AMAZING New OS for the 40-year-old Commodore 64! C64 OS Review
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 มิ.ย. 2024
- Exclusive review of the new operating system for the 40 year-old Commodore 64 computer - C64OS! Is it better than GEOS? Oh and check out PCBWay.com - great PCBs from just $5!
👾 Support us for exclusive perks: / perifractic or / @retrorecipes
🎧 Get the music: retrorecip.es/music
👕 Merch: perifractics-retro-recipes.cre...
🗨️ Full linktree: retrorecip.es/linktree
RECIPE INGREDIENTS*
• Get C64 OS: c64os.com/c64os/
• Retrospecs 😎: amzn.to/3S26ygi
• JiffyDOS: store.go4retro.com/search.php...
• EasyFlash 3: store.go4retro.com/easyflash-3/
• Savyour: www.mssiah.com/index.php
• ZZAP! & CRASH Annuals: www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
• Jungle Joe: vector5games.itch.io/jungle-joe
• 🛠 Get the tools I use: 🇺🇸amzn.to/3eT3SzD | 🇬🇧amzn.to/30y05lg
SAUCES & CHEERS
• Gregory Nacu
• Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons
• The Internet Archive
• Gardenside Prods., Clue Detectives & Paradise Radio
• Special thanks to Ladyfractic & the Puppyfractics!
• All other media featured is marked as public domain on Google Images or used with written permission or shown under fair use law.
MENU
0:00 Intro & Unboxing
3:24 Setup
8:00 Boot & Desktop
9:40 Menus & Utilities
20:07 Desktops & Backdrops
22:39 Chess & Graphics
31:08 Multitasking File Manager
33:33 Running PRGs/D64s
38:03 Price/Review Conclusions
SOME INGREDIENTS FROM
• MattGrandis.net - design of retrorecip.es
• / _gazmarshall - certain graphics
© All music & content Copyright & TM Retro Recipes™ LLC 1988-2022.
*Some links may offer some peanuts to support this retrochannel but all opinions are 100% unbiased.
#retro #retrogaming #retrocomputing #dogs #gaming #gamergirlk - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
The dev took the toothpaste tube, used it up, squeezed everything out of it then managed to get even more out! Absolutely astonishing work
He has one of those little tube slidy attachment things that let you get even more out
@@benlesczynski6194 does that plug into the eight-pin?
noting that there has always a physical use the vic-20 and the c64 programming language for use for commercial gain
And it was one of those metal toothpaste tubes we had in the 80s which you had to use those rollers for to get everything out with.
@@RetroRecipes and then used a needle to get the last bit out of the tube
This is an absolutely amazing piece of software. The fact that you can play music and move a window at the same time on this 40 years old computer is nuts. Really some people have talent :)
I guess with more modern computers, there are more ideas now of what computers are capable of and the old 8bit PC's were never utilised to their full potential at the time they were new. People back then didn't have any concept of what computers could do or what they were capable of.
Not really that hard to set up an interrupt to call a music player routine once every frame. I remember doing this on a stock C64 , had the music from Driller playing under interrupt - whilst still having access to code and run programs under basic. It did still blow my mind at the time - but its not really that tricky to do.
think what they could do today with modern computers if the drive was there really push the boundaries, and not assume an endless supply of cpu and ram resources
@@EsotericArctos Most people do not realize their phones are more powerful than the computers Nasa used for the moonshot.
@@DanT10 the C64 itself was, 40 years ago, a bit more powerful than the Apollo guidance computer designed in the 60s
What a great thing to know that almost 40 years later, someone is still developing on these platforms ... THANKS for sharing !!!
You’re welcome!
For me, this is almost tear inducing. I grew up using the C64, and it is still one of the most "home" feelings I'll ever have. Some of the games are still among my favorites of all time, as is the physical technology itself. It reminds me of long ago, when things were less messy, my family was still around, and the world seemed bright and overall good. But then again, the 80s in general seem that way, even looking back now, for all of their faults.
Thanks so much for reviewing this -- I know I'm just a random person on the internet, but I hope you can get some positive vibes at least from the thanks. :)
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️ I agree.
This man speaks for all of us.
