New GUI for the Atari 8-bit

woj · March 15

1 hour ago, flashjazzcat said:

once the initial period of bottomless-pit expenditure has passed

I must honestly warn you - practically, this period seems to converge to infinity…

flashjazzcat · March 15

1 minute ago, woj said:

I must honestly warn you - practically, this period seems to converge to infinity…

That's the impression I'm getting. We already wasted £700 on a cowboy roofer (the work will have to be done again at a cost of £1,200), and I estimate pointing work, flat roof replacement and some new UPVC windows at the front we want fitted this spring will easily cost £5,000. The philosophy is 'once it's done, it's done', but I'm sure it's never 'done'.

xxl · March 15

30 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said:

I estimate pointing work, flat roof

finally someone thought about ROOF computing - atari will order me dinner before I even think about it, thank you 🙂

Real-Time Operations Facilitations or ROOF is a class of computational framework for Edge Computing with Internet of Things (IoT). The ROOF framework provides support for building scalable, secure, and robust Internet of Things applications with limited tools in resource constrained situations.

flashjazzcat · March 15

So it is. Erm... thanks?

The roofer was certainly resource-constrained, since he arrived here without a saw (I had to lend him one so he could cut the boards). The result was anything but robust, however, nor secure and scalable.

+mytek · March 15

7 hours ago, bradc said:

Can't wait for something we can help with and write apps for.

I had to chuckle when I read this :lolblue:

Although the demo that's been out there for many years looks very enticing, it is after all just a proof of concept with no underpinnings. Essentially just window dressing at this stage. However it was so convincing at the time I first saw it, and the potential was there for it to become something truly usable and great, that I even worked on the hardware side of things to bring a PS/2 mouse aspect into some of my creations starting in 2017.

After 14 years since this topic first got posted, and not much traction over the last half of that, chances are looking bleak that this will ever see fruition as a completed workable GUI desktop application. And probably due to it being closed source pretty much insures that to be the case (the only guy working on it has gotta make a living doing other things).

Don't get me wrong... What Jon accomplished in the demo looks absolutely incredible! However for anyone to hold out hope for something more beyond what the demo currently does, is in my opinion wishful thinking, which is something I was guilty of for many years myself

flashjazzcat · March 15

25 minutes ago, mytek said:

Although the demo that's been out there for many years looks very enticing, it is after all just a proof of concept with no underpinnings.

The two demo applications (the task manager and perfunctory text window) are fully relocatable applications loaded from a ROM-disk filesystem, which call the (albeit undocumented) API.

25 minutes ago, mytek said:

And probably due to it being closed source pretty much insures that to be the case

I wouldn't presume to be the only person capable of writing something like this, and indeed there are several open-source multiprocessing kernels ported to the Atari which have been available for anyone to download and embellish since well before I started this project. I'm having trouble locating an example of where a committee of programmers took one of those, ran with it, and produced anything usable (let alone unprecedented), however.

25 minutes ago, mytek said:

Don't get me wrong... What Jon accomplished in the demo looks absolutely incredible! However for anyone to hold out hope for something more beyond what the demo currently does, is in my opinion wishful thinking, which is something I was guilty of for many years myself

Naturally people's circumstances change, life moves on, etc. Given my time again, on the one hand I would have kept the whole thing to myself until there was something usable to publish, but on the other hand, public discussion of the project (and most crucially, input from people like Prodatron, the author of another closed-source GUI) was invaluable. What is it they say? Release early and often? In any case, the amount of work required simply to make the source code make sense to a third party would be almost equivalent to finishing it, and given the hiatus, I'd certainly want to re-write large parts of it (again) anyway.

It just underlines what a marvellous job Prodatron did with SymbOS (which we have to remember was written in fits and starts with a long hiatus; the story of SymbOS is well worth a read).

Edited March 15 by flashjazzcat

+Stephen · March 15

I will say one thing about the whole open source vs closed source thing. I've been guilty in the past, on several occasions of asking for source, or at least wishing it was available. BUT - let's use the Jaguar as an example. Source code for at least 9 of the commercially released games has been available since (conveniently enough) 14 years. Guess what has come from it? Precisely (and this is a highly technical term) fuck all. Not a single update to any of the games has been published. Not a single project using any of the said source has come out.

