Atari 8-bit fans have long hankered after a GUI similar to GEOS on the Commodore 64. Diamond GOS went some way to addressing this deficiency, and since then there have been several creditable attempts at implementing a GUI OS on the A8. Now there’s another one in the pipeline: an as yet unnamed project which aims to bring a pre-emptive multi-tasking graphical operating system to the 8-bit Atari.
Impressive.
A few weeks ago that link went up on a classic computing FB group. It’s a very in-depth look at a lot of the behind the scenes gotchas that went into the development of that OS and the baseline technologies. It’s a really good but long read.
:0
I’ve been following this OS for quite some time now, running the test demos on a 65XE with Amiga mouse. It’s incredibly responsive and fast – you’d think you were on a 16-bit system with hardware support for blits rather than an 8-bit Atari. The work on this is phenomenal. Sure, it’s taken time to develop, but all good things take time. As many of us told the main dev in the thread at AtariAge, we’d rather he worked at his own pace and gave us a marvel for the ages than to rush out something not worth bothering with.
Can it Internet?
Actually I’ve been thinking for a long time of modding my 130XE to have 1mb of ram, how is it on memory?
It’d be also interesting to see VBXE2 be supported on it. Would be nice if they’d create more of those.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tHZWM12pl8
Edited 2015-09-10 05:29 UTC
Of course! It runs the latest Firefox!
There are some ethernet carts for the Atari, but I don’t imagine there will be support for that in GOS until someone with one of those carts adds it. The dev was asked about VBXE support a number of times, and the response is always “Wait until it’s working on regular systems, then he may work on VBXE support.”
Features can always be added, but having a solid base is most important to start. I’d rather have the devs working on the base until it’s finished than to have them working on a bunch of other features rather than the base.
Edited 2015-09-10 17:47 UTC
Wow, that’s some fantastic work right there! It makes me wanna pull my 800XL out of my parents’ attic and start modding it. I love these stories!
I currently have my 130XE connected to my 55″ TV with a SD2SIO box with a ton of stuff on it. Very much need to try this out.
One of these days I’ll fix my original Atari 800XL so that the display outputs color again… I think at some point I dropped it down the stairs and it’s been outputting to black and white since!
There should be a head-to-head review of this versus Contiki OS and other lightweight OSs for legacy platforms like the Atari. It’s awesome to see modern OS features on lightweight platforms, because the efficiency gains for OS design could help all around.
So it will or won’t run on something like an 800XL, ?
The 800XL is an XL machine.
That only has 64kb of memory by default. If I recall, the only one that has 128kb by default is the 130XE. Most models can upgrade past that though. I think both the 800xl and 130xe can go up to 1mb. I always thought it’d be cool to upgrade an atari 800’s memory. I did find a mod for that at one point, but it used a really early version of memory modules.
Here we go. http://www.atarimax.com/freenet/freenet_material/5.8-BitComputersSu…
Edited 2015-09-10 21:23 UTC
That takes some skill and a strong desire to do things right to make a full graphical OS for such limited hardware.
Modern operating systems are a complete and utter joke, I mean 1 GB of ram just to boot either OS X 10 or Windows.
I couldn’t find a link to any source code, is any source code available, I’d really like to have a look at it.
Edited 2015-09-10 19:50 UTC
He plans to release the source once it’s done. It’s been in such a state of flux that there’s no reason to release any yet. He adds features and hammers out bugs on a regular basis. He’ll pretty much NEED to release the source for people to use this once it’s done as the kernel and apps are tightly interwoven.
But no, there’s no source yet, just some demos and a bunch of videos.
Then he needs to release it now!!!
There are tons of programs that I would had like to look at the source code which the author said they would release once it was finished/polished.
Only to have real life (and in few cases death) come along to prevent the author from ever getting to that finished state.
So what you get is code that runs great on your machine, and just needs a few changes for your own use – BUT THERE IS NO SOURCE CODE.
Just because the code is not finished is no reason to keep it hidden, release the present version. Later he can release an update version. But presently anyone who is interested in this project may find out tomorrow that he got run over by a bus, have his house with all his files burn down or even a something as simple as a medical problem in the family take him away from the project.
RELEASE THE SOURCE CODE!
Yeah, I prefer when devs keep an open (at least readable) repository (github or whatever you prefer) for ongoing projects… just in case. Not always going to happen. I need to move more of my own code to my github account.
Anywho, the dev DOES often code pieces to the thread at AtariAge. So there IS some code to look at, but you’ll have to go through a looooooooooong thread to find it.
I prefer people keeping the source closed for the following reasons :
1- until ABI/API is stable
2- until everything is fine enough and reach 1.0
3- avoid useless forks
4- avoid people claiming this is their own creation
If people think they are competent enough to understand and redo it, then they don’t need the source code and crave for it, just type your own interpretation.
Looks aesthetically more appealing than Windows 8.
