New GUI for the Atari 8-bit

[wesmond]

Well done Jon - brilliant news on all fronts! I think we'd all heartily agree, very well deserved.

[+Firedawg]

Congrats all around for you, your wife, and the HR friend!!! Thanks for all you do for the Atari community.

[flashjazzcat]

Thanks folks... As soon as I get paid, we're taking Peter out for a well-deserved meal to thank him for his expertise and his time (and the fantastic four page appeal letter).

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Congratulations. Such a good news story made my day better. Glad things are looking up for you!

[jacobus]

Congrats Jon - and very well deserved!

[candle]

since you're rich now, PAINT THAT HOUSE you live in ;P

 

congrats Jon - to you and mrs too

[+David_P]

As we'd say in Canada, "Felicitations!"

 

(Well, parts of Canada, at least. Compared to most Europeans, I feel so limited, only reading, writing and speaking two languages...)

[sack-c0s]

As we'd say in Canada, "Felicitations!"

 

(Well, parts of Canada, at least. Compared to most Europeans, I feel so limited, only reading, writing and speaking two languages...)

 

Well they say in Europe 'if you speak 3 language you're Trilingual, if you speak 2 languages you're bilingual, if you speak one language you're English'

[w1k]

some screenshots?

[flashjazzcat]

Looks worse than it is from satellite photos Sebastian.

 

Anyway: I want to thank everyone for the amazing support I was given in difficult times... I'll never forget the brand new PC paid for by people from this community. You are the best.

 

And now: I arrive home from work tonight, looking forward to the weekend... And the landline's dead. No net... ISP has logged a ticket with the carrier. God knows how long this will take to fix.

Edited May 10, 2013 by flashjazzcat

[atari8warez]

This is really good... oh no, not the dead landline but the employment news . Congratulations to you both....

[popmilo]

Congratulations Jon!

May it be one of the best jobs you'll have

 

Off-time is good for retro coding but only up to certain point ...

 

ps. I like where you are going with Gui + rest of stuff. Serious effort, thumbs up!

[bbking67]

fjc, if you are working for a VOIP company its time to ditch the landline. I held on to mine for years due to my security system (I have been using VOIP for about 6 years concurrently), but I discovered that my security system does indeed work over VOIP with a bit of fiddling around.

[kogden]

this post is a tech support role for a VoIP company and means I can finally get some IT support experience on paper. The company is very "enlightened" and nice to work for, and I have to say I appear to have got the job almost entirely off the back of the work I've done with Sebastian over the past couple of years on mass storage devices and so on. The boss is also the senior programmer and was quite fascinated during the (long) interview by some of the stuff we've been doing here.

 

Way to go! Much more fun to work for folks that have a clue.

 

And better yet: after my wife was (unfairly) dismissed the day before I was offered this job (so you can imagine I was doubly pleased to be successful), myself and a good HR consultant friend of mine took up the fight, helped her lodge an appeal, and the dismissal was overturned last Friday. So now we're both working... good times ahead.

 

Wow! Awesome! Most companies here in the US would have laughed at the mere concept of an appeal.

 

Glad to hear things are going well!

[Chilly Willy]

Well they say in Europe 'if you speak 3 language you're Trilingual, if you speak 2 languages you're bilingual, if you speak one language you're English'

 

A look at the other side of that statement: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/4070610/56/

[flashjazzcat]

fjc, if you are working for a VOIP company its time to ditch the landline.

 

Considering this. Landline's back up now, but starting to look a bit slow nowadays (4Mbit downstream, 0.5 up), and Virgin Media do a very nice 30Mb connection for around 20GBP per month with no phone package. Of course my wife will then want the TV package added on...

[+MrFish]

In lieu of visible recent progress... a couple of screen designs from last year. I was roughing out a few ideas I had, for what should be one of the more enjoyable parts of the project, building applications.

 

 

[Caterpiggle]

Why not in color instead of B/W ? Threw back into 1970's in B/W ?

 

Yes, I am aware of GUI's limitation...

[+MrFish]

I happen to like working in a black and white environment, but color will be no problem at all.

 

 

[Caterpiggle]

Nice ....only 1 color per screen ? Once again, not possible to make normal color 16 or 64 colors at once like common Atari Games 8 bits era ?

 

And PS, I don;t see any downloadable link for the latest release GUI application ?

 

As for now, I only has an 1 demo GUI application, that's it.