@@RetroRecipes Is it just me or did you also get watery / glassy eyes in the video, especially around the 10 minutes mark while talking about the C64 getting something like this 40 years later? :D
@@moomah5929 I have been known to do so but on this occasion that might've been just you ;-)
@@RetroRecipes Hehe. :D
Btw, for me the C64 OS would be more of a toy than a "daily" driver. At least I would get some use out of my SD2IEC which hasn't seen much action since getting a Pi1541. My TFCIII is more than enough graphical UI for my general needs.
It's amazing how much of the limitations of early hardware came down to storage rather than the CPU.
@Jimbo Bimbo oh wow. that sounds amazing. wish i still had my old STE
My thought exactly when I read that it requires 9000 free blocks. With a 1541 disk drive giving you 664 free blocks on an empty disk...yep, 14 disks. Back in the days, owning even just two disk drives was "insane luxury", and the maximum number of 1541 drives which could be connected simultaneously was four.
Apart from that, development was much more difficult. Nowadays, you write your software on a PC. Back in the days, that was something only big companies could afford; a "lone coder" would write his code on the machine itself. Expect 100+ disks of assembler source code.
Actually seeing a printed manual after many years made me feel very nostalgic. I miss the old big boxes with manuals and sometimes extras like maps and stickers.
and Monkey Island 2's code wheel :)
Hats off to Gregory Nacu on this very impressive accomplishment! Excellent run-through and review in this video.
Can you imagine how things would have turned out if the C64 had this as its OS in the 80s? Such an amazing idea.
Actually the GUI of final cartridge was pretty nifty back in the day, never got it why geos was the defacto standard
we would end up using PCs.....?
We kind of did, and more advanced graphically, it was the GEOS operating system, which is mentioned in the video. My dad had a friend who was a programmer at Apple. One day I showed him the GEOS operating system. He was blown away that the C64 could do something very similar to the Apple machines of the day.
If this was the C64 OS in the 80ties, todays Windows and OSX would be much different and more advanced.
This gives a glimpse on what may happen when AI starts writing software for modern hardware.
This OS incorporates ideas and functions that we could only have dreamed of back in the eighties. Mind-blowing!
And many of those things hadn't even been thought up yet too back then.
This is as groundbreaking as GEOS was back in the day. Seemingly unlimited potential on a 40-year-old platform. I can't wait to see this evolve. There may be some lessons here for modern system programmers in using resources...
Definitely reminds me of GEOS OS wayyy back in the 80's which was a similar attempt to bring Mac like windows to the C64. Its biggest drawback was flipping through multiple floppies and course loading was slow. This is a fresh breath of air to an actual OS attempt. :)
so much b l o a t in modern computing
All I can say is wow.... The C64 was my first experience with computers and even being online with quantumlink. It's so awesome to see new software that is so advance for this system.
a clea labour of love - having written my own text-based screen os back in the day (emulator for clipper in dos, back in the day using turbo pascal), you can see the time and effort taken to manage the wimp interface and make it fully functional for the running apps. Really impressive
Right?! I'd love to see any footage you have of your own OS too...
Id love to see that too. I remember thinking Pascal was "the future" when I found it.
It couldn't be too hard to get Free Pascal (i8086-msdos target) working with your code.
a few things... I meant to say that the OS on display here for the c64 was really impressive and had taken care/etc. (didnt mean to imply my own was really impressive), second, unfortunately I lost all my old HDDs in a house fire so nothing to show here.. boo - it would be fascinating to review my own old-school code now (I'm sure i'd be horrified and a large amount of WTF-per-minute)
Seeing this reminds me of what it would be like to replace an Idiot Phone with an original Palm Pilot. Yes, I have one that still works.
It's amazing that after all these years so many old systems are still very much alive.
Absolutely magical. How on earth does someone code such a thing with so little resources and leave enough for apps to run on it?
If you have enough ROM, there's lots of cool stuff you can do with very little RAM. This Commodore OS probably reads continuously from the flash drive, with most of the complexity being read-only. When running a program, it could save most of its state to the drive and step out of the way. This is why increasing the I/O speed dramatically boosts the OS's performance.
