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Comment by vdupras | Hacker News Reader

You begin by making a pen "from just the elements", then work your way up to there.

In other words, it's a huge challenge, but 6502 is closer, in complexity, to the pen than to the, say, AMD Ryzen.

But the primary idea behind Collapse OS isn't to run from 6502 built from the ground up (although it partly is), but to run from frankenstein cobbled up machines made from scavenged parts.

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I wonder how many of preppers has mask images in their archives. Manufacturing primitive integrated circuits theoretically don't require digitally controlled machinery.

If I scavenge any machine today, how likely would I be to find a 6502 vs something more modern? I’d argue that some people might have a NES at home and one could get a 2A03 from it, but in a hypothetical scenario where I need to scavenge some computational power, I’d find an Android phone

You're much more likely to stumble one something more modern, but that modern something is also much less repairable. It's great if it works and if it can run Linux or Dusk OS, but when it can't, you're out of luck.

With a 6502 or other such CPU, the machines you scavenge them from are much more repairable and adaptable. You can use those components like lego blocks. It breaks? either repair it or strip the working parts to use in another frankenstein computer.

I get the idea of making a frankenstein computer, I just disagree that 6502 is THE platform to do it on. Practically, there's no way for me to find it. Other comment mentions ARM, which is a much more interesting proposal to me

ARM is an interesting proposal if you want to order a SBC online and run software on it. Soldering an ARM CPU with low tech tools? That's something else.

Time of a strategic reserve of J-Links?

DuskOS apparently runs on ARM, so one of these vape boards running FORTH would likely feel very roomy indeed.

I have ported zForth to an even weaker chip, the famous 10c risc-v micro ch32v003 (16k flash, 2k ram) so no issue running on this: https://github.com/BogdanTheGeek/zForth

Allow me to brag about romforth (https://github.com/romforth/romforth) which I ported to the "3c" Padauk and can run on really small rom/ram microcontrollers. Caveats: - tested only on an emulator SDCC/ucsim_pdk, not on real hardware - given how small the ram is, there is no user dictionary but new words can be defined and tested using what the Forth folks refer to as "umbilical hosting".

Even for a Forth, 3KB of RAM is rather tight. Dusk OS intentionally de-prioritize compactness and it couldn't run on that amount of RAM. It can get a C compiler loaded in about 100KB of RAM, but 3? not enough to boot.

OK, so we'd play with zForth then, as BogdanTheGeek notes here. That reminds me, I have a Scamp board sitting here on my desk that I really should play with more. https://udamonic.com/what-is-a-scamp.html

"we'd", you mean in a collapse scenario? Forths are, by nature, "collapse-friendly", but one particularity with Collapse OS and Dusk OS is that they are fully self-hosted. This includes the tools necessary to improve upon themselves.

From a quick glance, it looks like BogdanTheGeek's Forth is written in C, which means that it's not self-hosted. If all you have is that disposable vape with this Forth in it, you lack the tools to deploy it on another machine or to improve it in place.

One could also port Collapse OS to ARM. I guess it wouldn't be a very big effort.

Good points! Really, I should start with learning Forth on the devices I have first, before getting to concerned about others. ARM does seem like a useful target though, given that they're basically everywhere these days.

OK. It would be nice though if Collapse OS contained tools to build an AMD Ryzen.

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