cOS on commodore 64: Modern user interface with optional touchscreen | Hacker News Reader

cOS on commodore 64: Modern user interface with optional touchscreen

64jim64.blogspot.com

98 pointsdoener33 comments

Hey all - Jim_64 here (the author)

Nice to see the comments!

Yeah there is plenty of power in these old computers to pull off the simple user interfaces that are popular right now. I think it's funny how the trend has gone back to bold colors, blocky designs and full screen programs, all the things we were limited to in the 80s.

I did write it in C, so if I did it in assembler, it would have been smaller and faster.

And, no, I didn't retro bright my system. Bought the one in the video from some 20 something dude in Chicago selling off his uncle's system. Seems it was always kept under a cover, so no sun damage!

It's also funny and a bit sad that despite these extreme "simplifications" of UI, software still seems neither faster nor smaller...

> It's also funny and a bit sad that despite these extreme "simplifications" of UI, software still seems neither faster nor smaller...

It drives me crazy.

My "favorite" anecdote when it comes to the inefficiency creep:

One of my favorite text-editors is an Amiga editor called FrexxEd. I ported it to run on AROS, a portable re-implementation of the AmigaOS API. AROS can run hosted on Linux with X.

On my laptop, booting the Linux hosted version of AROS, that initializes the full GUI etc., with the startup-sequence (a simple shell script that gets started on boot) set to start FrexxEd at the end lets me "boot to FrexxEd" faster than I can start even the terminal-only build of Emacs on the same machine...

Vim can lend you a few million cycles, if you need'em. Vim starts close enough to instantly that I can't tell the difference. Modern Vim on a real Amiga is probably pretty slow though.

Can modern vim compile on an Amiga? I think I heard that the DOS version is completely broken because a default vim requires too much memory.

I think Bram stopped trying to maintain Amiga support after 6.x. But I don't have an Amiga anymore and haven't paid attention in a long time. I was surprised when it was still supported a few years ago.

did you byte-compile the .el files in emacs? .elc's load faster - also see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1217180/how-do-i-byte-com...

Way back when in the 486 days, I was poking around simtelnet and found a K&R C compiler. This one, I think:

http://www.filewatcher.com/m/pcc12c.zip.175811-0.html

It came with a demo game, which was a Caterpillar clone which ran in text mode. (Unfortunately the archive above doesn't have the source, only the executable.) This game used loops for timing.

When I ran it on my high-end 486, at a whole 66MHz, the screen would flicker madly for a couple of seconds and then the game would exit. In that time it had run through all three lives with no user input.

That 486 was at least an order of magnitude faster than the 4.77MHz 8088 that the game had been written for. And modern machines are a good couple of orders of magnitude faster still. I wonder how long that game would take to run on the desktop I'm typing this on...

I know it's taboo to talk about the TRS-80 and its descendants in C64 company, but did anyone else have a CoCo3? Loved that thing to death. Neatest feature about it was that it had the OS in ROM, but dumped it to RAM. So you could just use the OS designated RAM for your own flavor. Like getting the third-party ADOS and going through the commented code to tweak your OS to your liking, changing disk read times, etc. It was a lot of fun.

edit for typo

I grew up on a CoCo3; loved that thing as well :) OS-9 Level II was where I first learned a Unix-like OS (on a tiny 6809 machine!) OS-9 Level II was truly a remarkable achievement for such a tiny machine: multi-tasking, windowing, and more. Dungeons of Daggorath was also an epic game. Basic09 was an interesting Basic-dialect that provided more structural programing to the normal sprawling Basic program. And of course who could forget Rainbow Magazine.

You could do the same with the C64 (probably quite a few other 80's home machines). The ROM's were bank-switched in, and if you want to you can copy the ROM into RAM and switch out the ROM banks. Quite a few extensions made use of that.

I was pro-Apple and anti-Tandy back then, so I looked down on the CoCo and didn't realize how cool a computer it was until later. Now that I'm older and wiser (?) I realize how silly technology partisanship is. Each device and technology should be evaluated on its own merits and not by which camp it comes from.