An example of a system with a nearly identical processor is the NES. It only had 2k of RAM, with another 2k for video memory (and a little extra for sprite positions and palette data). That's insanely small by today's standards. With 2k, you can only store a 4-bit image with 64 by 64 pixels. Its games were awesome though, because the ROMs were huge in comparison. The PPU was continuously reading from them, just fast enough to keep up with the CRT beam. The CPU read most things out of ROM rather than loading them to RAM first. With banking, you could pull in whatever you wanted to the CPU's 64k address space, or the PPU's (picture processing unit) 16k address space.
I just had to check this out, it caught my eye in the sidebar, 40 years ago my buddy had a C64 with no tape drive or floppy drive, we spent a half a day typing in a BASIC program, he or I tripped over the power cord and lost all our work and that was pretty much it for my interest in a C64! Cool and crazy that somebody is writing a new OS for it! I think Terry Davis is in heaven smiling down at this development!
New C64 OS > Windows 11
Always cool seeing new stuff released for our old toys, cudos for the developper! J.R. must be gratefull playing with you🙂
40 Golden Years on and we are still Keeping up with the Commodore !
Actually OS9 for the Color Computer 3 is a full multi-user, multi-tasking OS that is still being developed and updated today, and the original version goes back to the original coco and that was before the c64 I believe...
I remember watching a few of his earlier update videos. Even early on what he was able to accomplish was absolutely mindblowing. I'm really happy to see it has reached the 1.0 milestone!
Yeah I saw some of those too. Its too bad he had to roll back using icons on the desktop in favor of thr Text based object, but I totally get the extreme limitations the system imposes. Its good the icons still exist and he can at least use them in the app screens.
What a wonderful thing. I can see this opening up so many possibilities and enjoyment. The C64 never stops growing. 😊
Appreciate you showing everything in realtime. That is kind of important in reviews of software like this to give potential users a good look at what to expect. Thumbs up!
I've been an occasional reader of Greg Naçu's blog pages talking about his design decisions and other challenges. This is an amazing achievement, right up there with Adam Dunkel's Contiki.
There just isn't enough space on the VIC-II text screen to show very much. And with UI gadgets and other elements like borders and title bars all around, it's compromised even more. GEOS, for all its glacial (pre-global warming) speed, managed to use bitmap graphics to circumvent that limitation. Even just an 80×25 screen would make a world of difference. The simulated 80 columns of Contiki's second release also come to mind.
I know-I _know..._ that using a bitmap screen is a big memory hog. A text screen takes 1000 bytes (not even 1K!) and a bitmap screen takes 8 times as much, and twice _that_ if you're using double-buffering. That isn't even getting into things like color maps and sprite pointers. Greg's managed to get 5 screens in there, switchable, and he's still only 62.5% of the memory footprint of just _one_ bitmap.
So, obviously, he's made some deliberate choices. He's favoring speed and compactness over information density. Plus a bitmap screen has the problem of attribute clash, so a text screen is actually more practical for color. Not that a text screen doesn't have its own color limitations, but at least the color isn't going to be split up in ways that break across the middle of a UI element.
It loaded the calculator faster than my core i7 windows 10 PC off a samsung SSD.
It needs to be on a cartridge of its own where you can plug the SD card into the cartridge. It will boot instantly running from RMOM. The cartridge can load data so much faster, and the cartridge can directly DMA into the 64.
Yep! Cartridge would be great but it need not be a new hardware. An EF3 (or any cardridge which can emulate one) plus an SD2IEC would be a great combination.
IDE64 is a "cartridge." And booting from an IDE64 is supported and it's wicked fast.
Interested in running this using clonatos roms and a mister box…
I never owned a c64 .. but it was the computer most of my friends had
Dog looks like he's having commodore loading screen flashbacks
I ran the original GEOS graphical interface operating system on my C64 years ago. Interesting new operating system
Even the Atari 8-bits got new OSs and incredible upgrades. Stereo Pokey, 1MB Ultimate, Video Board XE, etcetcetc. It would be nice to see more people talk about them.
The light blue area in the memory layout is the zeropage ($0000-$00ff), stack ($0100-$01FF) and most likely the used screen area (default goes from $0400-$07E8)
Thats very impressive. I'm doffing my cap in Gregory's general direction
It boggles my mind how much some of these talented people are managing to strangle out of this old hardware, it's incredible.
