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Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer
A retrospective account of building a windowed operating system entirely in 32-bit machine code for a homebrew AMD Am29000-based computer in 1996-1997, written by the author at age 18. The OS, named 'Windows Fénix', featured cooperative multitasking, a rectangle-list windowing system inspired by X11's XRegion.c, a manually ported Type 1 font rasterizer, SCSI-abstracted disk I/O, and Unicode file paths — all fitting on a 1.44MB floppy. Decades later, the author wrote an Am29000 emulator from scratch (3075 lines of C, using libSDL2) to revive the original disk images, debugging through millions of instruction cycles to fix emulator bugs including a sign-extension error in EXHWS and backwards PC register handling. The emulator and disk images are available on GitHub with precompiled releases for Windows and macOS.
Source: https://nanochess.org/the_am29000_computer.html. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
