Idea: Atari OS

[Syntaxerror999]

Im a fool for telling anyone this cause I feel it could be something that can be sold on atariage, but heres my idea... and yes it would fall under the "why bother" catagory...

 

Make an onboard Operating system for the atari. Ive seen a windows like homebrew before, but this would different in that the corner stone of the project would be a hardware modification kit. Basicly my idea is the kit would be a board/boards that fit into the 6507,RIOT,and TIA molex sockets, with the chips themselve inserted into the mod boards. The mod kit would disable the cartage slot and instead load the OS stored on an EEPROM (or EEEPROM..I can never remember how many E's to use) when the consol was turned on. This would be accomplished by a switching circut that flips the ground lead of the cartrage slot and the onboard chip on and off; simular to the slot mod on the Flashback 2. From the OS you could run programs that are part of OS, or load up whatever cartrage is currently inserted, or even from a third internaly mounted cart.

 

That last part is the tricky part... how do you make a switching circut that can be controled by the OS? ANy memory address you configure it to be the trigger could be triggered by any atrai game that uses the same adress... anyone with a unmodded supercharger knows exactly what Im talking about. Perhaps replacing that 6507 with a 6502 would give it memory adresses not normaly avalable to the atari and therefore no other game would be using?

 

Other features could be a hard reset (resets back to the OS) button, built in pause mod,built in video mod, mount for an internal Atarivox (switchable, and automaticly mixes the audio into the ataris audio via the audio/video mod), and multiple built in programs... maybe even the ability to load up roms like a harmony cart (or could use a harmony cart)

 

One final hickup would be ataris with sodered on chips... that will take creativity.

 

Well... how bout it? Trust me, Id do this myself if a could.

[GroovyBee]

Its been done. Its called the Atari 800/400/800XL etc .

[ScumSoft]

EPROM, Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory.

EEPROM, Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory.

 

EPROM's had to be erased with UV light.

EEPROMS can be erased via software commands, like a flash drive or bios.

 

Now you shall never forget

[player 0ne]

You are on to something. The harmony cart has a file loader, and can browse folders. Read a post that said he could prolly add another bankswitching scheme to make it read simple text files. wouldnt that be cool? what about some kind of picture viewer. A cart with a searchable rarity chart and a (SAVEABLE??) color drawing or ad for a retro gaming store. there is a calculator bin file. add that. so complile a a good range of stuff and put it onto a version of those carts that can be rewritten. so the os can be updated.

what do yall think. ive been thinking about this before it read it. any hardware guys know how possible this is? how many average games (apps) could fit onto the biggest rewriteable cart? kinda a multicart ??, but with text and pic capabilities, or other OS stuff. music maker, basic programming.

 

:ramble:

[GroovyBee]

With this in the works for the A8 :-

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/154520-new-gui-for-the-atari-8-bit/

 

No contest!

[player 0ne]

thats pretty cool

but i dont think a gui is am important as the apps. someone made atari OS, but without coding any apps (but pong) into it, its just not very usefull. fancy gui, no purpose. the harmony cart has a fine text interface. i dont mind text interface. but an "office" cart or app cart would do alot, especially if you could save or load date..