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SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

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Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#71

Post by wolfgke »

pkaye wrote: post #52
wolfgke wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does every OS screenshot (not from a big company) always have to have a few pictures of women in it? > It's ridiculously unprofessional in my book. If it were pictures of men, people would complain that there are no women included in the pictures people (i.e. women are discriminated against). You can't be everybody's darling.

Maybe half women and half men.

Then the political correctness warriors come out of their holes and claim that this reduces humanity to two genders.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#72

Post by watmough »

qualitytime wrote: post #11
stuaxo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off ebay, An Amstrad CPC 6128 will do. Though you may want an SD Card adapter to get the files onto it. As the banner on the site mentions, it works on Amstrad CPC, MSX, Amstrad PCW and Enterprise 64/128 (I'm not sure what this last one is).

The Enterprise was a British dream 80s computer that most people could not afford. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_(computer)

For me this started the trend of the render being much nicer than the final product.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/24/elan_flan_enterpris...

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#73

Post by squarefoot »

digi_owl wrote: post #29
api wrote: post #19

These sorts of things are great reminders of just how bloated modern software is and what is possible if you can avoid the bloat. These systems are less powerful than a typical modern washing machine or refrigerator.

Much of the bloat is from higher resolution graphics, and all the layers of mitigation of various security issues that comes with multitasking.

+1, and add theming and dynamic resizing of GUI elements to that. In the old days a window was not much more than a rectangle buffered in some structure in memory, nowadays a hell of complexity and CPU cycles are required to deal with different fonts, themes, widget sets etc.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#74

Post by userbinator »

anigbrowl wrote: post #66
ddevault wrote: post #9

Symbos is pretty cool but it's a crying shame that it's closed source. A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand the value of open source, but will give away binaries for free.

A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand Don't be so patronizing. Of course they understand it, but what they want is something different from what you want: status in the demo scene. If they open source it they're likely to end up as a footnote in their own projects rather than basking on difficult-to-scale peaks among their peers. It's not like open-sourcing it is going to enrich them in some more conc…

status in the demo scene

...and since the demoscene is closely associated with the cracking/warez scene, the implicit message is always "if you want to know how it works, get a disassembler and figure it out yourself."

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#75

Post by dfox »

mtkd wrote: post #50
rbanffy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, no. No memory protection, you see.

Which also meant you could do a lot of optimisations - like moving the stack pointer to point to the display memory area and using 'push' to blit a chunk of image data to screen which was quicker than using an 'ld' loop. Also having polymorphic functions where you could write over a couple of bytes to make the function behave differently at runtime - saving code memory space - and learning the hex for most of the com…

You can still do that, even more so on systems with memory protection as you will not break OS's interrupt handlers by doing that.

Notably pixomatic (Rad Game Tools' SW rasterizer) compiles Direcd3D shaders into i386 code which uses ESP as general purpose register.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#76

Post by icedchai »

digi_owl wrote: post #29
api wrote: post #19

These sorts of things are great reminders of just how bloated modern software is and what is possible if you can avoid the bloat. These systems are less powerful than a typical modern washing machine or refrigerator.

Much of the bloat is from higher resolution graphics, and all the layers of mitigation of various security issues that comes with multitasking.

But orders of magnitude more bloat? I had full multitasking in the late 80's, on an Amiga 500 with 512K of RAM. There was no memory protection, but there was a GUI.

I remember running Linux (kernel 1.0 and earlier) with X11, in 8 megs of RAM or less, back on an old 486. I could compile kernels. Running emacs was a bit painful, however.

What we have today is more bloated than I could have possibly imagined 20 years ago...

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#77

Post by sedachv »

jacquesm wrote: post #33
Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TI-83+ does not have bank switched RAM, but it's sister products the 83+ SE, 84+, and 84+ SE do. Regardless, you can achieve preemptive multitasking on z80 without banked RAM, you just need PIC.

> you just need PIC. Or a relocator. This can be a bit tricky but it's been done on many architectures.

Do you have any links/pointers to systems that did this?

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#78

Post by stuaxo »

anigbrowl wrote: post #66
ddevault wrote: post #9

Symbos is pretty cool but it's a crying shame that it's closed source. A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand the value of open source, but will give away binaries for free.

A lot of people in the z80 community don't understand Don't be so patronizing. Of course they understand it, but what they want is something different from what you want: status in the demo scene. If they open source it they're likely to end up as a footnote in their own projects rather than basking on difficult-to-scale peaks among their peers. It's not like open-sourcing it is going to enrich them in some more conc…

Agree with all this. Lots of demogroups have started releasing open source these days, which is heartening. There's definitely a feeling that the scene is getting older, so possibly passing on knowledge may be a motivator.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#79

Post by stuaxo »

rwmj wrote: post #40
fwilliams wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it means 1024 kB of addressable virtual memory.

The Amstrad CPC had 64K or 128K of RAM + 32K of ROM (in a total addressable space of 64K) using "RAM banking". The Amstrad PCW was the same but with even more RAM (up to 512K). This worked very differently from what we now think of as virtual memory. On the CPC it worked as follows: There were two 16K ROMs, located at 0-16K and 48K-64K. The 16K-48K middle area contained 32K of fixed RAM. The upper and lower ROM areas…

Indeed, you could plug extra RAM in the back of the CPC, and even stack these.

Re: SymbOS: Graphical Z80 Multitasking Operating System

#80

Post by j45 »

Nice to see GEOS referenced in this article - it also was the underpinning for the Atari ST line of computers that did well Europe and swung well above their weight.

If only I could find an ST 1040 again to appreciate Revenge of the Mutant Camels on a machine that was as good at desktop publishing, animating, creating sprite based games and and making music.

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