My first computer was the C64. When it came out. I progressed to Amigas and then Video Toaster scene. I am amazed at the development this magnificent programmer developed. Amazing.
Great review. I have never owned a C64, and probably never will, but it pleases me to see that someone has devoted an incredible amount of time and effort to produce a new OS for it.
imagine travelling back in time 40 years and showing to c64 users.
Wow, I have a old c64 computer in a box. I am curious about relearning the platform and now with this it moves higher on my list of to do. Thanks, great video.
40 years on and the bread bin has a new OS and this looks damn good with a good few things to do on it as well, love it. This was a great video as always and a nice surprise being a Tuesday so until the next one you guys take care and have a great week. Oh an puppyfractic the 2nd was so the star of the video ☺️☺️
Glad you liked this! We are truly spoilt (as is Ozzyfractic!) 🙌
ha, due to your picture, I read this in Stewies voice.
This is incredible!!! I would buy a brand new C64 packaged with this OS. I’m a novice user but I love the idea of a modern OS on old hardware.
So excited to see new stuff for the 64 and we were long overdue for a new OS. Great review, Christian!
The fact it’s already this fast with just the fastloader is just amazing
I only ever owned the VIC-20 but seeing what can be done with the C64 today is pretty amazing.
It's a great achievement using some very limited technology.
One thing I'd suggest adding.
C128 support. 80 column support would be a huge improvement, especially since this is all text based. More memory, possible to add ROM support (ala GEOS 128) for fast loading the OS via ROM U36. You could even support... dual monitors!
Could you imagine mailing this to your self back in time? Oh wow.
I love to see this - so many great memories! I'm glad that there is still a considerable following for the computers that shaped our early experiences.
Well, a very interesting episode. I can see some potential there, and having the file manager for working with the SD card is handy. It does need a bit more work there to make things seamless and smooth, but fascinating to finally see it in action. I don't know if I would use it every day, but I can see me trying it.
Yes I agree and I hope it grows into something full of apps. I can certainly imagine using it for the disk file organisation as you mentioned.
I'm kind of in mix of being very impressed and yet disappointed - I think it has to do with the memory use, and with C-64 Contiki OS (with GUI) which had co-operative multitasking kernel, a network stack (you could access internet or even run a server - in fact it had a telnet client, web browser and web server) and much more. It wasn't fast, but the kernel itself was - I think if you stripped it down (Contiki OS [which the C-64 GUI variant branced off from] is designed for very limited 8-bit systems) and built the UI and API's like this OS has it might've been even better, faster and maybe even have smaller memory footprint.
Still awesome - and maybe I don't know as much as I think I do
How beautiful & how clever! I’m sat watching & I’m quite tearful! My first computer was a C64 all those decades ago - I’m sure it’s still in my parents loft somewhere - I must take a look!!
You're very welcome!
Nice review!! Thanks for letting us know about this!!
This has changed my life! I've had my C64 since 1985 and this is revolutionary. BTW, your transatlantic accent makes the video even more appealing.
Thank you
His next challenge is to do a Vic20 version. Just how much OS can you stuff into 3583 bytes?
3583 bytes. How do I remember that after so many years? Can't remember my mobile number, but can remember the Vic20 had 3583 bytes free.
Awesome to see it in action! Greg has done a fantastic job! 👏
Agreed shtunners!
The tie fighter looks like. Moving back and forth through the months of a calendar.
You’re right!
Just got my copy shipped. Am so excited for this and thankyou so much for the video.
Very impressive! Thanks for showing and sharing 😄👍
Outstanding! Very, very interesting subject. As well as one of your most enjoyable episode ever. Thank you very much! Keep up the great work and engaging content! Wishing you and the whole crew, the best of everything!
Thank you for your kind words! Means a lot 👍🕹️
@@RetroRecipes Your content just keeps getting better. Many thanks from a grateful fan.
That is so cool! Great job on the overview video, really enjoyed it.
In 1986, I wrote a windowing system for the IBM PC (4.77 MHz 8088) with a floppy disk drive. In initial design decision was to use TEXT MODE so the amount of data would be reasonable. Windows were overlapping and could be dragged etc. Turned out to be very fast, even on the original hardware! It was easy for a program to use: creating a window gave it a pointer to a virtual screen of that dimension, and it could manipulate the character and attribute ram in that array as if it were the screen memory. The library would copy from those virtual screens to produce the overlapping windows in the real screen.
