The entire OS binary fits in 16384 bytes! That reminds me of the days of 8-bit computers. The ROM on the Apple II was less than 16k.
I've written a lot of assembler in my day, and I gotta say I don't really miss it. C is plenty close enough to the machine for me, and a hellova lot easier to understand/maintain.
I know what you mean - except I never got much further than Hello World in assembler. It does say though applications can also be written in C/C++. Not sure how people find locations for example deep deep zooms into the M-Set, but that could be done in your normal OS, and then when ready to render the deep zoom video, transfer the coordinates to a headless rendering application operating in Bare Metal OS. That was one of the ways in which I imagined it might benefit people here. I don't know how feasible that might be as I've not really looked into it.
Ugh, that's right. Such a machine would not have any graphics at all.
I think you're better off using a REAL computer, putting a high end graphics card in it, and using OpenCL for your rendering. That's likely to be whole lot faster than a machine without multi-tasking.
Alternately, you cold set up your machine to dual-boot in a stripped-down version of Unix, with most functions running at low priority and the rendering running at the highest priority. Unix can be made very lean and mean, but it has support for modern conveniences like graphics, networking, a real file system, etc.
June 19, 2009, 06:45:54 PM
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