[+Philsan]

1984 Macintosh was black and white.

 

Obviously a paint program with 4 colors (or more if possible) would be nice.

[flashjazzcat]

Nice ....only 1 color per screen ? Once again, not possible to make normal color 16 or 64 colors at once like common Atari Games 8 bits era ?

 

The GUI's display handler isn't device independent, so if an application needs to use a custom display (anything other than mono hi-res, that is), it'll likely have to do a lot of the UI leg-work itself. It's not practical to run the menus, etc, at anything less than 320x200, so if an application doesn't use the hi-res UI elements at all, one might as well write it as a regular DOS application. Some applications will obviously need to go full-screen at times (a movie player, for instance), but it's an obvious limitation of the Atari that we can't have hi-res UI components overlaying colour displays.

 

But really, I want to get the basic system working before we start worrying about the pros and cons of colour. I'm gonna start building a ROM-based kernel and file system driver from the bottom up shortly... there's a lot of work ahead.

 

And PS, I don;t see any downloadable link for the latest release GUI application ?

 

As for now, I only has an 1 demo GUI application, that's it.

 

Yep - that's it. I've been tied up for months with hardware jobs, and now I'm working full-time, so progress has been slight in 2013 thus far.

[Caterpiggle]

Interesting to make your own "Atari" new kernel ...

 

Nice .. like LLE kernel ?

[mimo]

I missed the good news Jon, congratulations on the new job. Great news

[flashjazzcat]

Interesting to make your own "Atari" new kernel ...

 

Since we're gonna do CPU time-slicing, andym00 came up with an excellent plan to use the 6502 BRK instruction to make kernel calls, and this is very neat because it puts us straight into the IRQ handler and thus the scheduler's context. We need a completely new interrupt handler for this, as well as fine control to overcome the "BRK bug" which has already been discussed in this thread (in short, one can end up in the NMI handler with the B flag set following a missed BRK). All well and good...

 

Now, the next thing I started envisaging was disk activity. We were going to have a wrapper for the SIO which was basically a concurrent I/O process. Applications would message the I/O process, which would then go ahead and call the SIO... but I foresaw problems here. Firstly, the OS SIO (not to mention some third-party custom) routines would play merry hell with our NMI mouse handler. Moreover, it would be next to impossible to pre-empt an SIO operation, so it would have to be considered a critical, blocking task. The user experience would be no mouse pointer and no other activity of any kind for the duration of an I/O operation. Consider a file copy operation with a progress bar and a cancel button in a dialogue. The file manager reads a block of file data, causing the mouse pointer to vanish and only reappear for the brief instant between finishing reading the buffer and writing it to the destination file. It's impossible to click the "Cancel" button because there's no mouse pointer... you might manage to register a press of the "Esc" key. Hardly an ideal situation.

 

So I figure what we need are interrupt-free SIO routines which will at least run alongside the mouse sampler / renderer so that mouse events will get buffered in the queue. Serial I/O won't be fast, but it'll work, and you can go for one of the plethora of PIO devices currently available if you want maxed-out disk performance.

 

With our own SIO handler, we might as well have our own file system too (in fact it becomes rather necessary). I've already gotten a half-finished (read-only) FAT32 driver from the APT projects, so there's a good starting point... and now we're talking about custom interrupt handlers, SIO handlers, and FMS, we're talking about a kernel.

 

Of course this is all rather ambitious and I'll probably try to enlist help from those willing to assist. Maybe it'll prove easier to scale things back a bit in the first instance... who knows... but there's something very appealing about building the kernel from the ground up to boot and run from cartridge ROM space, before adding SIO routines and such like. Much easier than retro-fitting the multitasking stuff to what we already have. And what we already have (the partially completed UI) would run as a concurrent task in its own right.

 

For evidence that it can be done, look no further than SymbOS, which supports FAT, FAT32, CP/M and other file systems, and is a true operating system in its own right. The moot point at the moment seems to be how well the 6502 can handle a context switch, but I think it'll be a lot of fun finding out. And with a talented graphic designer like MrFish on the project, whatever is eventually produced is guaranteed to look extremely pretty. Whether people put the system to constructive use is - I believe - entirely dependent on the bundled applications, as well as the willingness of other developers to write programs using the API.

 

I missed the good news Jon, congratulations on the new job. Great news

 

Thanks man!

Edited May 19, 2013 by flashjazzcat