Old habits are hard to break! I took a fun loving shot at TRS-80s on the cOS Test/Demo disk. There is a goofy Windows 9 "release" on there where I labeled the trash can... wait for it... "TRS-80". I just saw some old CoCos at a vintage computer show. Actually really cool what people were doing with them!

Url changed from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6mx7cjltsI. The video is fabulous, but so is the blog, and it seems nicest to send the traffic the author's way.

Edit: plus it lured him in here :)

Yes - Thank you!

Modern in the sense of looking like a smartphone/tablet, which ironicaly makes it easier to make work on a C64 than many of the user interfaces that were actually used on the C64, like GEOS.

It's quite fascinating that systems like GEOS with "proper" windows etc. looks more dated than a menu system similar to ones you might have found on a real C64 app (e.g. Koala Painter had a full screen full of rectangular "icons" to pick tools etc.)

One of the ones that impressed me at the time, was the GUI of The Final Cartridge III (the irony of there being a 3rd "Final" cartridge...) [1] which had "proper" windowing system in ROM with a look that was inspired by AmigaOS 1.x. Unfortunately pretty much no software supported it, so the GUI bit went mostly unused (wasn't typically why you'd buy it anyway - these cartridges were "freezers" used to pirate software and/or for their built in fast loaders and machine code monitors)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Cartridge_III

Great, I remember seeing full home automation system implemented with a C128 - its not the hardware holding us back! :) Also, impressive as this is, I think the author should team up with some of the peeps from the demo scene, since there's no reason why this OS shouldn't have full fluid-animation screen changes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzQVECn3tY8

The hardware is not holding us back, it is the way that the software is being developed.

Keep in mind that Apple made the Macintosh in 1984 and had to use a lot of expensive hardware to get the GUI to work. Then a year later GEOS was developed for the Commodore 64 that made almost the same GUI and apps for a fraction of the cost of a Macintosh.

When Windows was released in 1985 it ran on 8088 DOS PCs.

Over the years Windows and Macintoshes have added feature after feature and require state of the art systems in order to function properly. Most people don't even need the functions that got added, and it slows down things with each feature added.

I like the fact that GNU/Linux can run on older hardware with less RAM and run faster as well. It is developed differently than Windows or Mac OSX is developed.

When I had a Commodore 64 in the 1980s, I got laughed at by people who had an Apple II or IBM PC, but we could only afford a Commodore 64 because our family was poor. The C64 BASIC was primitive, but it forced me to learn machine language to get stuff to work.

Cool! I wish I still had the hardware I picked up at an auction a few years ago. A full C64 with monitor and drive, plus a couch and a desk for $9 :) But I moved around too much and shed a lot of luggage. I just picked up an Asus T100 tablet since they're cheap now, run Win10 and also capable of side-loading Linux. I wonder if the touch mechanism would translate through to the emulation on the tablet. What a geek triumph that would be: "Like my new tablet? It's runs Commodore VBASIC"

I bought a Commodore 64 + monitor a few years ago on eBay and played the original Ultima IV on it to completion.

I love how the disk drive and keyboard/CPU look like they're brand new.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright

Whoa! Thank you for posting that. Looks like my Apple ][e is getting a bath!

Be aware that there's recent news suggesting Retr0bright treatment only lasts for a few years--see the citations for paragraph 3 at the Wikipedia page. You can redo it, though.

Great video and software! :-)

For anyone interested in another modern & capable operating system for the C64 I would really recommend Adam Dunkels Contiki - http://www.contiki-os.org/

Love the disk doubler on the table. The disk double would double the capacity of 5 1/4 inch disks by snipping off a little square so you could use the other side of the disk.

My friend had a disk doubler - I was so jealous: Every once-in-a-while I'd borrow it to try and clean up the messes I'd made with my regular old hole-punch.

I just used to use a pair of scissors...

Just be aware that the internal brush that cleans off the dust as the disc turns can unload the dust back onto the disc when you run it the otherway as a doublesided disc....

Seeing this is one of those fabolous "you have got to be kidding me" moments.

Great job.

Is there source code for this somewhere? I wonder what it's written in. 6502 assembler?

From the comments, he wrote it in C using cc65.

This is my only C program I've ever written. A second goal was to pick a project to force me to learn C. I'm a run-time BASIC guy from the 80s, never used a cross developed or compiled language before!

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