If we're going to request going beyond the, uh, basics... What about another/different language? Or is that veering too far from the path?
I know every system and their mom came with BASIC back in the day, but IIRC Pascal and Logo were also available for a lot of systems as well. But I'm sure most of them still came default with BASIC.
I do agree that if you have a BASIC it needs proper structured capabilities. Would a VM/Interpreter system for that be best or a compiler, or a combo/option? /me wonders if there's a BASIC Bytecode Machine (surely there must be. though BASIC is so fast would it even be necessary?)
I'm also a fan of the idea of "hotswapping" OS's (but I don't think I've seen that much in home computing - like we have VM's now, and can boot into different OS's but what if you could do more/faster)...
What would it take to store the OS state and pause, like Switch does, then swap via a TSR program to a different OS? What would a cross OS data buffer look like, I wonder. You'd have to have some system standard for the OS's to communicate or some subsystem to interpret the data.
So much of this seems contingent on memory access and capabilities, I suppose. For some reason I was thinking 32k was the max ram possible on an 8 bit system (OK, by "for some reason", I was thinking of the memory upgrade option for our CoCo I which allowed it to go to 32k BASIC; but looking up I see most 8 bit systems utilized 16 bit memory addressing, so 64k is likely max).
256 color makes sense; I wonder if you could introduce an "alternate" palettized system for devs/demo people to play with the effects you can get from that.
I hadn't seen SymbOS before, that thing looks beautiful.
I think it'd be interesting to have a minimal "desktop"/commandline hybrid of some sort. Not sure what or how it would work, but I think it could be done - without having to ape the WIMP interface, and still provide a more elegant UI than pure text.
If I were a hardware guy this seems like it would be a fun project.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-01-01 03:34 am (UTC)I know every system and their mom came with BASIC back in the day, but IIRC Pascal and Logo were also available for a lot of systems as well. But I'm sure most of them still came default with BASIC.
I do agree that if you have a BASIC it needs proper structured capabilities. Would a VM/Interpreter system for that be best or a compiler, or a combo/option? /me wonders if there's a BASIC Bytecode Machine (surely there must be. though BASIC is so fast would it even be necessary?)
I'm also a fan of the idea of "hotswapping" OS's (but I don't think I've seen that much in home computing - like we have VM's now, and can boot into different OS's but what if you could do more/faster)...
What would it take to store the OS state and pause, like Switch does, then swap via a TSR program to a different OS? What would a cross OS data buffer look like, I wonder. You'd have to have some system standard for the OS's to communicate or some subsystem to interpret the data.
So much of this seems contingent on memory access and capabilities, I suppose. For some reason I was thinking 32k was the max ram possible on an 8 bit system (OK, by "for some reason", I was thinking of the memory upgrade option for our CoCo I which allowed it to go to 32k BASIC; but looking up I see most 8 bit systems utilized 16 bit memory addressing, so 64k is likely max).
256 color makes sense; I wonder if you could introduce an "alternate" palettized system for devs/demo people to play with the effects you can get from that.
I hadn't seen SymbOS before, that thing looks beautiful.
I think it'd be interesting to have a minimal "desktop"/commandline hybrid of some sort. Not sure what or how it would work, but I think it could be done - without having to ape the WIMP interface, and still provide a more elegant UI than pure text.
If I were a hardware guy this seems like it would be a fun project.