Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Now we need to make it compile with gcc (or clang) and run on a Unix-like OS.

...or at least wrap up the Impex and Nimbus parts so I can get a little more mileage out of the font and clipart disks I'm still holding on to (but probably can't read anymore).

I think I'd love to have GeoWrite and GeoDraw back, but I'm afraid that the nice golden patina my nostalgia has applied to them probably isn't actually very thick. It might be better for me to just get the originals running in a DosBox or something...

Given the fact that it is mostly written in weird semi-custom x86 macro assembler it would entail significantly more work than you expect :)

Yah, the assembly language is going to be a bit of an issue. But I wonder if there wouldn't be some interested parties to turn it all into portable C code ..

You can always compile it to function calls that emulate x86 opcodes. Considering the difference in speed between a 386SX (which ran GEOS acceptably) and a Core i3, it'll probably be fast enough.

Besides, the whole environment can probably run from within the cache of a modern CPU.

That's a neat idea, and probably kind of feasible .. I wonder if anyone will take up the challenge and produce a clean C-portable version .. I'm guessing some of the folks around ContikiOS might be intrigued by this idea. Off to other forums to discuss it further ..

Was there any kind of emulator to run it on the Suns used as a development platform?

We cross-developed. The host machines were Sun workstations where the dev tools and Swat debugger ran and talked to the PC target (remember that we started with PC/GEOS running on an original IBM PC with 512K of RAM).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com