noone_youknow

In the context of the Amiga you didn’t need to change the signal frequency, the underlying video signal stayed the same.

For wider pixels, the hardware just drew each pixel for longer, and for taller pixels each pixel spanned more lines.

Pixels weren’t real in the CRT days :)

This is open-source hardware, caveat emptor is implied.

At this stage in a project like this, I’d expect the people who were getting boards fabbed to also have the skills to sanity check the schematics and layout before they sent the gerbers off to China.

For me, one of the saddest side-effects of modern generative AI is this apparent rise in an attitude of “I don’t know how to do this, therefore anyone who does this must have just one-shotted it with AI”.

Even if we assume this _could_ be one-shotted, projects like this from respected members of the retro hardware community would be what made that one-shot even possible.

It isn’t, actually.

There would likely be value in a POSIX layer as you describe, at least from the point of view of porting existing programs. And perhaps it will happen, if I get far enough along, but it will never be a kernel feature - it would be an entirely userspace concept intended only to speed up porting and building out said user space.

Perhaps in the fullness of time essential software can be rewritten to Anos’ “native API”, or perhaps that’s a pipe dream and not worth the work, but the option will be there.

Thank you! A project like this is all about compounding small wins for sure, just building one thing on top of the previous thing until (hopefully) one day it’s a complete thing :D

I’m glad you found some inspiration and really appreciate your kind comment :)

I agree that for it to be generally useful, it’ll need to be easy to port existing software to. But I don’t think I’ll need a translation layer at the syscall level (unless I want to expose a Linux-compatible ABI as you suggest, which is totally a non-goal).

You can get surprisingly far in this area with a decent libc implementation - once you have that porting a lot of things becomes possible. There will always be harder problems (e.g. anything that hard-depends on fork) but with enough work pretty much anything in user-space should be possible to port eventually.

I’m using newlib for libc, with a custom Anos-specific libgloss that mostly talks to SYSTEM via IPC to get stuff done, and uses syscalls where needed (and a process has the appropriate capabilities). I’m filling out that low-level interface as I go, and will be using porting of exiting BSD or Linux software to drive that implementation :)

Haha that quote felt pretty much obligatory :D Non-POSIX is definitely keeping things fun, letting me explore different ideas without having to fit into an existing interface design :)

Thanks! I haven't thought much about long term to be honest, right now my immediate goal is to get enough USB HID to be able to make it interactive, with the medium term goal of porting enough software for it being self-hosting.

> We live in an age of AI overinvestment. I would reserve judgement until they prove they actually have something.

Haha yes, that's a very fair comment!

There's ideas in here from various other kernels - some of the capability stuff is inspired by (but simpler than) seL4, and the message passing IPC and how I'll avoid priority inversion is based on ideas from QNX. Generally as a learning process I've tried to keep as open a mind as possible, without trying to reinvent all the wheels at once...

SYSTEM has a tiny arch-specific assembly trampoline which just sets up the initial stack pointer for new processes that it creates and makes the jump, but other than that it's source-compatible across architectures.

The platform detail extraction isn't yet complete, such that devices management on non-ACPI platforms isn't finished, but the idea is the abstraction will be enough that drivers for (at least) MMIO devices will be trivially portable.

That's a good way to look at it, and on reflection I feel the same way.

It's certainly useful _to me_ and has helped me really nail down concepts I thought I already understood, but it turns out I didn't.

I just hope that, in an age where it feels like code, and maybe even deep technical knowledge have diminishing value, projects like this don't become completely anachronistic.

Ahem, well, that's embarrassing! :D