[N8VEM: 17772] Symbos - 8-bit on steroids

[Nikolay Dimitrov]

Gents,

If you're one of those people who can't sleep at night after seeing a
cool vintage project, please don't read anymore. I don't take any
responsibility for your sleep deprivation :).


Symbos is a 8-bit multitasking OS, based on microkernel. This OS runs on
CPC/MSX and compatibles. The most striking feature is the M$-like GUI,
which definitely looks quite usable. You can check for more info here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS
http://www.symbos.de/

...and you can see this cool OS in action (btw, I can't explain how the
Z80 decodes mp3, please share if you know):

I can only share my admiration to the author of this project. On the
other side, as far as I saw on the project web site, this OS is not
open-source, and I'm not exactly sure if there are any distribution
limitations.

Kind regards,
Nikolay

[James Moxham]

Thanks Nikolay. I won't be sleeping much tonight!

Well, I wonder if we could get this running on Grant's multicomputer?

One of the issues with building Z80 systems out of discrete chips is the
banking circuitry. Designs optimised for one solution, eg 32k banks, may
not be best for MP/M or SymbOS.

With Grant's board we can experiment with different banking designs,
including more complicated ones that would take quite a few chips.

http://www.symbos.de/download.htm scroll down to Developer documentation,
and the second file in this is Applications which describes the banking in
a bit more detail. They seem to be using 16k banks. For ultimate
flexibility, consider 512k of ram, and each 16k bank can be anywhere in
that ram. So each bank would need a latch to hold its bank address, plus
the decoding. It would be maybe 8 chips or more in TTL, but in VHDL it
would only be a few lines of code.

It would be a fun project getting Grant's computer running SymbOS...

Cheers, James

Post by Nikolay Dimitrov
Gents,
If you're one of those people who can't sleep at night after seeing a
cool vintage project, please don't read anymore. I don't take any
responsibility for your sleep deprivation :).
Symbos is a 8-bit multitasking OS, based on microkernel. This OS runs on
CPC/MSX and compatibles. The most striking feature is the M$-like GUI,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SymbOS
http://www.symbos.de/
...and you can see this cool OS in action (btw, I can't explain how the
http://youtu.be/2-oBNh0UkQc
I can only share my admiration to the author of this project. On the
other side, as far as I saw on the project web site, this OS is not
open-source, and I'm not exactly sure if there are any distribution
limitations.
Kind regards,
Nikolay

[Edward Snider]

That is really cool... Looks like it requires a hardware mp3 decoder BTW...

On Sunday, April 13, 2014 4:30:52 PM UTC-5, picmaster wrote:

...and you can see this cool OS in action (btw, I can't explain how the

Post by Nikolay Dimitrov
http://youtu.be/2-oBNh0UkQc
Kind regards,
Nikolay