Hacker News Reader

Comment by knd775 | Hacker News Reader

This isn't Terry, is it?

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.

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.

Definitely an interesting user.

"I write TempleOS programs and hymns for God."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com