Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris • Hacker News Board

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#51

Post by grishka » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:11 AM UTC

jfrunyon wrote: post #50

lisper wrote: post #19

This is cool, but I think it's misleading to call it an operating system. It's Tetris that runs without an operating system, which is to say, on bare metal, old school. Writing programs that run on bare metal is a cool and worthwhile thing to do, but calling any such program an "operating system" is confusing. This probably sounds like I'm picking a nit, but I think it matters for the sake of newbies just starting to…

IDK. Plenty of "operating systems" are linked as a single binary with the application, in the embedded world and historically. This takes it a bit further but I doubt you think the dividing line is "OS and application are maintained as a separate project" which is about the only distinction. I do see where you're coming from, though. Personally I would've described it as "bootable Tetris".

Even in embedded systems, there's still usually a distinct boundary between the OS kernel and the "application", and a well-defined API between the two.

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#52

Post by dudeinjapan » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

If Tetris (with an infinite board) is Turing complete, then how about building an OS from Tetris?

(It seems for certain problems it is NP-complete!) https://liacs.leidenuniv.nl/~kosterswa/tetris/tot.pdf

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#53

Post by mlang23 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:20 AM UTC

Do you know that effect? Once you touch a topic, it appears to show up everywhere! :-) I recently wrote a tetris clone for braille users. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26790812

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#54

Post by modernerd » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:38 AM UTC

“In the 1980s with things like the Amiga computer, for example, every game was a boot disk. It booted into its own customized version of an operating system that ran what it needed to run to make its game work well and be performant and reliable. … We know that in the past, hardware that was very capable and very interesting made it so easy to create an operating system that literally everybody did it. Not a few people. Not even most people. But literally everybody.”

– Casey Muratori in “The Thirty Million Line Problem” https://youtu.be/kZRE7HIO3vk?t=1205

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#55

Post by nikodunk » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:38 AM UTC

Damn that’s probably some good Tetris performance with it being so close to bare metal.

Edit: having read the readme, it looks like performance is locked at 60fps.

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#56

Post by procrastitron » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:43 AM UTC

There is a similar project for Space Invaders here: http://www.erikyyy.de/invaders/

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#57

Post by Hnrobert42 » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:44 AM UTC

ganafagol wrote: post #47

> This has only been tested in an emulator. Real hardware might not like it. ?! So this is just a stand-alone binary with an awkward loader then. The real trick (and challenge) comes when you want to run your stuff on actual bare metal.

I don’t understand your point? Are you trying to argue that OP didn’t work on a hard enough challenge to make you happy?

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#58

Post by sitkack » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:02 AM UTC

RantyDave wrote: post #35

loser777 wrote: post #17

How do we delineate "OS that does one thing" from "bare metal program?"

I'm having enough difficulty separating "hypervisor" from "operating system".

meta-os, the os that runs the os. Then there is nested virtualization, and then user mode virtualization, so you can easily get 4 levels deep. Think of all the exits!

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#59

Post by eru » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:04 AM UTC

dudeinjapan wrote: post #52

If Tetris (with an infinite board) is Turing complete, then how about building an OS from Tetris? (It seems for certain problems it is NP-complete!) https://liacs.leidenuniv.nl/~kosterswa/tetris/tot.pdf

If you already know that it's Turing complete, isn't it automatically also NP-complete?

(I also read the paper: to clarify, they are referring to different problems you can build on top of Tetris, and prove some of them NP-complete and some Turing complete.

(They don't mention Turing completeness directly, but they do a reduction to Post's correspondence problem.))

Re: Tetris-OS: An operating system that only plays Tetris

#60

Post by teddyh » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:05 AM UTC

modernerd wrote: post #54

“In the 1980s with things like the Amiga computer, for example, every game was a boot disk. It booted into its own customized version of an operating system that ran what it needed to run to make its game work well and be performant and reliable. … We know that in the past, hardware that was very capable and very interesting made it so easy to create an operating system that literally everybody did it. Not a few peop…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-booting_disk