[HN Gopher] A graphical OS for the Atari 8-bit
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A graphical OS for the Atari 8-bit
Author : indigodaddy
Score : 132 points
Date : 2022-07-14 08:48 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (atari8.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (atari8.co.uk)
| forinti wrote:
| Makes me wonder why we had to put up with DOS for so long.
| pjmlp wrote:
| We 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.
| noobermin wrote:
| Is 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.
| forinti wrote:
| In 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 wrote:
| Apparently 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
|
| There's also the issue that MS would actively sabotage any
| competitor that gained a toehold.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| The embedded youtube video is from 26 Feb 2018, so I'm guessing
| this post is from the same year. Any new developments since?
| dafi70 wrote:
| is it open source? I like to compile myself
| rbanffy wrote:
| I 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.
| shakna wrote:
| Development 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-
| ata...
| mzs wrote:
| Thanks, I was wondering how page 2 stack could be shared with
| the limited bank switching available on the 800. Turns-out a
| special cart is needed that can switch the first two pages (and
| presumably protect IO somehow).
| flashjazz wrote:
| No special hardware is required at all; just 128K of RAM and
| a bank-switched cartridge.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| 348x200+ pixels is possible with the 48 byte wide mode.
| flashjazz wrote:
| The 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.
| Zetaphor wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| From 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.
| danachow wrote:
| > and not when the console was still in production?
|
| The "Atari 8-bit" refers to a line of 6502 based personal
| computers manufactured from 1979 until 1992! There was a
| commercially unsuccessful video game console, the 5200, derived
| from this general architecture - it's wild that for their
| illustrious place in video game history, Atari was a one hit
| wonder - they never really succeeded in a console release after
| the 2600.
|
| Atari also had a line of 68k based 32/16 bit computers that
| sadly also discontinued in 1992 so that Atari could focus on
| their pathetic attempts to break back into the console market.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > it's wild that for their illustrious place in video game
| history, Atari was a one hit wonder
|
| They had many, many popular coin-op machines.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| Hardware documentation and developer software not generally
| available, and expensive.
|
| Internally, Atari did development on minicomputers and cross-
| assembled the output. For me there was just (slow) BASIC.
| Information on low-level features (Display Lists, I/O, etc)
| only came out in 3rd-party magazines & books years later.
|
| I experienced the same mindset on the Atari ST & IBM PC later.
| Reading about GNU was a very novel idea.
| luma wrote:
| Wild 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 wrote:
| Back 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.
| Lio wrote:
| In the same vein, I believe John Carmack used a NeXTStation
| to develop Doom for the PC[1].
|
| Matthew Smith also used a TRS-80 model III to develop Jet
| Set Willy for the ZX Spectrum.
|
| 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Doom
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The closest I came to this was using a PC AT clone to
| develop some software for a teacher at my school when I
| was in high school. (Unless you count using a PC today to
| develop for Arduino)
|
| I thought the teacher had a PC clone so I wrote the first
| draft of the software in Turbo BASIC, but then I found
| out she had a CP/M machine but I wasn't fazed very much
| because there was a good Z80 emulator that ran on my
| machine so I was able to port the code to run under (I
| think) MBASIC or CBASIC in CP/M.
|
| In this case I was using an emulator to run the same dev
| tools I would have used in CP/M, I just didn't have a
| CP/M machine. It ran considerably faster than any real
| Z-80 machine thanks to the power of a 12Mhz 286 with zero
| wait states.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| It's crazy how responsive the UI looks in the video (for an
| 8-bitter):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T14dL9MeMHE
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Fire 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 wrote:
| Haiku (https://www.haiku-os.org/) is a pretty good modern
| equivalent. It has a very responsive interface and a 90s look
| and feel.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Wow. I will really try this out on my 800xl
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Actually, I can't. I see it requires pretty hefty upgrades.
| Understandable though.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It needs a cartridge with extra RAM, right?
| flashjazz wrote:
| 128K RAM and a banked cartridge. So: stock 130XE and an
| AtariMax 1Mbit cart will do.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Ok I only have an 800XL and no cartridge unfortunately :(
| rbanffy wrote:
| We need to make it be useful with 64K. My XEGS needs
| this.
| marcodiego wrote:
| License?
| CmdrLoskene wrote:
| First reaction: Why?
|
| Second reaction: Wow!
| mwexler wrote:
| Finally, a reason to avoid upgrading my 800 to an ST!
| timbit42 wrote:
| The 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
| transfire wrote:
| The absolute height of real life irony.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Since you are technically correct, the best kind of correct,
| I'll try to one-up you by pointing that the Atari 65XE, which
| was the actual successor of the 800 and 800XL ;-)
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Nice, also: I'm totally amazed by SymbOS for Amstrad 8bit
| computers - https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/SymbOS
| zabzonk wrote:
| Impressive. 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 :-(
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