it's free software) and way more powerful (because the host hardware gets faster every day). One of our goals - to create a distribution installable from a CD that would turn any PC machine into full featured Atari power machine - can be tested with the ARAnyM/AFROS Live CD. Maybe some hardware vendor could even sell preconfigured computers that would boot directly to TOS desktop... That could help some of the remaining Atari users that wish to upgrade their Atari machines.