YamOS Beginnings

So a short while ago a friend and I were talking about a project they want to work on. A lot of the techniques we were talking about, such as scanline generation, were commonly used in retro consoles and computers.

So… I thought, why not make my own!

In the spirit of a fantasy retro computer, I plan on having a very thin operating system where the programmer can directly poke at the memory space. The OS will take care of some basic stuff like, video signal generation and the like.

VGA seems pretty easy to implement in software, colour composite video seems a bit harder and I might try implementing it as a challenge but that may not end up happening.

The two DACs of the microcontroller are capable of generating triangle, sawtooth and noise all on their own without needing to be constantly fed samples. Two channels aren’t much, it might be better to provide a framework for generating the tones and mixing them in software. I’m uncertain exactly how much of the CPU is going to be used doing the other tasks, so this might not be the best approach.

I’d like to write a shell for it and maybe a filesystem, I plan on supporting FAT12/16/32 with one of the various libraries like fatfs or dosfs initially but plan on writing my own. The computer will have an μSD card reader for storing the files and programs. Since the microcontroller has USB support, I may as well use it though I’m not certain what all would be handy.