Mega Man for TempleOS | Hacker News Reader

Mega Man for TempleOS

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327 pointsrobertelder143 comments

Whenever I watch one of Terry's videos, I get highly motivated to program. Not read a blog post comparing frameworks, or a debate about some programming idiom, or even designing some larger project. But literally type stuff into a computer and make things appear on the screen. It is remarkable how watching his TempleOS videos uncovers the fascination I had of computers from my youth, 30 years ago.

You've got me curious.

Who's Terry? And where can I see one of his videos?

Terry A. Davis, creator of Temple OS. Here's his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdX4uJUwSFwiY3XBvu-F_-Q/vid...

Clicked a recent video and he rants about random numbers, the lottery and the "whitest of the white scientists of the National Institute of Standards" with a few colorful "monkey niggers" thrown in. ..... uh Okay? Is that guy crazy? In the comments people say he has a 90 day youtube ban.

Terry is schizophrenic.

> Is that guy crazy?

Yes, he is schizophrenic (which does not change the fact that he is a great lowlevel programmer).

Yes he is. TempleOs is his literal third temple of god. He is a very skilled guy though. Own operating system, own programming language, own terminal, made first person shooter and flight simulator from scratch. Just to show you what a skilled guy in different mindset can do.

One should probably add a trigger warning. He is schizophrenic and not quite himself at times, especially in the comments. Not to take away from his technical feats.

At first i thought that was a bit of an exaggeration, but after listening to him talk in his "What God Wants in Music" video, that is actually a reasonable request to make. He very casually and without warning declares things that might easily make traumatized people relive things.

Well that was unexpected [1]. I can kinda see what he means, but I'm not sure I'd use the same simile.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozt2d8t8hIU

jesus, right in the first minute, goddamn

I think it's worth being specific here -- he uses the word "nigger" frequently and regularly makes other nasty comments about black people and other minorities.

When I've seen his website in the past, the crazy religious stuff has always been there, which I can look past, but now it seems like the crazy racist stuff is way way more prominent, which I just cannot.

Completely agreed. I understand that he's mentally ill, and I wish him all the best in that regard. But I can't help but see him as just another racist hick. Super cool project he has, but I want nothing to do with him or anything he works on.

Do you understand what schizophrenia entails? If it makes you uncomfortable that's one thing, belittling him as a "racist hick" is another.

See my post below.

He is a racist hick, who happens to be ill. If that's "another" thing, then so be it. Don't really care which came first. I will not let racists duck undercover of his illness. I stop short of being genuinely upset at him, but hate speech is hate speech. Since he has a large-ish audience, his ideas are becoming part of culture. Agree with him or defend him or apologize for his racism all you wish -- you are kinda/sorta part of the problem.

What an absolutely absurd opinion. I really don't think you appreciate the manifestation of schizophrenia. Would you feel the same about someone suffering from Tourette's for swearing in front of a child?

The guy believes lots of crazy things: men in suits are after him, aliens put things in his body, that he has conversations with god about music, etc. He translates random number generators into ASCII attempting to divine messages from god. He writes long-winded nonsensical rants jumping from detailed technical dissertations to rambling about old war movies. Schizophrenia literally means "split mind" -- ideas, concepts, hallucinations attack his brain and he has no basis for dispelling which are grounded in reality and which are not. It's the biological equivalent of radio interference or a loose wire.

A large chunk of the things he writes are unintelligible. Yes, people focus on his work, because it's pretty amazing that somebody suffering so profoundly from an illness can do such interesting (and esoteric) work. The fact that a subset of his schizophrenic attacks include racist language is something I feel sad, not angry about.

Yeah, the sadness really shows. I wish I could share your clinical detachment. I guess I'm too PC (as someone else implied) or ignorant of mental illness (as you implied). Let's agree to disagree about our opinion of Owens. He's a deranged and schizophrenic genius, I get it. We can agree that he's brilliant and is producing something really cool.

I'm not bothered by his racism -- it's too common for me to be really upset by it. What bothers me is how you and others are so quick to point out how cool TempleOS is, and how smart he is, and how his hate speech is OK because he's ill. You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says, which is telling. Enjoy his streams, hell -- make TempleOS your default OS and mail all of your friends/family a copy of it.

Just consider that white males happen to make up the vast majority of his audience. Blacks and whoever else he hates will have a harder time than you do sympathizing with his hateful speech, schizophrenic or not. Again, Hitler was a schizophrenic but that doesn't make his hateful rhetoric OK does it? Oh wait, Mein Kampf was recently a bestseller in Germany and we have a former Breitbart editor in the White House. Touché.

Wait, who is Owens? Terry Davis is the creator of TempleOS. Please read some of the writing on http://templeos.org and tell me that's anything comparable to Mean Kampf. He's not writing political rhetoric, it's quite literally the ramblings of a mentally ill person.