Due to the limitations of the CGA and general speed, it minimized copying and intelligently picked out just the regions to copy, that showed (not covered by other windows).
This proved to be a good engineering decision even on later hardware, as the CPU got faster the interface to the video RAM was stuck in the past and became dog slow in comparison. Because of this, some programs ported to use my library even in a trivial way (one big window) ran much faster! It could manipulate the virtual video memory array in its casual inefficient way, and upon triggering an update the library would minimally copy that to the real video RAM, copying each changed character only once. Note that it always used 16-bit writes to the video RAM, which (on then-current cards) used a protocol newer than the original 8-bit bus, so not only did it transfer twice as much but it used fewer cycles. So, the program updates _only characters_ , writing 8-bit values to non-concecutive addresses. My update copy copies 16-bit values, even though the adjacent 8 bits (the attribute, or color) was not changed. This alone made it faster than the original program was when it wrote directly to video RAM.
I later updated it to C++ and wrote a fancy multi-windowed text editor that I used for many years. It wasn't until the mid '90's that I was given a machine at work that had a graphics card that was capable enough to make a GUI-based editor smooth (responsive and fast updating) enough. That was a 70MHz Pentium IIRC, but the big difference I believe was the switch to the PCI bus, and "minimum standard" cards that had some built-in line-drawing, box-drawing, and blitting.
But I still have fond memories of doing things in CPU code only, one byte at a time.
I remember using my C64 back in the late 80s. What a fantastic time it was 🙂
Nice to see these kinds of developments, even after 40 years. I won't be using this operating system though, I don't need it.
But this weekend I did order "Vision Basic" for my C64. Also a new development, a completely new Basic with a lot of potential.
@RetroRecipes Great review! @13:37 Look forward to the (future coming) deep dive into the C64OS wi-fi feature is explored-just sent Greg Nano a tweet about that.
Sort of a "Big Lebowski" vibe going with those glasses.... love the OS and video. Thanks for giving us the demo!
😎
Great review of a very interesting product. It's amazing to see what's still being done for our beloved C64 40 years later. Plus, as someone who recently switched to Windows 10 and isn't all that in love with it yet, I'm hoping that one day we may see C64 OS developed for modern PC's.
I'm all for Julia Roberts' knees being added to v2.0 myself.
😆
GEOS was so slow, this is very snappy. Some ram expansion, this may just be the normal use. Love it.
This video made me so nostalgic. U made me feel again as a kid on c64 i was. Thank you!
The C64 just gets stronger and stronger, the support out their is just astounding. And is this the best YT channel out there, you bet it is!!
Totally gobsmacked here. Can't believe doing all that on the C64. Can you imagine how this would have impacted the life of the platform if this had been possible then?
Love the interpretation of some of the features we all are use to, in a simple and yet responsive interface. I used Geos over the 1541 ... to me is more like a gimic thing ... really slow. As magnificent as it is for such a machine like the 64, this os is more down to the Earth, give the 64 good speed in terms of today's usability "standards"
I don't intend this negatively but those glasses made me immediately think, Walter from The Big Lebowski. Really cool to see the new OS. Thanks!
You are precisely the 42nd person to say that 😎
WOW !!! I feel like I am a happy 5 years old again of 1980's with a Pacman on DOS PC
That looks great. Amazing considering the difference in time from the machine to the software 😘
Incredible! No other words to describe.
I never had a C64. My machine for the last 40 years has been the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, but I found this fascinating and entertaining. Brilliant work by the author 👍🏻
A very interesting video. It was nice to see the system in action, which I've heard about before. 🤩
Was wondering how you write apps. for the OS that can run in the desktop. You at least showed how you run a conventional app. from the desktop. That is nice. I used to wonder about that with GEOS. Seeing how 64OS operates reminds me of how the IIGS was set up. I remember it had an optional GUI you could boot up. It seemed like you could run full-screen apps. out of it. I don't know, since I only saw a friend use it. He used a command-line interface on it a lot.
