Tom Lake wrote to Daniel <=-
You can get almost instant-on by turning on a fast boot switch which is available in most BIOS. Fast boot eliminates a lot of the checking
(such as a RAM test) the regular boot does. Remember, for the old
systems, the ROM was written for just that particular hardware. There
was no need to try to identify all sorts of different hard drives, USB devices, etc. The ROM knew exactly what was there and only needed to
start BASIC or an rudimentary menu. Modern systems then have to load a very complex OS from some device. When everything is in ROM, there's no need to do that.
Thank you for the reply. Let met phrase the question a different way because I don't think I properly conveyed the question.
Imagine if Commodore continued releasing faster and more advanced versions of the C64. System still loads on ROM and, with a flip of a switch the user is welcomed with either a basic screen or a basic menu UI.
David, of the 8 bit guy, is actually building a souped up Vic 20 with off the shelf components and getting help on his pursuit from a variety of people including an old Commodore engineer. His dream machine, as he calls it. I think he's naming it the Commander X16. He's intending to mass produce it for the retro computing scene. Yeah he's a small guy with very little funding but the pursuit is similar in concept to my question the one i asked about. Every copy will be on identical hardware and software so OS complexity shouldn't be much more complex than the original system.
while he's building a modern 8bit machine, I'm wondering if it would be possible to do this very thing with a modern 32 or 64 bit processor with modern storage, memory, video/audio, and input/output yet be instant on. And the developer would be responsible for the look and feel of the application.
Daniel Traechin
... Visit me at
gopher://gcpp.world
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