"You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says, which is telling."

It's very telling. When someone does something out of mental illness, there is no reasoning them to change their course. When someone does it out of bigotry, there is.

Calling him a "racist hick" makes several claims. One is that he is a racist. Another is that he is a poorly-educated rural dweller. These are frequently paired because some people think that rural dwellers or the poorly educated or Southerners or whatever are all racist (sure, there's a correlation).

Being schizophrenic is a serious problem, and his technical achievements in the face of them are notable. But it's not a free pass for everything. We can distinguish, for example, between people with mental health problems who are danger to themself and others and those who are not.

It's one thing entirely to rail about aliens, because aliens aren't real. It's another use racial invective and epithets against racial and cultural minorities, because Jews and black people are absolutely real.

If you are a mental outlier, the village can agree on torching the next time, somebody must be put on a stake- it might be a good survival strategy, to vent the anger towards a minorities group that is not you. In particular, if you are all ready paranoid anyway, meaning, you basically have a conspiracy theory for anyone you meet.

That was a very vague and meandering allegory, but I think I hear what you're saying. I'm not gonna respond to it, but if you wish to call me a paranoid witch-hunter please just go ahead and do so next time.

Put yourself in the shoes of a jew or black person and watch some of his streams. Then revisit the comments for this story and how they all gush over his unique cool project and wave away his vehement racism as just an unfortunate detail.

Go a little bit further from the curated and (somewhat) tolerant atmosphere of HN, and you'll see Owens' hateful speech being parroted, and being used to legitimatize the promulgation of the already massive undercurrent of racism that lurks in almost every corner of Internet culture.

I hate to confirm Godwin's law, but -- Hitler was also schizophrenic. Seeing an obviously ill person suffer from disease is sad, but it's even sadder to see the social disease of racism so ubiquitous and widely tolerated.

And just in case you really do think I'm "looking for" examples of racism --just last night I joined an IRC channel about my city (DC) to meet people. I had to leave because I heard "nigger" and "brown people get out" one too many times for comfort.

Well well now i am curious. That was what drew me towards Linux back in the day as i felt Windows was getting more and more convoluted and opaque. And these days the feeling is rising in me again as i watch what is being introduced above the kernel on almost a daily basis.

Cool! This project started out as a way to learn Gr library routines in HolyC, and kind of Frankensteined its way into a game engine. In the coming weeks I'll be doing lots of refactoring to bring the code in line with proper TOS guidelines naming conventions.

(Author here: I cross-posted this comment from a reddit thread, hope it isn't against the rules..)

Can I ask why you decided to do this rather than learning on a more conventional platform?

I was kind of interested in writing something for the temple (well, okay, I spent a bored afternoon contemplating giving it a go and half heartedly booting vms and reading code ....)

While I can't answer for the OP, my motivation was specifically that this is kind of an alien environment and the challenge involved in even getting to hello world would definately have seen me walk away at the end the better for the exp, even if walking away from those hours without having gained some marketable understanding of framework foo or language bar.

In the end I didn't do that because the code is insanely complicated (all single letter vars) and my downtime is too precious for such masochism currently; I don't think it's too much of a strech to understand why others might be interested though.

I'm glad to live in a world where such an outstanding personal achievement like Terry's OS really is can exist, and that there are people out there prodding at it.

Isn't it cool that we don't always do things for the money?

I dearly hope that none of the recent templeos projects are attempts to antagonize Terry though. He is a profoundly accomplished software engineer and deserves nothing but respect for his technical achievements from us all alongside understanding of the rest of the package.

"Isn't it cool that we don't always do things for the money?" Yes, it really is. Glad you had fun ;)

> half heartedly booting vms

I initially read that as VMS rather than VMs. Very confusing.

I don't think too many people half-heartedly boot VMS. Reactions tend to be one extreme or the other.

Wouldn't a half-hearted boot of VMS be Windows?

Can you comment on what the system's like to write for? i.e. development workflow, good/bad points about the language, things you thought were cool, things you thought weren't cool, that sort of thing?

Per wikipedia:

TempleOS (formerly J Operating System,[1] SparrowOS and LoseThos)[2] is a biblical themed lightweight operating system created over the span of a decade by the American programmer Terry A. Davis. The software is a x86-64 bit, multi-tasking, multi-cored, public domain, open source, ring-0-only, single address space, non-networked, PC operating system for recreational programming.[3] The operating system was designed to be the Third Temple according to Davis and uses an interface similar to a mixture of DOS and Turbo C. Davis describes the operating system as a modern x86-64 Commodore 64 with C in place of BASIC.

I'll bite.

Why did you paste a paragraph from the Wikipedia article?

Probably because some people don't know what TempleOS is.

Because many people will have no idea what TempleOS is from the link, or the demo video on the GH page.

