Comment by Jotalea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jotalea | Hacker News Reader

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There actually is a Switch to English button at the top of the screen, which of course translates the whole website to English, and adds more details that I know English-speaking people would be interested on (for example, the source code), while Spanish-speakers won't. And even if they are, they have a note saying "for more details, check the English version of the site"; and I'm sure that if they can understand those details, they can also understand English.

> Did you do anything with the MMU yet? Any hardware detection?

No, not yet. I still have to learn that

> Do you ever jump to a user space context?

I mean, I haven't put any restrictions, just as I haven't put many features that I would consider user space.

> Do you have any specific design goals you want to explore, or was this just a learning exercise?

I saw a video about TempleOS, and got motivated to make my own OS from scratch. Of course, TOS is a ~15 years-in-work project, while mine has been just a couple days/weeks, these are very far from each other.

I guess my final goal with it would be to get Minecraft running? I don't know, getting a Java program (or Java itself) to run on an OS from scratch sounds too complicated for me.

My current goal is to get Bad Apple on ASCII to show up on this, but to do that I need to save a lot of variables, one for each frame, and there being ~6000 frames, it would take a huge lot more than 512 bytes, so I would need to get jumps in memory to work so I can have these many variables set, which is what I would be working on now, if I hadn't other stuff to do.

> Best of luck!

Thanks :)

Yeah, I didn't notice the site switch to English link; If I had seen it, I might have also seen the source, lol. Sorry about that.

Terry Davis, the author of TempleOS, was fairly well known online. He had a lot of struggles psychologically, and met an unfortunate end a few years ago. It's an interesting case, but I honestly wouldn't take too much from the project. He was a gifted developer, but he did things for reasons that were decidedly non-technical.

For building up your knowledge (you can't only read the reference manuals, after all), there's a ton of resources online, but a particularly good one is the OSDev wiki: https://wiki.osdev.org/Expanded_Main_Page. I can't speak for it as it exists today because I've been out of the game for too long, but it was maintained by helpful folks. I didn't check to see if the forums are still up, but there used to be a wealth of information in them back in the day too.

As a note, relying on BIOS is ok, but the whole write a bootsector in 512 bytes to switch to 386 protected mode, to then switch to long mode (64-bit) is kind of outdated (the modern computer boot process is handled by the UEFI firmware, and by the time your OS binary is loaded, the CPU is already in long mode with paging enabled and setup with a flat linear mapping of physical memory).

Not to say that the method/approach is worthless (it's all learning), it's just that you spend an awful lot of time doing things in the whole mode-switching dance that are basically tossed in the bin almost immediately, and most of it has nothing at all to do with OS development. UEFI at least allows you to start on the real meat & potatoes without spinning your wheels on code that isn't going to stick around very long.

Thanks for the information :)

I just analyzed and did what I read online and it seemed to work.

To be honest, I don't fully understand how these things work, but I'm here to learn ;)

why are spanish-speaking people not interested in source-code?

what about bilingual people, do they have an average amount of interest for the source-code?

> why are spanish-speaking people not interested in source-code?

Most of the Spanish-speakers that I know, don't have advanced knowledge on technology (on things like Assembly, or the difference between x86 and x86_64), and those who do, it's granted that they know English, because we are told in school that "to be smart and succeed, you need to know how to speak English".

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