Alpacaman
Your editors, whilst in a State of Flux from our Remodeling Project, have nevertheless found time to be amazed by the ingenuity and sheer audacity of conceit displayed by some of you out there. Not that you are the most practicable of sorts, but that you could even conceive of the following warrant our salute.
Alpaca is a small multitasking operating system for Z-80 computers, specifically for Pac-Man/Pengo arcade hardware. It is an expansion upon [the] PTUI project, which was originally just an experiment to see how much of a real GUI can be put into the tight constraints of Pac-Man arcade machine hardware. The limitations are a total of 1kb of RAM (for storage and stack), 16k of ROM, sprite/tile based video hardware (1k color, 1k character ram), joystick, and two buttons.
The features of the OS are:
- up to 4 processes concurrently running
- simple inter-process communication via messages
- simple semaphores
- simple memory management (eventually)
- adjustable priorities (eventually)
The features of the GUI (PTUI) are:
- Joystick and start buttons navigate
- Window frames can be moved about the screen, raised, hidden
- Build-configurable color schemes, frame ornaments
- Many widgets including: push/radio/check/spin buttons, sliders, text display
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