And definitely more usable than Windows 10!
Yup!
WTF were they thinking with Win10.
I see people trying to use it, they type a word or to, then start poking the screen with their fingers, write another word, try poking and drawing the screen for 5 minutes just trying to highlight and copy something. Its crazy.
I’ll totally agree with that statement!
This is actually a better looking system then the new OS X Yosemite, and certainly Windows 10.
I mean seriously, OS X Yosemite looks like somebody beat it with an ugly stick. And Win 8/10 is even worse.
If you can make an OS that is this small and responsive on a computer from the early 80’s, why then must Windows be tens of gigabytes big and take minutes to start on a hard drive on a last years computer model?
Something is wrong in the tech world …
Let’s see:
1) Support for multiple languages.
2) Support for a bajillion different setups whereas this OS only supports one, specific device.
3) Networking-support and all the stuff that entails.
4) A web-browser is an enormously complex piece of software all by itself.
5) Support for multiple different kinds of much more complex filesystems than FAT.
And so on and so forth. Please, open your eyes and think a little. Sure, Windows could possibly be much leaner than it is, but it’s also ginormously more complex an OS than the one here and the comparison simply makes zero sense.
Let’s see:
1) Support for multiple languages.
True!
2) Support for a bajillion different setups whereas this
OS only supports one, specific device.
And that is partly Microsoft’s fault. If they laid down some basic rules there probably be a few thousand if even that much different setups. As it is a manufactor seems to come up with any design and Microsoft will support it if the sales will be there.
3) Networking-support and all the stuff that entails.
True.
4) A web-browser is an enormously complex piece of software all by itself.
Yet, a lot of the complex of browsers are the result of supporting old standards and worse the roll-your-own standards Microsoft came up with when they tried to capture and control the internet market. Browser are complex, but they would not need to be as complex today as they are if Microsoft had not caused many of the original problems.
5) Support for multiple different kinds of much more complex filesystems than FAT.
Don’t make me laugh. Just about every open source and some closed source OSes out there support more file systems out of the box than Windows does from the very start. The file systems Microsoft supports are the ones it created itself, where is the support for non-Microsoft file systems?
But Win 3.1 did all this, and Win NT 3.51 did all this, and was incredibly stable and responsive. What exactly does Win 10 do that Win NT 3.51 didn’t do, other than just bloat your computer to death with sloppy code that just wastes resources.
NT 3.5 was an fantastically great OS, especially for its time. NT 4 was OK.
And as NT 3.5 was based on a microkernel, it is infinitely more secure than NT 4+ was, and we likely never would have had nearly as many security issues we have with a monolithic kernel.
They should have stuck with NT 3.5 approach, kept the core OS super small, efficient, and just updated the apps.
Edited 2015-09-11 17:40 UTC
OSes are bloated in an effort to get you to buy a more expensive computer. Software and hardware manufacturers have been doing this since the very early days of the PC. If you look at modern linux, the kernel itself is less than 50MB total, with the most important part being less than 20MB. Almost the entire “bulk” of linux is in the many modules (hardware support)… which are roughly 200MB on a modern system. This is why you can make a tiny linux distro for small systems and embedded devices. In linux, the “bloat” is in the apps where Windows coding styles rule, yielding apps that breach the gigabyte barrier.
As an example, contiki HAS networking (for example) and support for multiple languages and is STILL tiny compared to nearly any other OS. Also as an example, Firefox is less than 50MB in size. A modern browser is not a justification for bloat in the gigabyte range. Even the entirety of Open Office is a few hundred megabytes, and I consider it bloated. I really don’t know where Mac and Windows manage to spend those gigs of space needed… but they do.
Edited 2015-09-11 18:16 UTC
MorphOS does most of that with it’s 200+ megabyte system. I think the OS itself is about 35 MB.
I’m not saying an OS can’t be bigger than it fits on a floppy diskette. I just think 60 GB is way bloated. Not to mention how slow it feels on a pretty modern system.
Funny, I actually thought that while Win95 was slow as poop, eventually technology would catch up and by now the system should start in a second, and all the apps at the same time you clicked on your mouse button. But it’s still painfully slow!
The guys at AtariAge are awesome. I ended up getting an Atari 800XL with VBXE2 installed. I also have SDSIO.
And I bought Atari Assembler Editor and even learned enough 6502 Assembler to write a small game – nothing worth mentioning.
I am so impressed by the guy I only know as flashjazzcat, but his Last Word Atari word processor and this GUI OS – are amazing technical feats.
That is one impressive community of folks, and they are always churning out new stuff. Soon they’ll have 65816 accelerators…its really cool. At one time before I was running my own business, I would come from from work and do some programming on my Atari, and had it set up as my main desktop in my bedroom ….lol.
Unfortunately now its in the closet because I don’t have the time…so good to see the OS mentioned here.
Not that I have the hardware for it. Still its interesting.