John's point of making the source usable to other people taking as long as him re-doing it is 100% valid. Many times in my job, it is simply easier to restart and just do it myself rather than taking existing code and fixing it up. It's either too messy, too inefficient, not able to be understood, etc.

flashjazzcat · March 15

From my own observation, I couldn't have put it better than 'PFA' myself.

There's one thing I did forget to mention: in the intervening time (in 2022, specifically), I wrote a FAT16/32 file system driver (and DOS) from the ground up, and with that, one of the most counfounding obstacles (among several) to getting the GOS finished is basically dealt with (with the message passing system overlaid onto the driver and the code made relocatable, there's your GOS's ability to handle mass storage sorted out).

CPUWIZ · March 15

2 hours ago, xxl said:

finally someone thought about ROOF computing - atari will order me dinner before I even think about it, thank you 🙂

Real-Time Operations Facilitations or ROOF is a class of computational framework for Edge Computing with Internet of Things (IoT). The ROOF framework provides support for building scalable, secure, and robust Internet of Things applications with limited tools in resource constrained situations.

ROOF (Realtime Onsite Operations Facilitation)

flashjazzcat · March 15

6 hours ago, danwinslow said:

My two cents - leave the vbxe and other fancy hardware out of it for now. Finish the original core base, leaving things set up so that folks can reasonably easily add features - i.e., APIs are present for the core system and for a device driver layer.

Missed your post earlier Dan. I completely agree, and certainly wasn't intending to write VBXE drivers (to begin with, if at all). But the very act of redesigning everything so that it worked through a driver layer was quite the undertaking in itself, and something I was half way through doing when I last worked on the project (although that was years before I wrote the FAT drivers, so it was very easy to get completely overwhelmed back then).

bradc · March 16

Congrat's on the new house and my sympathies on the wonders of home ownership. By kick, I didn't mean a hornets nest. My intent was just to check on you and the project.

Love the videos, BTW.

+mytek · March 16

59 minutes ago, bradc said:

By kick, I didn't mean a hornets nest. My intent was just to check on you and the project.

I didn't see any hornets nests coming out of what you posted, or for that matter what I posted. But I guess everyone has a unique way of looking at things.

+x=usr(1536) · March 16

Just as a bit of stream-of-consciousness: FJC's GOS could be the VBXE's killer app.

VBXE is a great bit of hardware, but it's always been something of a solution in search of a problem. Even though it expands the A8's graphical capabilities significantly, the cycle of a lack of software supporting it because uptake on the hardware is slow since the software to make use of it isn't there continues.

GOS running on a modern display at a high resolution (always a plus with windowing OS environments) with, say, Last Word would be pretty sweet. Ditto having it work as a full-on GUI-based file manager across different types of filesystems. With those two as anchor apps in addition to the existing games, both GOS and VBXE would have more than enough in the way of proofs-of-concept to be attractive development targets.

Whether or not the horse drinks once it's been led to the stream is an entirely other question, but the potential does appear to be there.

flashjazzcat · March 16

8 hours ago, mytek said:

I didn't see any hornets nests coming out of what you posted, or for that matter what I posted. But I guess everyone has a unique way of looking at things.

I imagine he's referring to the completely tangential and impossible to ignore discussion regarding closed-source vs open-source that was a direct result of the specious insinuation in your post that were it open source, it would be done already, etc.

Mr Robot · March 16

11 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

VBXE is a great bit of hardware, but it's always been something of a solution in search of a problem. Even though it expands the A8's graphical capabilities significantly, the cycle of a lack of software supporting it because uptake on the hardware is slow since the software to make use of it isn't there continues.

