Custom Made Operating Systems and Video/Sound cards...

[Nightmare Doom]

I wonder if it's possible or anybody here actually made their own cutom made Operating system and even their own custom video/sound card (or you had some shop made it for you)? For one example, I wonder if there exists a customed operating system that has both "Dos and XP" compatibles and not to mention a video card that supports all game engines from dos to modern games and a sound card that with it's midi sympathies sounds just as good as Roland or SB AWE64 but with modern compatiblities like SB X-FI and Realtek?

Or is it possible to or has anybody here built a new operating system and sound/video from scratch? although it's mostly a difficult task to do but I wonder if anybody has or built something like this or better put it is there any computer technicians that post here?

[fraggle]

My job involves writing low-level systems software and even I don't have a fucking clue what you're asking.

[Creaphis]

Well, I made myself a graphics card out of Lego Technic.

[MasterOFDeath]

Creaphis said:

Well, I made myself a graphics card out of Lego Technic.

Can it run Crysis?

[Nightmare Doom]

fraggle said:

My job involves writing low-level systems software and even I don't have a fucking clue what you're asking.

What I'm asking if any one here has made a custom video/sound card by either making one from scratch or took existing sound/video cards and tweaked them a bit (like taking a X-FI sound card and replaced whatever makes the midi-synthesis with a roland one or something like that)

I'm also asking if anyone made a operating system by scratch like how Bill Gates made windows in the 70s or the people that made Linux or Macintosh.

[Creaphis]

MasterOFDeath said:

Can it run Crysis?

Indeed it can! I expect the first frame to finish rendering by 2013.



Anyways, video and sound cards are designed upon well-established bases, are designed by teams, and are built with highly sophisticated materials, tools and machinery. The same is true for any modern OS, aside from the fact that they aren't physically constructed - they are coded by teams who already have most of their work done for them. One dude can't write his own OS anymore. One dude could make his own variation on an open-source OS, though, but there'd be no point when you could more easily just write whatever tool you need and run it under an existing OS.

Also, Windows didn't exist in any form during the seventies, and I'm pretty sure that Bill Gates bought DOS.

[fraggle]

Nightmare Doom said:

What i'm asking if any one here has made a custom video/sound card by either making one from scratch or took existing sound/video cards and tweaked them a bit (like taking a X-FI sound card and replaced whatever makes the midi-synthesis with a roland one or something like that)

In general, that isn't really possible. Hardware like that isn't designed to be modded. You _could_ design your own sound or video card if you had the data sheets for the chips that they use, and print your own circuit board. It would be a rather pointless effort, though - it's unlikely you'd be able to do achieve anything that wasn't already possible with a commercial card.

I'm also asking if anyone made a operating system by scratch like how Bill Gates made windows in the 70s or the people that made Linux or Macintosh.

I'm pretty confident I have the skills necessary to write an OS from scratch if I needed to, but I'm unlikely to ever need or want to. I have written code that runs on the "bare metal" without an OS (or even a bootloader) as part of my job, though.

Creaphis said:

Anyways, video and sound cards are designed upon well-established bases, are designed by teams, and are built with highly sophisticated materials, tools and machinery. The same is true for any modern OS, aside from the fact that they aren't physically constructed - they are coded by teams who already have most of their work done for them. One dude can't write his own OS anymore. One dude could make his own variation on an open-source OS, though, but there'd be no point when you could more easily just write whatever tool you need and run it under an existing OS.

It probably isn't as difficult as you'd think. I've seen several OSes made by individuals just hacking on them in their spare time. Obviously, to achieve something as full-featured as Windows or Linux, you'd need a team working several years, but to get something basic up and running probably isn't that much work if you're dedicated.

[Creaphis]

Okay, correction: No dude can write his own OS anymore except for Fraggle.

fraggle said:

It probably isn't as difficult as you'd think. I've seen several OSes made by individuals just hacking on them in their spare time. Obviously, to achieve something as full-featured as Windows or Linux, you'd need a team working several years, but to get something basic up and running probably isn't that much work if you're dedicated.

Yeah, what I had in mind was something full-featured. I suppose a homebrew OS could be useful for extra efficiency with one set of hardware, but I can't imagine that a new OS made by one person could have the features, versatility and user interface necessary to serve as a serious alternative to the big OS's out there.

[GreyGhost]

Or Linus Torvalds.

