I've always wanted to build my own computer system, OS and all, which would be, ahem, perfected. I designed an ISA called SubSky and wrote an emulator/VM implementing it, and made a language + compiler. (It's kinda like UXN in nature, actually, just 32-bit and more 2000s-era than 80s-era.) A 16-opcode, 3-operand RISC with an operand/"pseudoregister" referring to the stack. I'll have to publish it sometime. I'm making a videogame for it.
Cc: @rl_dane (it didn't seem right to reply to the thread)
🍵 
Awesome! I'd love to see a 16/32-bit 68k-inspired cousin to #uxn.
Someday I wanna develop a GUI system that's purely 1024x768 monochrome, just to prove that we don't need truecolor, 4k, and all that jazz.
Macintosh graphics, Amiga sound
Why not Amiga graphics? The HAM modes were 🔥🔥🔥
@rl_dane @cerement Currently, the graphics system uses 24-bit color, plus an alpha channel for transparency. It supports setting individual pixels, as well as basic image buffer rendering which supports nearest-neighbor scaling. Rotation is not supported, as I deemed it too high-level for this system; although, via negative scales, you can effectively flip the image 90° 180° etc.
This is in the standard Devices specification, and is implemented in the emulator.
What about color cells? You can save a ton of VRAM and even bandwidth by having high res mono with color cells or raster tables (i.e. set BG=a, fg=b, starting at line 512)
@rl_dane @cerement SubSky's supposed to be easy to program for (in a low-level language), so I feel like color cells would be too hard to work with.
Here's a demo of the palette I have in mind. The colors have been rearranged since I made this demo image, but nonetheless there are a few short of 256 colors here so that'd be 1 byte per pixel.
@rl_dane Some notes on color indexes, from my bobcolor.s lib (for the videogame; it uses this palette):
A bobcolor color index can usually be interpreted as:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Brightness Saturation Type (often hue)
with Saturation descending (keeping RGB values generally ascending).
Type:
4-15: the 12 hues
0-3: other types
@rl_dane The SubSky CPU can only R/W one byte or four bytes at a time, so unfortunately I need to avoid e.g. 2 bytes per pixel, as well. (Still unsure about how to handle audio with this limitation...)
@rl_dane @cerement I've considered doing paletted color instead of 24-bit color. Given that you usually don't need that much color, I might step the graphics down a bit to make it more minimalistic.
The sort of level of "low-tech" I'm going for is something like a computer with 1 -- 4GB RAM, one core at 0.3 -- 1GHz. Again this isn't for nostalgia and definitely not for historical accuracy; it's more for simpler computing with less bloat. And because I enjoy designing computers.