But if they are reading HN, surely they know how to use Google and Wikipedia and could acquire this information in seconds?

as an incredibly lazy person i found it to be helpful

You logged out, signed up for a temp account and then logged back in - just to post this comment. That IS incredibly lazy ;)

You just made me realize how blindly i am reading comments, on and on.

You've clearly never been to the Reddit front page

He probably doesn't want to be on record saying that he is lazy

Is that you there, Mr Obvious ?

Wasn't me. (far too lazy for that)

I think he added networking lately. Might be easier to persuade gods followers, when they can interact with each other.

I find TemploOS a pretty normal name, but HolyC is an amazing name for a language. I always laugh when I see it.

I agree. TempleOS sounds like something some marketing department might churn out, but HolyC is a hilarious name. I love it!

> but HolyC is an amazing name for a language

For those who don't understand the pun:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_See

I didn't think of this pun.

Me neither, I assumed the pun was to do with "Holy Cow"

It's interesting and fun that Terry's odd but impressive project is getting a little cult traction. This is kind of neat, though the physics and animations could use some work.

Can someone explain the TempleOS author's sprite and graphics interface? From one of his videos it appears that:

1. Once a sprite set has been defined the user can manually (programmatically?) rasterize it 2. User can set affine transforms 3. It seems like the boundary between 2d and 3d API is small, or easily traversable, or non-existent. In one of his 2d examples it appears he changes a parameter to get animation in the z-axis. 4. Sprites are somehow part of the language (or at least seem to be integrated deeply into it).

To me it looks a bit like editing an SVG, automatically converting it to HTML5 canvas, then switching to WebGL, seamlessly.

Sometimes it is nice to browse HN with 'showdead' enabled, because you can see Terry commenting on these threads. (his comment is sibling to mine)

Terry, keep up the great work! Its super refreshing to see your commitment over the years on such an ambitious project.

> Sometimes it is nice to browse HN with 'showdead' enabled, because you can see Terry commenting on these threads. (his comment is sibling to mine)

Did he give a relevant technical response to my technical questions? If so, are you or someone else willing/able to repost that here?

I really don't want to dig into HN caves and learn about its subculture. I just want to discuss a technical topic that I find interesting (and apparently others do, too, if those little numbers next to the post mean anything).

He said

"I wrote everything from scratch. I am the smartest programmer ever lived with divien intellect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EDLCs4fBJc "

4chan's /g/ is especially obsessed with TempleOS and Terry's livestreams; there's typically a /tosg/ thread somewhere on the front page.

https://youtu.be/5gfoDHycEi0?t=2m12s

That sentiment! I know that feeling so well.

"God's favorite game is Donkey Kong."

Surely the best quote of all time.

What the hell is that top comment on the YouTube? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DepFpVt-mIo)

The "Defend Kebab" one?

It's a meme. Google "defend kebab" for more info.

As for why it's there? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The in-game music is a chiptune version of the "Defend Kebab" song.

"herp derp for youtube" is a good browser plugin that fixes youtube comments like that.

Some background, for those who haven't heard about TempleOS before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283

Vice wrote a piece on him in 2014: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gods-lonely-progr...

He drinks a lot of caffeine and lives mostly on a 48-hour schedule: "I stay awake 16 * 2 and sleep 8 * 2."

Did I understand correctly that HolyC is a C like dynamic Language with AOT compilation and dynamic binding? Does this mean that functions can be redefined in the REPL while the code is running? Looks like a pretty cool language!

So, they put a game I used to love and hate on TempleOS. Guess I finally got a reason to visit the Temple. Although that comment about the HolyC going into the shell, compiled, and running was pretty cool.

Looks better than Mega Man for DOS!

TempleOS is a very interesting OS with many original innovations, as mentioned in the "constructive review of TempleOS" (which you can look up).

However it is a ring 0 only OS, with all the consequences that implies. You can make irreversible mistakes in this way, especially outside a VM.

Other OSes worth looking into are:

- Redox OS (Rust)

- MenuetOS / KolibriOS (x86-64 Assembly)

- Haiku OS

- GNU Hurd

Did you pay attention to what TempleOS is for? Do you know what it was like to program for the C64? It is ring 0 only on purpose! That's the whole point!

The idea that someone would go into a thread about TempleOS, trash TempleOS for one of its central and distinguishing features, and then use the thread as an opportunity to promote some new OS written in Rust is boggling my mind.

Well that's one aspect of TempleOS that appeals to some and that is fine.

But you an also appreciate TempleOS from other perspectives such as how HolyC is compiled, dynamic documentation, etc.

This isn't Terry, is it?

It's not. It's impressive Terry's platform has attained a following.

Next year will be the year of the TempleOS desktop.

