TempleOS Reverse Engineering | Hacker News Reader

TempleOS Reverse Engineering

starkeblog.com

63 pointselvis7022 comments

This is fun, but TempleOS is fully open sourced, and even has actively maintained forks.

https://github.com/Zeal-Operating-System/ZealOS

This says that Terry didn't release the source code for the kernel or the bootloader. I'm not sure if I'm reading that correctly, since the entirety of TempleOS was built within TempleOS:

- Kernel: https://github.com/cia-foundation/TempleOS/tree/archive/Kern...

- Bootloader: https://github.com/cia-foundation/TempleOS/tree/archive/Adam...

- Bootloader documentation: https://github.com/cia-foundation/TempleOS/blob/archive/Doc/...

The article even links to this repo...

The boot sector moves itself to segment 96C0h:

    0000:7c69 e8 00 00        CALL       LAB_0000_7c6c

pushes the address of the following instruction (7C6C) on the stack.

    0000:7c6c 5b              POP        BX=>DAT_9000_6ffe
    0000:7c6d 83 eb 6c        SUB        BX,0x6c

BX is now 7C00, the beginning of the boot sector. This is a common trick to get the address of your own code when you don't know where it was loaded in memory. No idea why he did this though, since the PC BIOS boot process always uses the same address.

    0000:7c70 c1 eb 04        SHR        BX,0x4
    0000:7c73 66 8c c8        MOV        AX,CS
    0000:7c76 03 c3           ADD        AX,BX
    0000:7c78 66 8e d8        MOV        DS,AX

DS:0000 now points to the boot sector. Note that this would fail if it were loaded at some address that isn't a multiple of 16, but of course this is never the case.

    0000:7c7b b9 00 02        MOV        CX,0x200
    0000:7c7e 33 f6           XOR        SI,SI
    0000:7c80 33 ff           XOR        DI,DI
    0000:7c82 f3 a4           MOVSB.REP  ES:DI,SI

Copy the 512 byte boot sector to segment 96C0

    0000:7c84 b8 c0 96        MOV        AX,0x96c0
    0000:7c87 66 8e d8        MOV        DS,AX
    0000:7c8a ea a2 00 c0 96  JMPF       LAB_9000_6ca2

Jump to rest of code starting at offset 00A2.

The 0000Kernel.BIN.C file isn't loaded yet at this point, and would likely end up at a different address. I haven't looked at the rest of the code, but it seems to be not nearly enough there to parse any filesystem structures. It probably loads the second stage starting from a fixed sector number.

This may sound like blasphemy to some, but honestly, I'm not that impressed with the quality of this code. There are also superfluous 66h prefixes on the segment load instructions.

[edit:] the actual source code is available here: https://github.com/cia-foundation/TempleOS/blob/archive/Adam...

This is a good way to get the wrath of God rained down upon thee.

It doesn't quite apply but I think it kind of does: I consider TempleOS to be a form of "outsider art".

Terry obviously was a trained engineer, but he still effectively taught himself a lot of the stuff to build a kernel and operating system and compiler and a few dozen games. He was also obviously extremely mentally ill, but that's also kind of what makes TempleOS fascinating. It's an extremely bizarre thing to play with, and it can be a surprisingly big time sink if you really decide to get into it, and I don't think all the ideas in there are bad.

For the most part, it doesn't feel like there are a ton of original operating systems anymore; most people seem happy enough to use a dialect Linux of FreeBSD if you need something specialized, or Windows and macOS for general purpose. I don't blame these people, that's certainly what I would do too, but I have to give credit to Terry for deciding to do his own thing from scratch in assembly code. He was sort of a relic of a bygone era in that regard.

I certainly don't want to engage in any apologetics for Terry's outright racism and conspiracy theories, that stuff is horrible and I have no nice things to say about it, but he will always be a figure that I'm a little fascinated by.

From the article:

> The boot sequence up to this point looks completely different than any other primary/secondary bootloader I’ve ever looked at. It demonstrates a lot of creativity in the writing process

It's clear that this guy didn't think like the rest of us, didn't code like the rest of us. But he was so incredibly talented. I'm in awe.

Yeah, that's kind of why I think it's important to reinvent the wheel sometimes.

The "logical" choice if you want a custom OS is to start with a Linux, glue together Grub and a kernel and if you're really ambitious maybe write your own windowing system on X or Wayland or something. I think it's safe to say that's what most of us on this forum would do, and it's certainly what I would do, and I don't think that's an incompetent decision.

