A research operating system to endeavour towards Anodyne.
This repository provides a collection of tools to quickly and neatly bootstrap a DOSBox-X session running Sirius DOS. Currently, it provides the following software:
- Pacific C compiler and IDE (
PPD.EXE)
Eventually, it will provide the following software:
- Oración (
ORACION.COM) - Feeble C compiler (
FCC.COM) - Sirius C* (
CSTC.COM) - Quindle (
QUINDLE.COM) - Hinterlib
The Anodyne personal supercomputer project poses a dilemma: with how conjoined hardware and software are both in theory and in product, it is hard to significantly improve one without being held back by the other. Just try installing Xilinx Vivado and marvel at all of the gigabytes of disk space you will end up needing – and that’s the minimum required to start making anything.
The cause of this problem is something programmers are, incidentally, already familiar with: it’s called coupling, and it is indeed a scourge. Even though products continue to climb into the stratosphere as measured by benchmarks, scientific computing and visual rendering of 3D and video, the experience of using them and programming them has become severely stunted. One does not simply “do whatever” as they could in the 1990s now that programming has become pigeonholed into existing architectures, paradigms and ways of being.
We have to break this coupling in order to reopen the door to impactful experimentation. The only way to do that is by solving the catch-22, hence the creation of Sirius DOS. DOS was chosen as a foundation because of its widespread use, unassuming architecture that can be expanded upon easily and its virtue as a period piece of the 1980s and early 1990s when it was an open question what media formats or instruction sets your computer might be using. Indeed, even on DOS we will fast be realising some great innovations—such as the software modular memory technique—without even having to touch an FPGA.
To start, the project will retread the footprints of Ken Thompson:
- an editor
- an assembler
- a kernel/overlay
In our case, the following software will do these jobs, respectively:
- Quindle
- Oración
- Hinterlib
But unlike Thompson’s original UNIX™, these will not be a crummy amalgamation of primitive tools. Quindle will be a high-colour program running up to 1280×1024 in resolution with a fully-fledged virtual terminal and fixed tiling window system, Oración will be a modular assembler with instruction encodings and aliases composed in source files, and Hinterlib will subsume the MS-DOS subsystems already present while also pulling double duty to converge the programs using it onto a unified API for both DOS applications and hosted applications on other systems it supports.
These are just the basics however. With these in hand, the creation of the so-called ‘developmental quartet’—Inbound, Outbound, Rebound and Earthbound—can begin. These tools provide the rest of the plumbing necessary to develop software products to completion: build orchestration, software package creation, software distribution strategies, and finally the procurement of software from yonder.
Run util/fetchdst.{bat,sh} on Windows/Unices respectively. If the
upstream servers dislike the curl user agent, your IP address, or some
combination thereof, download it however you may and place the files
manually according to the script contents.
Then run util/setupdst.{bat,sh} to extract and configure everything.
Finally, run DOSBox-X with the config file dosbox-x.conf – on
Windows, DOSBox-X can be installed with a shell context menu addition to
open the file in it; in general, one may run it on any command line (or
create a .lnk similarly) via the incantation dosbox-x dosbox-x.conf.
The setup configured here will drop you into a C: drive mounted to the
local relative directory data/system, with an overlay of
data/local for whatever changes and additions you end up making in use
of the system.