8 ms·
A graphical OS for the Atari 8-bit
- GekkePrutser 4y agoWow. I will really try this out on my 800xl
- GekkePrutser 4y agoActually, I can't. I see it requires pretty hefty upgrades. Understandable though.
- rbanffy 4y agoIt needs a cartridge with extra RAM, right?
- flashjazz 4y ago128K RAM and a banked cartridge. So: stock 130XE and an AtariMax 1Mbit cart will do.
- GekkePrutser 4y agoOk I only have an 800XL and no cartridge unfortunately :(
- rbanffy 4y agoWe need to make it be useful with 64K. My XEGS needs this.
- mzs 4y agoCan you please explain how you swap the first two pages?
- zabzonk 4y agoImpressive. And it looks a lot like Gem on the Motorola 68000-based Atari ST. I wish I still had my Atari 8-bit box, but something went horribly wrong with the cartridge slot - no more Star Raiders for me. Sniff :-(
- dafi70 4y agois it open source? I like to compile myself
- rbanffy 4y agoI don't think it is. I'd like to examine it as well. The preemptive multi-tasking scheduler can be very useful for games, and it may be possible to port it to other 8-bit computers. And, if software could be made portable, it'd be interesting to have GUI software that's cross-platform between Ataris, Apple //s and ///s, and the Commodore and BBC families (a VIC-20 would need a lot of expansion). Sadly, most of the others run their 6502's at half the speed of the Ataris.
- vanderZwan 4y agoThe embedded youtube video is from 26 Feb 2018, so I'm guessing this post is from the same year. Any new developments since?
- flohofwoe 4y agoIt's crazy how responsive the UI looks in the video (for an 8-bitter): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T14dL9MeMHE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T14dL9MeMHE
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y agoFire up Windows 2000 in a VM and poke around for a bit. The responsiveness is so good it's actually a little jarring. I have this experience working with the legacy 2003 VMs at work. Shows you how much software developers and designs have squandered resources over the decades.
- rwmj 4y agoHaiku (https://www.haiku-os.org/ https://www.haiku-os.org/) is a pretty good modern equivalent. It has a very responsive interface and a 90s look and feel.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoNice, also: I'm totally amazed by SymbOS for Amstrad 8bit computers - https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/SymbOS https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/SymbOS
- mwexler 4y agoFinally, a reason to avoid upgrading my 800 to an ST!
- timbit42 4y agoThe successor of the 800 is the Amiga, not the ST. The architecture between them is very similar as Jay Miner designed both of their chipsets. The ST was designed by the designer of the Commodore 64, Shiraz Shivji , so the ST is its successor. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_Shivji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiraz_Shivji
- shakna 4y agoDevelopment of this also appears to still be ongoing [0], though I don't think the code is actually public anywhere. [0] https://atariage.com/forums/topic/154520-new-gui-for-the-atari-8-bit/page/158/#comments https://atariage.com/forums/topic/154520-new-gui-for-the-ata...
- rbanffy 4y agoI find this a real shame. If the code was available, a lot of people could be writing small programs for the GUI, running it on emulators, playing with the GTIA overscan modes (it can do more than 192x320 pixels) and so on.
- ddingus 4y ago348x200+ pixels is possible with the 48 byte wide mode.
- flashjazz 4y agoThe thing needs to be finished and documented before anyone can write anything for it; open-sourcing it (as I notice from observing other projects) won't necessarily make great things happen. The GOS can already be run in emulation, althogh I don't know what would be accomplished by using the 48 byte playfield mode if one hopes to run it on a standard monitor. It's a lot of effort for a couple of dozen pixels.
- rbanffy 4y ago> It's a lot of effort for a couple of dozen pixels. Sometimes, "because it's possible" is all you need ;-) But now, more seriously, it'd be fun to try to port it to different 6502-based computers. I've been looking for a good excuse to get myself an Apple III or a BBC Master and this seems like a great one. Not all of them will be able to have preemptive multitasking (interrupts aren't always convenient), but it'd still be fun. Imagine that - in 2023 we could have software that runs unmodified on more than one 6502-based computer...
- 4y ago
- forinti 4y agoMakes me wonder why we had to put up with DOS for so long.
- pjmlp 4y agoWe didn't, Atari ST and Amiga dominated 16 bit home market in Europe until Windows 95 came out. The few of us using PCs during those early days, were booting straight into Windows 3.x straigt out of AUTOEXEC.BAT.
- forinti 4y agoIn my neck of the woods these were very hard to come buy. During the 80s, people mostly had 8-bit micros at home. And Windows 3.1 only appeared in the 90s. ATs and even XTs could have handled a GUI well. It wasn't for lack of memory or processing power. The PC was stuck with a really subpar OS for about a decade.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoApparently there were a lot of options, but the folks building them made the then common mistake of exorbitant pricing. A razor/razorblades model would have been more successful. See Visi-On, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092804 There's also the issue that MS would actively sabotage any competitor that gained a toehold.
- noobermin 4y agoIs this really true or was this just true in Europe? I was born in the 90s but even I remember my dad using dos before win 95. It was only later that I learned about amiga and atari st and all the wiki articles and blogs today seem to paint the picture that dos dominated everything from the moment it appeared. Should specify, I'm American.
- pjmlp 4y agoYes, why do you think Demoscene was such a huge phenomenon in Europe? We needed to have those computers around. Outside work, the PC only took off at home around Return to Castle Wolfstein / Doom, with AdLib/SoundBlaster and 3Dfx, Matrix, NVidia,... as standard gear.
- Zetaphor 4y agoIs there any particular reason projects like this only exist today, and not when the console was still in production? Is it a matter of enough time passing for people to gain the full understanding of the hardware required to optimize enough to make this possible? Or are these new developments somehow made possible by access to hardware and software that is orders of magnitude more capable than the target device? Stuff like this and the various 3D render demos always leave me wondering why we never saw anything like this in these devices primes.
- buescher 4y agoFrom the article: "similar to GEOS on the Commodore 64". GEOS was definitely of the time. Also large memory expansion (i.e. >= 256K) kits, while available in the era, cost money and were uncommon. This system apparently runs best with 1MB of memory. There were some cool classic demos in the prime era of the Atari 8-bit like the FujiBoink response to the Amiga bouncing ball.
- luma 4y agoWild guesses off of the top of my head: * Time. A lot can happen in 40 years, new techniques are discovered and popularized, etc. * Better tooling all around. Better languages, better IDEs, better libraries, etc. Anyone working today on a platform that has been hacked on for 40+ years is the beneficiary of all that work. * More and better contributors. The number of people who had both the interest and the means to purchase an Atari computer in 1979 was necessarily limited. Since then, we've added another 3.7B people to the planet and a hell of a lot of them now have access to something resembling a computer. Most of them have grown up with the notion of a "programming language" being present in their world, something which wasn't necessarily commonplace 40 years back.
- PaulHoule 4y agoBack in the day the most advanced software developers used minicomputers: for instance Gates and Allen used an 8080 emulator on a PDP-10 to develop the original Microsoft BASIC. Infocom similarly used a PDP-10 to develop games like Zork. A modern computer is a much more powerful machine than a 1970s minicomputer and would be great support for writing complex software today.
- marcodiego 4y agoLicense?
- CmdrLoskene 4y agoFirst reaction: Why? Second reaction: Wow!