We are truly spoilt with modern machines, this doesn't seem all that until you consider what it is actually doing and what it's running on... It's a total marvel that it runs so well and it seems quite intuitive as well.
Fair review too
This is so awesome. Now I know what I'll add to my birthday wishlist.... This and Eye of the Beholder which will be released in October for the C64...
This is really cool! I'm going to try this on my own C64. Well presented as usual as well! :)
Great review and interesting as usual Perifractic. I want to add to "somewhat of a first", the Voyager space probe got a software overhaul in 1990 and an update earlier this year. But for us mortals down here it's certainly a welcomed first! Perifractic's next episode: Kitesla gets sent to space after being moded with a C64 running this new software while you control it via an old 1200 baud modem connected to your iphone. Somehow I know you'll make it work! 😉😂
Damn don’t spoil the surprise!!
Great stuff, for great once hw, now i never owned, but i always am mesmerized what ppl can do with old hw and new sw for that hw. Here in the videos is the proof of what im talking about. Its just amazing i think. Sure its slow, but if this was real time, i mean, its ok i think, sure its not fast as with linux or windows or mac, but doesnt matter. It can do all sorta things and if updated regularly it could become really great piece of sw in the future. Just blows my mind that after 40yrs still this can happen in retro circles, this great piece of sw. Needs updating, adding functions and retro enthusiast mostly will love this to bits. I just love watching this old stuff. My friend owned C64, played games only, probably my first introduction to gaming, boot from cassette, slow as hell, but yeah, still fun back in those days. So this is like wtf moment for me. Anyway i think it has potential not only as a show piece but a really useful piece of sw.
Great presentation! 👍Thanks for sharing this with us 🙂
Didn't know about the REU! Great video, I learned a lot!
This is digital voodoo. I love it! 😊
Perhaps a future version might come bundled on a cart with an SD card slot built in (a la Ultimate). A C128 variant of this that utilises 80 columns would be pretty cool too.
That would be like the CoCo 3 has with the CoCoSDC and Nitro9
It's amazing to see what given 40 years of computer experience what the C64 would have been capable of in the 1980's. OK well it would have had to have had a hard drive to really do this.
Very nice review. The 5 desktop feature is very nice for productivity, one for email / correspondence, one for music, one for gaming, etc. Truly impressive OS and probably the only such product we'll see for hardware that is 40 years old. Would have been nice if this OS could use the border area for time / date, notifications maybe?
I remember getting the Byte magazine I believe, and in it there was code to program your own games, and then after days of typing in 1's and 0's, you hoped to God that your tape saved the games correctly. Fun times.
Genuinely super impressive bit of software, very cool!
This is great, kudos to these developers!!!
"...that was their stomach, in case you were wondering, um..." lol lol!
Great Review! Thanks a lot for this 👍🤩
C64 OS is incredible work.
Great review.
I think this is incredible and for some functions, yeah, I could use this as a daily driver system. If I can add network capability and being able to read and write to remote text files, simple email and I know already that I can do IRC for real time chat, I would love to do that. Thinking about it... if I could get telnet working reasonably well, I could log into my server and access various chat services in terminal.
I would like to use this and see how far I can take it. :)
Yep he envisions email etc for it so you could do just that!
@@RetroRecipes I like the idea of keeping old tech relevant. Email would be fantastic. I wonder if an implementation of a shared clipboard would be possible? Obviously, only text could be shared but I think it could be possible.
@@drphilxr You could ALMOST do it with an Ultimate 64, Pixelwizard case and the Mechboard 64 but there are still no keycaps... if I could only get myself an injection mold machine...
Six- to nine-year old me back in the early 90s would've been astonished at this OS if we had it running on our C64! My brother and I were just mostly playing whatever few games would actually work (mostly Dino Eggs, Space Taxi, Choplifter, Miner 49er, Defender) and tinkering with Thinking Cap and Print Shop. Eventually, mom got a used PC from work with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 and we switched to that. Watching these videos brings me back to a simpler time when I had dreams of making games and used Thinking Cap to outline everything.
Great video, glad to see you still creating., Hope the mrs is well
Thanks! Yes all well and good. Same to you and yours.
Really nice product. Would be interesting to know how to program apps for this. Does it have any OS routines you can use from your own apps, is there some memory management/protection etc?
