C64 OS has one goal. Make a Commodore 64 feel fast and useful in today’s modern world.
It’s a very high bar. The C64 was introduced in 1982 and has an 8-bit, 1MHz, 6510 CPU with just 64 kilobytes of directly addressable memory. It has a screen resolution of 320×200 pixels, and a fixed palette of 16 colors. But, it is an incredibly versatile machine. And it enjoys an active userbase and a great variety of modern hardware expansions.
The C64 has had many operating systems written for it, So why write another?
Some of these projects were designed to be experimental, or to demonstrate a point, rather than to solve a problem or to make using the C64 better. Others had good intentions but pushed the machine in ways it wasn’t designed for, compromising on speed and usability in the pursuit of features available on more powerful computers. The aim of C64 OS is to work with the limitations of the Commodore 64 and enable it to become useful.
It never ceases to amaze me how much functionality programmers can squeeze out of old micros.
Hopefully it will support REU – ram expansion unit !
And Turbo Chameleon 64 !
I hope so, I remember writing my own GUI system for the C64. But it had problems that more ram would had solved.
1) There was too little memory left over for interesting programming. (Larger arrays)
2) Fonts were slow to draw because they were scaled as they were drawn, there was not enough memory to cache them.
3) 1541 was slow, at the time I did not know how to do FASTLOAD to speed up reads. (RAMDISK is help too)
4) I coded it all wrong, today I could write far better, faster and smaller code. The system was too hard to add features to.
I’ve been talking to the creator and this OS is interesting because it’s not another case of “look what the C64 can do!” — many people have already demonstrated that you can make a neat demo of something that resembles Windows. C64OS is different. It actually aims to be fast and usable; it runs in text mode rather than the slow bitmap mode, so it won’t look as pretty, but opening menus won’t make you want to tear your hair out.
It’s designed around modern storage devices for the C64 like the SD2IEC so that directories are required and the OS doesn’t have to juggle floppy disks all the time. You can keep the OS, Apps and data all in one place.
I’m looking forward for when demos are available and people can start making some productive apps for it.
Will have to give it a try when I get my Ultimate64 put together.
I already have a beefy Atari 130XE, need to still install the GUI on that.
Possibilities abound! I helped run a BBS back in the day which ran on a C64 with everything loaded into RAM or onto a RAMdisk – and people hardly believed it. They were sure it had to be on at least a 286.
That said – isn’t Contiki OS (http://www.contiki-os.org/) an ideal starting point for this project?