It's a fascinating project, but if you made a game in LoseThos, who would actually install the OS / boot via LiveCD to play it?
Still, it's nice to see someone trying to preserve the experience of early home computing; barebones systems with painfully easy access to graphics hardware.
Hopefully he or someone else can improve upon this and make an OS which includes some modern amenities (ahem, network support for multiplayer!) and we'd have what is sort of like an open source console OS, a non-moving software target which could be paired with a non-moving hardware target and bring some of the advantages of console development to the PC. This pairing could even be in the form of a through-and-through open source video game console.
In a VM scenario, it could be an interesting environment to do some development in. The limitations and OS install aren't a big deal if it lived in a VM window, and the thing is small.
I've been wondering in general if we will get to the "each app in a VM window" paradigm as a common way to do business on the desktop. Really if there was a cross-vm cut and paste and filesystem driver, the os itself would be a smaller part of the picture.
However, the easy access to graphics hardware is less appealing when you realize it only supports 640x480 and 16 colors. Yes, you could write directly to ports to change the screen mode, but that would break the "non-moving target" argument.
Sounds entertaining. I'll give the developer credit: he/she knows what he wants from that project, and that's half the battle. No feature creep in his mind.
it better not have any internet/lan support ever... "runs everything in kernel mode and all applications have access to everything".. If I was a virus-programmer, my fingers would itch...
Still, it's nice to see someone trying to preserve the experience of early home computing; barebones systems with painfully easy access to graphics hardware.
Hopefully he or someone else can improve upon this and make an OS which includes some modern amenities (ahem, network support for multiplayer!) and we'd have what is sort of like an open source console OS, a non-moving software target which could be paired with a non-moving hardware target and bring some of the advantages of console development to the PC. This pairing could even be in the form of a through-and-through open source video game console.