A82: Re: Fw: Proposed open operating system/gui/shell (CalcOS-82,83,85,8


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A82: Re: Fw: Proposed open operating system/gui/shell (CalcOS-82,83,85,86)



First of all you are saying that it is a problem that there are too many
OS's for each calc, and your solution to this problem is to make yet another
one. This does not sound very logical. Besides that 5 other programmer are
allready working on an OS with basically the same features as the one you
want to make. Sometime ago Jason Todd and I teamed up and are now working on
one shell, which means that on the ti82 there will be only one shell.
However if you make your own OS there will again be 2 OS's for the TI82,
which you said was a bad thing.

The reason that the source cde for most OS's are not released is people
would then ust change a few bytes in the source and then release it as their
own shell. Try having a look at all the shells released for the TI85, a lot
of them looks like the author disassembled ZShell and copied the code. By
not realeasing the source only programmes who are smart enough to
disassemble the shell will be able to do this.

To me it seems like you have not been working with the calcs for very long.
The idea of making a compressor for like the one you are suggesting was
discussed on A85 long time ago, and some people started making it, but it
ended up beeing way to big (and therefre not saving any space at all).

Libraries has been tried on the TI85 and the authors of the shell found out
that it was a bad idea, and therefore they removed them from the shell.
Libraries are nice for programmers because they make it easier for us, but
most users do not like them. Th reason for this is that you need a lot of
variables on your calc to run one program and that it is too complicated to
remember which libs goes with which programs.

Another thing you are suggesting is multitasking. You have to remember that
this is a calc, with a small processor and a limited amount of ram. The
question is do we need multitasking ? are we willing to use some of the RAM
for a feature like this ? My answer is no.

You say that you want the the OS to work on all calcs, but it seems like you
have not thought about (or do not know about) the problems with all this.
One of the big problems is that not all functions found on one calc has been
found on the other. I am currently working on finding these functions on
both the ti85 and the ti82, but it takes time. These problems would have to
be solved before you can make your OS work with all the calcs, and since i
am (as far as i know) the only one working on this it might take some time.
So you would probably endup with a OS for the TI82 which could not be ported
to the other calcs with out chaning the rom calls, and then people would
have to make seperate version of their program for each calc anyway.


You also write that you want your OS to be small. The OS you are writing
includes more functions than Usgard and alot of people think that it is too
big. So what makes you think that people will like your OS which is even
bigger ? Again you have to remember that these calcs only have 32k of mem.

As far as i can see you are missing some of the important features of a
shell in your OS. First of all i think tha it s very important to support as
many rom versions as possible and i know of 3 which are not yet supported by
a shell. Besides that several rom calls which could be very useful has not
been added in any shell yet because they lack documentation.

Dines

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Riley McArdle <rileym@geocities.com>
>Newsgroups: bit.listserv.calc-ti
>Date: Monday, 13 October, 1997 00:28
>Subject: Proposed open operating system/gui/shell (CalcOS-82,83,85,86)
>
>
>>I am proposing a new operating system.  Unlike anything any other TI
>>calculator has seen (other than the 92).  I have attached my notes so far.
>>Nothing is started yet so don't ask for a download site.  I have been
>>looking at the state of ti calculators for a while and I have been
>thinking.
>>It is so hard for someone to get started programming.  Once they do get
>>programming, there are so many operating systems (at least two for each
>>calculator) and twice as many gui/shell/apis.  Most of them are also
closed
>>source code.  What I am proposing is an open operating system with
>>reasonable portability and SMALL size.  The way I think that we can make
it
>>small is with compression.  If we had a small kernel and a compression
>>library, we could load and unload programs from RAM (or even a memory
>>expander like the ones for the TI-85) and dynamically decompress them.  I
>>also think that the operating system needs to have dynamic linked
libraries
>>so that common code can be shared (which would also help with size).  I am
>>starting with the TI-82 (because that is what I have) and TASM (not the
one
>>from Borland).  I don't know a whole lot about assembly (especially Z80)
>but
>>I definitely know a lot about programming and operating systems.
>>
>>By the way, the name I have chosen is CalcOS-82 (and in the future,
>>CalcOS-83, CalcOS-85, and CalcOS-86)
>>
>>IF ANYONE WOULD LIKE TO HELP PROGRAM, E-MAIL ME!  Please include which
part
>>you would like to program (from the list in the attached file), don't go
to
>>far ahead until we have the basic structure set up (i.e. kernel, basic
gui)