A86: New operating system...
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A86: New operating system...
I am a curious about something. Who else in the ti-86 community is
tired of having to put up with the TI-OS. In fact I wonder how many
people have even thought of programming for an OS other than the built
in one. I sent a message a little while ago, but I do not think I was
on the list correctly at the time. But imagine an operating system
design for the pupose of running games or running more powerful memory
hungry applications. Instead of these little 1k-3k and maybe 5k toys.
Has anyone checked out www.hpcalc.org. Sure they have a processor
capible of address more memory than the Z80, but in my openion a major
reason why few quality programs are written for the 86 is a lack of a
good OS. And I am not talking about a SHELL!! I'm talking about an
operating system with its own kernel procedures for addressing memory
and allcoating program ram and data ram. Why are we limited to only
running programs at $d748??? this does not have to be the case. With a
little preperation in programming, a general program could be written
such that when the OS loads it, all the instructions are updated before
runtime, so that it can be put at ANY address!!! But the TI-OS of
course does not support this. All the TI-OS does is throws us a bone
and gievs us ~10K to work in "easily". Sure you can hack just about as
much memroy as you want for a power hungry program, but this is just
hacking... and I'm tired of it. Plus... the TI-OS sinks ~32k of memory
on its on. This is memory that you can't get to without worry of
messing up the TI-OS.
Well I just wondered who else even cares about this, or would be
interested in an alternative platform.
With the combination of a 200hz interrupt and a good kernel
capibily of putting a program anywhere in memory, a SHELL could be
written to even "time-share" programs on the calc. All this with little
or no change in z80 coding... of course this means no rom calls would
be available(I'm not sure if rom calls would be possible outside the
TI-os, I'm not that much of an expert on it). But power proagrms
written totally in z80 assembly, with very little "OS-specific
accomidations" could be written for this new operating system.
Of course there are key things any new OS would have to have. Such as
custom link capabilities.. but this mean we can rewrite the TI-protocal
that everyone seems to hate anyways!!!! Well I want to see who is
willing to chew on this idea.
later,
David E. West
p.s. I'm in the process of working out such an operating system. My
specs are not 100% yet but I'm determined that the next program I write
WILL NOT be run under the current TI-OS!!
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