Well, it seems like 640x480 is a sacred limit for display resolution so I wouldn't get my hopes up, from the F.A.Q:

    God said 640x480 was a covenant like circumcision.  The resolution will remain 640x480 for centuries to come.

Holy cow ... The OS is such a strange mix of impressive feats and crazy conventions.

Writing an operating system is hard:

http://jvns.ca/blog/2013/12/04/day-37-how-a-keyboard-works/

Yes, I remember reading that article and thinking how ridiculously complex an OS is. I can't imagine being confident enough to even contemplate starting to write one.

Impressive thing about Evans is she doesn't worry about it, just dives and learns.

Your description applies to ALL OS, all of them.

I've been around the block for a couple decades and retro-compute as a hobby... I'm not just making this up.

640x480 isn't a crazy convention at all when you understand what is required to interface with the display hardware and you remember the goals of TempleOS. He wanted to recapture transparency of the C64 system in a 64-bit system. It's pretty clear Terry didn't want to spend all his time writing vendor-specific device drivers and painful workaround cruft.

This also applies to things like the RedSea filesystem and the way memory is used.

Yes, that's a good point. He just expresses it in a rather unusual way.

It's his OS - but it would've been nice for games and other things if he had added Mode 13h to the mix - at least fullscreen only - for games mainly. That or ModeX - just something with 256 colors. Heck - he could have added some of the more common VESA modes for that matter.

I was looking thru the source to find the graphics init routines, and I am pretty sure I found it (well - once - probably couldn't locate quickly again) - the thing is such a convoluted mess, and I am not sure how much of that is due to it being an OS and how much of it is due to his style and illness?

At any rate, I think it would be possible to hack this stuff in place (mainly mode 13h - as it's the simplest, and doesn't require much to code for). I think it also needs a way to use the parallel port - mainly for a simple parallel port sound card, if nothing else. Interestingly, if you dig into the various source code examples and such, you'll find a bit about a "HD Audio" system (which looks like a soundblaster interface, if I remember my DOS hacking days) as well as a couple of bits of code for manipulating USB devices (he already supports keyboard and mouse in legacy mode, but nothing else).

Honestly - in spite of his various racist rants and views - this code is begging to be cleaned up and expanded just a bit (it's public domain - so there's nothing he could do or say about it). Overall, it is fairly accessible - just a few other tweaks could make it perfect, IMHO.

The subculture of OS makers is far smaller than the subculture of esoteric programming language enthusiasts. Its inevitable if templeos works the esolang people will descend upon it. There's probably a hundred, maybe a thousand Intercal programmers for every templeos enthusiast and they all love a new challenge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language

Personally I've been thinking of doing make-a-lisp in templeos. There's no point in doing make-a-lisp in qbasic or gnu awk or makefiles because its already been done. But make-a-lisp on templeos is, I believe, completely uncharted ground ... so in my infinite spare time ...

https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Just checked, sed isn't on that list.

And lisp sounds a bit simpler than sedtris - tetris in sed (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430171, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2430171) - so that could be an interesting challenge.... hmm...

No, but the Github user sure is interesting. Have to wonder how Terry feels about https://github.com/tramplersheikhs/hgbd and https://github.com/tramplersheikhs/uriel -- is the Temple being desecrated?? Either way, seriously cool stuff.

Definitely an interesting user.

"I write TempleOS programs and hymns for God."

Terry has stated that, apart from serving God, the goal of TempleOS is to encourage C64-like hobbyist experimentation. He seems quite happy with outsiders writing software for his system, and has endorsed this MegaMan game on the TempleOS software page:

http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Web/AppStore/AppStore.html#l...

  Supposedly, there is a guy on E-Bay selling TempleOS merchandise.  It's okay.

Heh, what a cool guy.

You'd... know if it was him. He'd, uh, have some choice words about Bomb Man.

Nope, but pretty sure this is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13972548

Is it just me or is the official templeos site hacked / defaced right now.

Nope, it's standard, Terry Davis is the author and he's a very religious schizophrenic. He's a very smart guy, but he got banned many times on HN and Reddit for going off about "India niggers" and spamming blocks of random words.

Actually all the times I've read him use the word "niggers" (and it is an offensive word, I won't dispute that) he actually means something different than you would expect.

Unfortunately, no - that is the correct content for the site...

Amazing project! :-D

Weird. Makes me want to start a crusade.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13973144 and marked it off-topic.

A cult following for the God-given operating system. Huh. Sounds a bit sacrilegious.

Isn't that exactly what God would want?

I just wonder how long it'll take for some heretical sect to start a fork and add blasphemous features like networking or 32-bit colors... ;-)

Fear not: https://github.com/minexew/Shrine

That is just awesome, thanks!

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, as Bad Religion used to sing. ;-) (NB what a great name for a band that is in this context!)

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13972467 and marked it off-topic.

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