Unearthing My 1996 Windowed OS in Machine Code for Am29000 Homebrew Computer
In 1996, I developed a windowed operating system in 32-bit machine code for a custom Am29000 computer built by my father. Despite the processor's legendary speed, I faced challenges with memory and porting code from my Z280 system. Inspired by OS/2 and X11R5 source code, I implemented cooperative multitasking and a unique window clipping algorithm to create a functional GUI that fit entirely on a floppy disk.
The real discovery was the message pipeline. Every process with windows has a message pipeline, and when you create a window you should assign it a kind of interface handler, and this handler reads the messages and it does operations according to the user's interactions.
- rob74
> The AMD Am29000 processor came out in 1987, also announced as the world's fastest processor (do you see a meme here?) and it could process one instruction every cycle, so indeed it was fast.
The AMD 29k - the fastest CPU you never heard of? No, seriously, I am quite interested in computer hardware, and Computer Architecture by Patterson/Hennessy was required reading during my studies, but I can't say I ever heard of this CPU architecture, which is "based on the seminal Berkeley RISC" (according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am29000). And it seems to have been quite widely used, but not in an actual computer (except for this one)...
- taolson
Wow, blast from the past! I was on the architecture / micro-architecture team for the 29K and 29050, and your story of writing and debugging the emulator brought up similar memories of working on the performance simulator for these chips.
Very impressive work -- congratulations!
- sage981
Writing a windowing OS straight in machine code for the Am29000 is wild. The emulator debugging story is the part I would love expanded.