I don't want to drag this off topic so this is just a sidebar. I have noticed an uptick in new software that supports or even requires the VBXE lately; it does appear to be getting more support, maybe it has finally reached a large enough number of people that developers think it's worth the effort.

woj · March 16

14 minutes ago, Mr Robot said:

I have noticed an uptick in new software that supports or even requires the VBXE lately; it does appear to be getting more support

Fascinated by the VBXE capabilitites and motivated to write my first true program for the Atari I was thinking why is so few of us going for it... Truth be told, after I finished, it was kind of boring. I mean, I can see the challenge of programming for and squeezing everything out of the stock graphics. Not that VBXE did not present its own challenges, on the contrary, but at times it felt like shooting sitting ducks, even though I never programmed the Atari for real before. In short: for self satisfaction of a hobby programmer VBXE is not that attractive 😉

(This is not to say I am done with my VBXE adventures 😀).

+mytek · March 16

4 hours ago, flashjazzcat said:

I imagine he's referring to the completely tangential and impossible to ignore discussion regarding closed-source vs open-source that was a direct result of the specious insinuation in your post that were it open source, it would be done already, etc.

Interesting. Although I made no such insinuation, at least not that the project or said software application would already be done if it were open sourced. I merely implied that in the present scenario with only you being privy to the details of the actual code, and the ongoing necessity to focus your talents elsewhere in order to make a living, that it hadn't seen much 'shared' progress as in any new demo releases that I was aware of. Although you did mention work that had come out of the SIDE3 project being applicable to the GUI, this was not apparent until your mention of it yesterday.

And just so we are all perfectly clear, nothing I posted was meant to disparage the GUI project or yourself in any way, or to suggest your best course of action on getting it done. It was simply an observation that other things and life in general had seemingly side tracked the project for the last several years, and that perhaps open sourcing it might have had some positive affect on this, but apparently that assumption was of a 'specious' nature (I had to look that word up to know what it meant).

The written word on forums can conjure up so much confusion and/or misunderstanding if one is not extremely precise in what is written, which in itself can become tedious in nature. Now I wish for that time machine so that I could go back and stop myself from running this topic off course 🙄

No reply necessary. Time to let the discussion get back to where it was before my interruption.

flashjazzcat · March 16

On 3/15/2024 at 1:22 PM, mytek said:

chances are looking bleak that this will ever see fruition as a completed workable GUI desktop application. And probably due to it being closed source pretty much insures that to be the case

I didn't regard that as the least bit ambiguous, but if it was, I apologise and thank you for clarifying.

+mytek · March 16

35 minutes ago, flashjazzcat said:

On 3/15/2024 at 6:22 AM, mytek said:

chances are looking bleak that this will ever see fruition as a completed workable GUI desktop application. And probably due to it being closed source pretty much insures that to be the case

I didn't regard that as the least bit ambiguous, but if it was, I apologise and thank you for clarifying.

Well to be clear let me re-post the full context where that was snipped out of...

On 3/15/2024 at 6:22 AM, mytek said:

After 14 years since this topic first got posted, and not much traction over the last half of that, chances are looking bleak that this will ever see fruition as a completed workable GUI desktop application. And probably due to it being closed source pretty much insures that to be the case (the only guy working on it has gotta make a living doing other things).

As can be seen I wasn't saying that Open Source was the only way this could get done. Instead what I was trying to say is that if you weren't able to get to it due to other obligations -AND- what you had accomplished thus far wasn't Open Sourced, that the chances were 'bleak' that it would ever see completion. Seems pretty logical to me, and wasn't the least bit derogatory about your abilities, unless you consider yourself to be Superman and like him can execute multiple things at light speed without ever needing to take a break.

BTW, although English is my first and only language, I will be the first to openly admit that I butcher it quite frequently, and many times people misunderstand my intent. I'm sure that almost anyone better versed than I, such as yourself could have done a far better job of conveying what I meant to express (thank goodness I'm a subscriber and can re-edit my posts, otherwise a lot of it would end up being word salad for sure).

+MrFish · March 16

On 3/15/2024 at 9:22 AM, mytek said:

it is after all just a proof of concept with no underpinnings.

