And we have a complete functioning FAT12! Reading and writing have been working smoothly. The fs writing wasn’t even that hard to implement, and I also added a few more mathematicals to to once again appoach GWBASIC. We have direct hardware access (PEEK/POKE into ram, etc), arrays, nonblocking input (INKEY$) and I also added 2 string functions.
After countless fixes I have managed to get a functioning FAT12 filesystem working, including listing and loading files. Saving (writing) is not functional yet. The key issues were: CHS mismatch, BPB was wrong, broken multisector loading, and other. Next I will try to make writing possible.
I’ve changed some kernel details, like that instead of straight crashing, it might tell you whats wrong before, design details, etc. I changed the approach to disk wiriting from straight dd to a python script that actually makes a mountable volume, and I am still working on getting filesystem working. There has been so so many issues ive been running into as the complexity of the system rises (and so does entropy, I guess). This will take an unprecedented amount of work to get even remotely to the level that is GWBASIC, much less what I aspired to (ISO/IEC 10279:1991).
As advised by @Amu I made the README nicer, font bigger, and put compiled packages on github via actions.
I managed to implement longer variable names possible, a lof of trig/calc functions and overall perked up some details. Im heading towards Full BASIC instead of just Tiny BASIC but Im not sure how far I will go with this.
Ive gotten to the point where it actually boots from floppy in QEMU (no hd working) AND to an extent BASIC works. Its not perfect yet but ill get there soon.
What a poor choice this project. I wanna sleep so much and yet I cant fall asleep because I just have to get it running and it will definietly only be an hour or less.
I changed the approach. Instead of just messing around in assembly, I will do most of it in C and assembly is only for the bootloader. Yes, bootloader. Simplest way to keep this as bare-metal and universal as possible was, in my opinion, to just write a kernel, grub, crosscompile for i868 (in distrobox because the toolchain doesnt run on my distro) and boot via QEMU. I got far enough that it compiles and builds into an ISO, but doesnt actaully even boot, instead bugs out in SeaBIOS. Seems I bit off more than I could chew.
After an all-nighter i got it to assemble, but to call it functional would be a joke.
I figured out the issues, then more came up, then I figured those out, then more, and so on and so on. But I did manage to get something working out, and from my tests it works swimmingly. ALGOL68 is definietly something I will never revisit thouhg.
It’s my first time working with ALGOL68 (what an idea) and of course nothing works. However I wanted to devlog these 2h38 because this will take a few more days to get functional. Not like I have any worthwhile images to attach so here goes my latest error message.
Fixed some text alignment, and the multistrain component giving completely wrong results. Everything actually (seemingly) works pretty well.
Worked on support for multistrain, and while it is somewhat implemented it gonna stay off main branch, theres a lot left to do with it.
I implemented age stratification as a separate mode, and will work on integrating them more closely. Very minor text alignment issues left but it is time to sleep.
I wrote the core architecture of the simulator, with almost no larger features yet but it should be functional. I have also ran into a build error and fixed it and now built successfully (with 1 error).
