Hi,

  I think it would be nice if I could compile the TOS utilities
  (loadbsd.ttp, aptck.ttp, etc) for NetBSD/atari under NetBSD, instead
  of requiring a cross-compilation setup or compilation under MiNT.

  There is precedent for this sort of thing:  under NetBSD/i386 the DOS
  utilities such as dosboot.com and netboot.com are compiled in a NetBSD
  environment.

  As a proof-of-concept, I've managed to compile a "hello, world"
  program under NetBSD/atari and run it through an aout2tos conversion
  program I wrote, similar to the elf2aout and elf2ecoff utilities used
  under NetBSD/pmax.

  Actually getting real programs to compile in this manner would be a
  lot of work.  Does anyone else think this is a good idea?  If so, i'll
  persue it further.  I'd hate to do all the work only to find out that
  it would never be integrated into the tree.

Why are you reinventing the wheel? The GNU utilities that were ported
to TOS already handle this. gas for Atari puts out a.out files, it's
ld that binds it into TOS format executable. What you want to do is
exactly the same as setting up a cross-compilation environment, and the
existing tools already do exactly what you need.
  -- Howard

(PS: howdy, entropy - I see you've left MIT!)