TBOS 1.0.1

I hope I didn't miss any files in this release! :D

I took out setup.asm since I'll be rewriting it shortly, and added an APM shutdown command to hash, replacing the restart command with shutdown -r. Note that the shutdown part won't work under Virtual PC since it doesn't include APM support.

Screw Facebook

Yes, it's another one of these rants.

Seriously, Facebook needs to be killed off brutally with a butter knife and duct tape. For example, there are 2.547 million people in the Metro Vancouver area, where I live. There are 881 thousand registered and active accounts on Facebook that have the location set to Vancouver, BC. Simple number-crunching, that's a ratio of 1:2.89 people with an active facebook account. Let's just say that's one in 2.89 people who could spend their time doing something waaaaaayyyyyy more useful, say, writing or reading or learning new things, or even finding hobbies that don't include the use of writing useless posts about your mood, what you're listening to, etc. on the internet for everyone to see and go "OMG I R DOING TEH SAME THING!!!!!!111oneone" about.

Myspace isn't much better. The music feature is just useless (see here) and the site is almost as bad as Facebook, but I think it would be better than Facebook (for example, nobody goes up to me and says "join myspace, ill friend u!!" Oh, and one word: FOX.

In conclusion, can we please, as a society, detach ourselves from these sites and have normal lives? Thanks.

EDIT: For those who think that WoW is just as bad, it just might be. I personally think it's not. End of story.

Torneth Reborn

I've just finished a draft for a Dungeons & Dragons -style game called Torneth Reborn. It's real simple compared to D&D, and if anyone's in for a game on Freenode, my nick is TroyMartin. I also have a mIRC-based dicebot, but it's a little screwed over, so I'll have to look through the source.

EDIT: Replaced the mIRC dicebot with a standalone one written in Ruby scripting, so I can edit the source and then reload it in less than 10 seconds. :)

On the subject of TR, I'm almost done the Core Rulebook and the Game Master Guide. Expect the first edition this week :D

The "S" is for Serial

I've commenced work on a little operating system in real mode assembly (of course) I've called TBOS-S. I'm not sure if I'm going to release it or not, depends on how buggy it is. Basically it's an operating system over the serial port.

Visual C#

I love it. Josh was blathering on and on about it, so I thought, "what the hell, I'll download it."

Holy crap. Finally a Visual Studio language I can relate to.

Goals for the Week

If you read post #2, you'll remember that I said I'd get some releases done this week, since I'm on Spring Break. I've decided on the goals:

TBOS

• Do up some nifty stuff (yes, I'm being vague here.)

TBOS32

• Release 0.2.0 as soon as I fix the IRQ issue
  
• Write an IRQ-based keyboard driver
• Write a memory debugger/dumper

Other Sub-projects

• I don't know, write some open-source utility that people need (open to suggestions from anyone!!)

TBOS32 - Always a Constant PITA.

Whooo. I'm about to pull my freaking hair out of my head. Just as I find a way of doing something more efficiently, the timer interrupt dies. It doesn't fire off at 18.2 Hz like it should (and like it was before the little efficiency explosion...) I'm completely stumped. I think I'll SVN the latest code as soon as I get a working copy on my box set up.

In other news, I'm starting to like protected mode. I had thought of enabling A20 in TBOS, but then I'd lose 186 compatibility. The 32-bit registers are the biggest bonus in my eyes, but accessing > 1 MB of memory is pretty nice too. Maybe I'll write a C library once a floppy driver, FAT12 reading, and ELF parsing is done.

EDIT: I uploaded the latest (read: broken) code to the SVN repo (anonymous checkout is at http://tbos32.googlecode.com for those interested!)

Scrolling for hours on end, woot!

Yessssssss! Thanks to the help of the folks on #communityos (namely Josh) the scrolling code works perfectly! I've yet to break TBOS32 since I fixed it (error occured between the keyboard and the chair.)

Expect it out either tonight or sometime before noon PST tomorrow!

TBOS32 progress

Well, this morning I finished working on the IDT for TBOS32, wrote a call to remap the PIC, and crazily wrote simple handlers (just sending an EOI and iret'ing) for IRQs 0, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8.

Sadly, the console scrolling code is broken, and I hope to have it fixed by Monday. If not, I'll do something else to TBOS and release 1.0.1.

Spring break, TBOS, 32-bitness, etc.

Yay, I've got the following week off for spring break!! As a result, expect TBOS 1.0.1 out sometime in the week of March 15th, as well as the release of TBOS32 0.2.0 (or whatever version I decide to name it.)

Speaking of TBOS32, I have no intention of halting development on the 16-bit TBOS in order to work on the new 32-bit version. I started the new version because I wanted to let the TBOS 1.0.0 downloads come in like money to Donald Trump before filing for bankruptcy, as well as since MP (Mr_Piranha) in Freenodes' #communityos told me to. :)

I'm trying to gather up some stuff that I finished but never released to be smaller projects here, since two incomplete operating systems isn't much to gloat about.

First Post, Woot.

I hope you note the sarcasm in the title.

Welcome to the Titanium Bonfire Project Blog, which is both the homepage for the project and the place where the developers blow off some steam or explain what's been going on with development lately.