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Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

I'm the author of this software, with the help of some open-source contributors. Feel free to send questions my way.

Even people who don't know assembly can help, if you're interested. We need assembly, C, Python, and web programmers. Let me know if you're interested in helping out.

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I couldn't find any mention of this but does it have any sort of TI-BASIC-type language you can use on it? I got started programming with that and it was awesome to be able to carry around with me a little computer that I could write and run programs on. I never delved down into ASM but I did install a few ASM programs that provided better access to the BASIC programs doing things like sprites or screen draws a magnitude of times faster or providing features that were not available in BASIC.

This is very well done! Almost makes me want dig up my 83 Silver Edition, try it out, port Antrun and fix that one bug that made it impossible to play after a while[0]... except I have given it to my sister who actually has a proper use for it during her biology master.

Does this OS come at the cost of not having any of the standard calculator functions, or are all of those still supported? Or maybe a better catch-all question that covers that: what do I have to give up if I switch to KnightOS from the stock OS?

Does it support any forms of on-calc programming?

[0] http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/328/32817.html

You give up math support, as well as on-calc file editing. However, efforts are underway to support both of these things.

You could probably port that game fairly easily. Many Ion functions are included in the kernel.

Does it work on emulators? If so, any suggestions? (I haven't kept up with development of the TI calc scene at all, I assume there's new kids on the block by now)

Runs best on wabbitemu, but you'll need wine to use it on Linux. We're working on a new emulator, maybe you'd like to help? https://github.com/KnightOS/z80e

I'd love to see a screenshot. What does it look like when running?

There are some screenshots on http://www.knightos.org

Always makes my day to see people still carrying the TI-hacking torch! :)

Any particular goals you want to achieve with this project?

I just want to see a nice Unix-like for these calcs. Eventually it'd be cool to have a bunch of slick stuff like a VFS and such, but for now I'll be happy once there's good math support and students can start using it.

TI-73: 6MHz Z80, 25K RAM, 512K mass storage PDP-11: ~4.5MHz, 16K RAM, >1M mass storage

CPU looks powerful enough and the amount of RAM is comparable to early Unix machines but you might run into storage space limitations.

This is really cool! Does it require/bundle any nonfree software?

Nope.

Hm I wonder if KnightOS fits the GNU Project's free system distribution guidelines. The list of endorsed systems is pretty short right now.

https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guideli...

KnightOS is not:

- Complete

- Self hosting

It also does not replace a single non-free blob that's written to read-only memory on the device.

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