What an attractive title, isn’t it? J
First a little introduction: My first computer in the eighties was a TI99/4A, and I spent hours on it trying to push it to his limits. Unfortunately, I only had an Extended Basic cartridge, so I never had the opportunity to try assembler, so I didn’t had any chance to compete with my friends with Commodore 64…
Few years later, I sold my TI99 and get an Atari ST, but I never forget this little box.
I recently discovered that there is a strong TI99 community, and I’m really (really!) impressed by what your guys are still doing with the TI99. I knew my TI99 could compete with C64, and you are proving it!
But now, there’s a chance to show that TI99 is BETTER than C64, as it could run Unix!
OK, I don’t have any TI99 to play with, and I don’t even get free time to do anything around it, but I wanted to share with you some information about Fuzix, as I’m sure some serious geeks on this forum could be interested into porting Fuzix to the TI.
So, Fuzix is a new project started by Alan Cox, one of the main contributor to the Linux Kernel. His aim was to do something small (small is beautiful) , and he started to port a System 5 Unix to Z80. Many forks was done to the project, and now Fuzix is running on Z80, Z180, 6809, 6502, 68000 processors. The TMS9900 being a real 16 bit processor, why not Fuzix on TI99 or Geneva?
What is needed to get it is :
- An open source ANSI C compiler. With GCC for the TMS9900, it’s seems we have one…
- A timer interrupt with reasonable precision or a RTC
- At least 32 Ko RAM, or banked RAM (SAMS?)
- Lot’s of time...
Some links:
Alan Cox announcement: https://plus.google.com/+AlanCoxLinux/posts/a2jAP7Pz1gj
The main project on GitHub : https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX
More information in the Wiki: https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX
Fuzix ported on a Tandy Coco2 : https://sites.google.com/site/cocoboot2/fuzix
Video of Fuzix on a MSX2 TurboR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUIl--jNN2o
So, anyone interested by this challenge? J