16 minutes ago, mytek said:

...if you weren't able to get to it due to other obligations -AND- what you had accomplished thus far wasn't Open Sourced, that the chances were 'bleak' that it would ever see completion.

I think a big part of your perception of the current situation is due to the misconception that there are no underpinnings. Whatever gave you that impression?

flashjazzcat · March 16

1 hour ago, mytek said:

As can be seen I wasn't saying that Open Source was the only way this could get done. Instead what I was trying to say is that if you weren't able to get to it due to other obligations -AND- what you had accomplished thus far wasn't Open Sourced, that the chances were 'bleak' that it would ever see completion. Seems pretty logical to me, and wasn't the least bit derogatory about your abilities, unless you consider yourself to be Superman and like him can execute multiple things at light speed without ever needing to take a break.

Yes - I understand now Michael. And I certainly didn't interpret any of your comments as derogatory. Even in the context it was 'snipped' out of, however, the implication seemed thus: if something isn't closed-source, it's open source; if something doesn't have a remote chance of ever reaching fruition, it presumably has a realistic chance of reaching fruition in a timely manner, and finally, if it isn't 'one guy working on it', there are presumably several developers sharing the workload. So this implied to me the opinion that if the project was open-source and worked on by several coders instead of one, it would have a realistic chance of being completed (and I assume within the fourteen year time frame already elapsed). It doesn't seem unnatural that a discussion regarding the pros and cons of open-sourcing broke out as a result of someone remarking that the fact the project is closed-source and maintained by one person with limited time is something of a logistical drawback (which could be reasonably argued), although my view is that the 'opposite' situation (open-source, several programmers, lots of time) doesn't necessarily incite progress, let alone guarantee it. If that's reading too much into the comment (which on reflection, it clearly is), my bad as I say.

1 hour ago, mytek said:

BTW, although English is my first and only language, I will be the first to openly admit that I butcher it quite frequently, and many times people misunderstand my intent. I'm sure that almost anyone better versed than I, such as yourself could have done a far better job of conveying what I meant to express (thank goodness I'm a subscriber and can re-edit my posts, otherwise a lot of it would end up being word salad for sure).

It happens to the best of us Michael, and I don't think on reflection that I worded my earlier posts very well either.

Edited March 16 by flashjazzcat

+mytek · March 16

1 hour ago, MrFish said:

I think a big part of your perception of the current situation is due to the misconception that there are no underpinnings. Whatever gave you that impression?

Once again a failure in my communication. Although probably not the best way of saying it, what I meant was that the demo appeared to only let one mouse around (very well in indeed), click on a few menu items with some allowing drop-down selections, and able to open multiple active task managers and/or text boxes plus move those windows around. This was all very impressive, and is what enticed me to create a PS/2 mouse aspect in the 1088 series systems I designed, thinking to future proof those systems so to speak. However it was far from a working desktop with the conspicuous missing file manager window. So in other words no non built-in applications could be launched, and what was built-in was very minimal from a usability point of view. The missing file manager was what I specifically meant by no underpinnings (e.g., a set of ideas, motives, or devices that justify or form the basis for something). Without a working file manager there really isn't a whole lot one can do with the GUI, so to me that meant it lacked a practical basis at this time, no matter the possible future potential. Like I said perhaps underpinnings was a poor choice of words on my part.

Now I think I'll shut up before I really get in trouble 🤪

+MrFish · March 16

5 minutes ago, mytek said:

The missing file manager was what I specifically meant by no underpinnings

6 minutes ago, mytek said:

Like I said perhaps underpinnings was a poor choice of words on my part.

Yeah, there's a big difference between "no underpinnings" and "missing integral underpinnings".

Jon's work with the FAT file system for other projects has always been directly related to it being used in the GUI.

+MrFish · March 16

Speaking of file management...

I don't think we ever talked about it in this thread, but we did a few experiments before to see how many files could be displayed in a single window with different-sized icons.

Here are some of the examples. To be noted is that these are using the default icon font. We have other, smaller-sized fonts that could be leveraged for maximizing the number of files on screen beyond these examples too.