But I think it's important for people shoot for the moon and inject entropy into the process. Terry definitely had a very interesting way of thinking than the average engineer, and I think there are more than a few clever ideas buried within TempleOS that we might not have otherwise. If we don't occasionally inject entropy into the process, I think we find plenty of local maxima, but miss a lot of potentially higher potential maxima.

> If we don't occasionally inject entropy into the process, I think we find plenty of local maxima, but miss a lot of potentially higher potential maxima.

Someone sent me this video a while ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHuFSnhKG9I

The video uses an analogy that stuck with me, and the basic idea is that if autistics are good at deeply building out a single idea, schizophrenics / schizotypals find it very easy to adopt entirely new ideas. This could also be one of the mechanisms behind schizophrenic delusions, which are difficult to fight with logic, because they're not based on logical combinations of existing ideas, they stand on their own.

I think it's extremely fascinating. I don't think there's any doubt that he was suffering from his illness, but I don't think he suffered only due to his illness. I think general society doesn't yet understand mental illness and neurodivergence in general well enough to know how to approach it. I don't know if I'll live long enough to see real studies catch up to even just what I currently know and feel intuitively, and that makes me a little sad.

To me, autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, DID, BPD and so on, all feel critically misunderstood by medical literature.

for a brilliant science fictional treatment of some of these themes, check out friedman's "this alien shore" and sequel

IIRC Terry literally injected entropy, in that he used a PRNG to suggest what to work on next. At the time, it occurred to me that that might have been an effective way to make sure all of the system got a little implemented, instead of only ever working on his favourite subsystems?

"I certainly don't want to engage in any apologetics for Terry's outright racism and conspiracy theories"

Indeed, but one may consider this is often part of mental-health symptomatology in many cases.

I watched people I knew for decades slowly develop schizophrenic disorders, and they tended to fixate on visible appearances about 10 months before cycling into a full psychotic episode. It is not a permanent state, but rather they would later cycle back into lucid states where they were the same people they used to be for awhile. The modern medications are far more effective at tamping down the frequency and severity of the paranoia symptoms with fewer side-effects.

As you age, even without a psychopathology background one will learn people are delicate, madness is a gradient, and some people break in ways you won't understand.

The modern internet is hardly accommodating to anything unique or controversial, as the vitriol often flows far more easily than compassion.

Take care of yourselves, and remember to be kind to each other =3

I completely agree.

When Terry died a few years ago, I actually had some arguments here about people fully condemning him for the racist stuff, and I pushed back claiming that mental illness could happen to anyone and it's important to approach these things with a bit of sympathy [1].

I go back and forth, but I generally try hard to approach these things with some level of empathy. The human brain is a frustrating and annoying thing, it breaks in non-obvious ways for non-obvious reasons causing non-obvious effects. Dementia is something that will affect a lot (most?) of us at some point, and who the hell knows how any one of us are going to handle that?

While I think it's totally fine to condemn the individual statements that Terry said, and maybe even ok to use the reductive-but-useful label of "asshole" to describe him, I also think it's important to remember that fundamentally, he was a human.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17913372

"Dementia is something that will affect a lot"

Most with such a family history should be regularly eating a diet including Edamame, fresh eggs, fungi, and seaweed. The FDA will be clearing a new treatment this year which includes some of the same Edamame protective compounds if I recall, and should help many people slow degenerative symptoms by over 80%.

Gene therapies are also outpacing projected models, and should be more viable in coming decades.

Cheers =3

What if I'm allergic to soy?

eggs include many of the same beneficial compounds.

If you are Vegan, than you'll have to wait for the pills to clear approval. =3

Note if you haven't been tested for allergies yet, than you should see your doctor. It is very common for guys taking Soy-Protein powder in sports drinks to have a bad experience with many (but not all) products.

All good. I'm allergic to virtually everything haha.

Dementia is heavily linked with both viral infections and with microbes, e.g. in your gut, mouth, urinary tract. Sure, diet can have a protective effect on two of those but you're naive if you think it'll actually reach 80% slowdown of progression for everyone eating them.

"you're naive"

Indeed that might be the case, but I do trust the US FDA more than an Internet of recursive Google results from Lithuania. We will soon learn if the medication trials are repeatable in the general population, and whether it is effective for greatly slowing cognitive decline.

The food intake tips are something people should look into if they want to stay healthy, but it is not some new-age recipe for replacing medication.

This should be obvious, and have a great day =3

Only idiots keep order, a genius controls the chaos.

I hope Terry rest in peace. He had a tormented mind.

I look forward to more analysis. Watching this guy on youtube play with his mangled toy is always going to be a part of my outlook as an engineer. We really could sit down and build it all again from scratch, and yeah we might go crazy, but we learn so much in the process.

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