Nightmare Doom said:

Or is it possible to or has anybody here built a new operating system and sound/video from scratch?

If you can provide the blueprints, a billion transistors and fifty acres of Veroboard - I'll have a go at the sound/video cards.

There was a time when a soldering iron, a handful of components, a microprocessor & peripheral databook and boundless enthusiasm were almost all you needed to build your own computer. The operating systems were every bit as simple as the harware they ran on - easily modified and extended. Unfortunately computer technology has evolved to the point where only the most skilled, resourceful and determined would consider tackling the sort of project you've outlined on their own.

[Remilia Scarlet]

Nightmare Doom said:

I'm also asking if anyone made a operating system by scratch like how Bill Gates made windows in the 70s or the people that made Linux or Macintosh.

Sure, many people. I started, but lost interest. Just remember, "Linux" itself isn't an OS, it's just a kernel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_from_scratch

[fraggle]

Creaphis said:

Yeah, what I had in mind was something full-featured. I suppose a homebrew OS could be useful for extra efficiency with one set of hardware, but I can't imagine that a new OS made by one person could have the features, versatility and user interface necessary to serve as a serious alternative to the big OS's out there.

As a couple of examples, there is AtheOS and SkyOS, both of which were developed by individual programmers. They both have a fairly impressive set of features, although they each took several years to develop.

The difficulty really depends what you're aiming for. The number of hardware combinations for a PC is staggering, for example - for a "PC OS", you need drivers for all the different graphics cards, all the different sound cards, all the different network cards, and so on. I think the AtheOS guy restricted his system to only support the few pieces of hardware that he used himself. Certainly if you do that, it's not so hard.

Obviously, the feature set you're aiming for also makes a difference. An OS could just be a system that schedules other processes to run, or even less than that. A friend of mine at university wrote his own DOS-compatible OS, for example. If you want a system with a full GUI that's always going to be more work.

The hardware platform itself also makes a difference. You just have to read about the A20 issue to see how much of a nightmare the PC is. If you're developing on a clean, consistent architecture things are a lot easier, because there are no surprises.

[Maes]

Creaphis said:

Okay, correction: No dude can write his own OS anymore except for Fraggle.

Depends what you define as an OS: somebody may implement a keyboard and text-mode driver and a crude hex-only assembler/memory editor and have them work out of a BIOS ROM chip and call this an "OS". In general however, you must at least get past the stage of having a bootable system having support for at least BIOS calls to access floppies, hard disks, basic ports and video output, and having at least an assembler capable of generating the rest of the programs and utilities without hex editing.

To have anything resembling sane software development for the future of said OS, a barebone C compiler is also required.

As for home-made sound cards:

I once made one of those parallel-port DACs in 1995 using only passive components, and it worked, and I also knew a guy that made his own, more compact version. There were more sophisticated designs though, using ICs, which gave stereo sound etc. Interestingly, it was possible to go beyond 48 KHz of sampling rate with certain modplayers!

[Creaphis]

fraggle said:

The difficulty really depends what you're aiming for. The number of hardware combinations for a PC is staggering, for example - for a "PC OS", you need drivers for all the different graphics cards, all the different sound cards, all the different network cards, and so on.

Exactly. Considering that the original post mentions an OS that is compatible with all DOS and XP applications, and sound cards that combine the functionality of different existing high-end sound cards, I think my first pessimistic replies were appropriate.

However, I may have underestimated the ability of lone programmers. Are you saying that an OS can run on a computer without Windows underneath it, at all?

[GreyGhost]

Creaphis said:

Are you saying that an OS can run on a computer without Windows underneath it, at all?

Yes and no - an Amiga 500 runs quite nicely without Microsoft's finest installed on it. On the other hand - once the casing starts to warp a Windows CD stuck under one corner will stop it bouncing while typing. :P

[Maes]

Creaphis said:

Exactly. Considering that the original post mentions an OS that is compatible with all DOS and XP applications, and sound cards that combine the functionality of different existing high-end sound cards, I think my first pessimistic replies were appropriate.[/url]

While DOS compatibility would be relatively trivial (if your goal was to play a game like Doom) since there is no API to speak of, good luck replicating a complex API like that of Windows XP, shaped over the course of over two decades, and full of application-specific compatibility hacks and fixes. That also explains why "clean" attempts at replicating it (WINE, ReactOS) have so many compatibility issues.