Memory management, he wants. Lazy developers, use the damn hardware ya got! But seriously, this OS is fantastic and I get why to want to hack on it. I can’t find a GitHub for it.
Wait, the blog is full of low level stuff! Yippie!
I'll be working on the C64 OS Programmer's Guide in the coming months. All of the KERNAL calls, the libraries, the Toolkit classes, drivers, etc, are designed to make it easy to write new Apps. And, if you do write an App, the idea is to split the development into libraries, and Toolkit classes that not only help your app, but can be used in other Apps too. There is a paged memory allocator, and malloc/realloc/free, but no memory protection. That requires hardware that the C64 does not have.
@@c64os Ok, very nice. Thanks!
Edit: wrote this before noticing that the developer had also replied to this :D
Well, there has to be memory management for this kind of OS to work - and I hope it has some kind of system for loading libraries and applications into memory locations unknown beforehand, otherwise it will be severely limited in it's ability to have more than one application running the same time. Only programs and libraries that don't overlap with their hardcoded memory locations could be loaded at the same time if it doesn't have dynamic address relocation of some kind.
As for memory protection, the C-64 wasn't designed with multitasking in mind and has no hardware support for memory protection - it can't be implemented in software, any application will have same access to any memory address that the kernel has. The only kind of "memory protection" on such system is trusting the application developers to not try to do anything malicious and to be capable of eliminating any bugs that may cause memory overflows - just like original x86 (it wasn't until the 286 it got any sort of protected mode - and most 16-bit OS's and desktop suites (like Windows, Geos, Gem, etc.) didn't utilize it. Linus Torvalds called it's design braindead. It wasn't until 386 that *most* x86 OS's started to be written to utilize it's 32-bit protected mode - though OS/2 was one of the exceptions and used protected mode when it was still only a 16-bit OS. But I digress badly.
So no memory protection on hardware supported memory management - the former cannot and the latter must be implemented purely in software.
Hope my rambling has some value as answer :D
@@robsku1 There was no question, really, but I liked your answer. The memories of GEM, DesqView, EMS, XMS, ahhhh! Then, with the 386, we got to map to “special” RAM between 640k and 1024K. HIMEM, they called it. Somebody was high, I’ll give them that!
I think an REU and an accelerator would really change the disposition of this OS. :D
Way cool, especially the graphic/text split screen. Neat to see what kind capabilities that modern software development tools and techniques can extract out of the old hardware. A port to the 512KB CoCo3 would be neat. MinuetOS was written all in assembly for the '386 (GUI, multitask), had built in examples of assembly code that could be assembled and ran within the OS. A cool app for c64OS would be a terminal emulator, that could virtualize 80-col mode (e.g. support scrolling left/right to see your 80-col connection even if you're in 40-col mode).
I would actually use this os as the main use for my c64 it’s about time for an update had my same machine since 1984
I think the 1541 Ultimate II+ has one *severely* undermarketed feature: the Hyperspeed kernal. It should be both much faster than JiffyDOS and capable of storing large file sets like C64OS.
It's very cool.
The ultimate would be a Rasberry Pi inside a working c64 case (with a c64'ish graphical interface) that could send commands to the c64
So you could load a program from the Pi as if it was a Linux desktop program but instead it would reset the VIC, load the program and switch video signal to the c64 instead.
Something like that atleast.
The ultimate 2in1 solution.
I like where you are going with that idea. Kind of like how a C128 has a Z80. I had a similar idea of pairing up a Mister FPGA with a Raspberry Pi. Is this C64 Singularity?
@@puzzud Yeah a modern frankenstein take on the "Amstrad Mega PC" go wild with that concept and see how far you can take it.
There should be some very interesting technical challenges to it aswell.
Look up the Orange Cartridge and RVCop64. And maybe super-reu. Or SideKick64. I’m sure you could cobble together a 320x200 VNC client that runs on a cartridge with networking and uses the C64 keyboard, mouse, and display.
A fitting way to celebrate to Commodore 64's 40th birthday. A brand new OS
Incredible, although the basic commands you were using look very advanced to me. I hope it becomes easier for casual users to use to list and load games etc. Tha k you for putting such an insightful video together!