Retro development

Hey, I just thought I'd put up an image of a project I've been working on in blitz3d for over a year on and off.

It's actually a development IDE for an operating system which runs on the 8bit computers the amstrad CPC and MSX2 from the early eighties. This OS is called Symbos and is as near to windows as you can imagine on an old 8bit.

Here's the blitz IDE and a screen of symbos running on an amstrad cpc.



The IDE has a full form editor, art conversion, a pretty good video suite. It also contains a full code editor, with built in assembler and basic language compiler. I know its a waste of time to help develop on a computer over 20 years old, but its fun :) Another use of Blitz :)

Oh and have a look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCyQZiOr0iQ if you think a z80 can't handle a modern operating system

Rob

That's obscenely impressive. Congrats!

Dude that is totally gorgeous! Do I sence a small smattering or nostalga in the forum today?
Best luck to you!

Sweet! :)

That is just f****** unbeleviable... I can't believe this is possible!

how long does the tape take to load lol..

and that makes me wana get my old cpc out. if i could find it.

Yes tape loading is slow :) Actually symbos can work off the old 180k a side 3" disk, but its actually a FAT32 OS so can use a modern HD.

Plus it works on both MSX2 and CPC, with the applications being truely cross platform. Tommorrow the 16colour version for CPC and MSX arrives, with the possibilty to support 256 colour on MSX in the future. That's why I've coded a video suite into my IDE.

Can I point out only the IDE written in blitz is mine. Symbos is coded by a german guy called prodaton. For more info on symbos you can look at www.symbos.de

That's just mind-boggling. I've become so used to modern resource wastefulness that I'd forgotten what could be done with a few K of ram and some ingenuity.

SpaceAce

Mleh, I knew I had my TI-99/4A around here somewhere, I gotta try to see how hard it would be to do an OS in TI BASIC. This is just getting me jealous now.