Supercharge your C64 with C64 OS - Gregory Nacu

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:20]Okay. So, yeah, welcome everybody. Uh, my name is Greg Nassu and, uh, this is my very first VCF, so I'm very excited to be here. Um, I've been to lots of uh Commodore, lots of computer expos, but they normally focus on the Commodore and Amigga computers. Uh, so that's what I focus on.

[00:00:40]This is what we're going to be talking about today. And I thought I would start with uh just introducing myself.

[00:00:48]So, in uh in 1986, I was 5 years old and I discovered a broken Vic 20 under the bed in my parents guest room and I begged them to get it repaired and they did and very quickly I fell in love with computers.

[00:01:05]In 1990, when I was 9 years old, my parents got me a Commodore 64 and a 1541 disc drive uh for Christmas. Now, the uh Commodore 64 is quite a bit more advanced than a Vic 20, and it was also the coolest thing that I had ever seen.

[00:01:23]So, uh during the '9s, I got on the internet and I discovered creative micro designs. And I decided that I would soup up my Commodore 64 instead of switching to a PC. And so I I added a CMD hard drive and a RAM link and a super CPU and then then a fast dialup modem and a mouse and a bubble jet printer.

[00:01:44]Now around the year 2000 there was an operating system called Wings. It was created by a guy named Jos McInness from Australia and it was written specifically for the super CPU and it required a minimum of one megabyte of super RAM. Well, I became Wing's biggest advocate. Uh, I taught myself to program in C and I started writing tools and applications for wings and I went to uh expose like this to demo those uh those apps. I also had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit and I started to import the IDE64 cartridge from Europe and to sell them at shows in uh North America. The only problem is that uh in the early 2000s, creative micro designs exited the Commodore 8bit market and uh the super CPU became unobtanium and Joles McGinness soon thereafter left the scene. So I hung on a little bit longer till around 2008. Uh I had become a professional software developer during that those years and uh sadly I packed up my Commodore equipment and I left the scene too. But fast forward eight years, um I was married, had two kids, and uh I had also become thoroughly bored by the state of modern computers and I started daydreaming about what I could do with the Commodore 64 if I took the skills that I'd learned as a software developer and applied them.

[00:03:09]So what I really wanted to do was to write uh network-based apps. But when I started to look into it, uh, I was shocked at how very primitive the Commodore 64 actually is. Uh, as a developer, you get almost nothing to work with. And I realized, uh, that you really need an operating system in order to do advanced things. Um, so I looked into some um, other operating systems, but none of them quite had the the cocktail of features and philosophy that uh, met my design goals. So in early 2017, I started to teach myself uh 6502 assembly with the goal of creating a modular and configurable operating system that feels fast and is easy to use.

[00:03:57]So uh it took a lot of work and I climbed many mountains and had to teach myself many subjects. And uh 5 years later in 2022, I founded a company called Opcoders Inc. and I released C64 OS version 1.0.

[00:04:14]Uh so what are some of those design goals? Um I wanted it I wanted C64 OS to run on a minimum set of hardware. So definitely no super CPU is required and I wanted it to support a maximum amount of hardware that you could optionally add on. Now uh the the Commodore 64 has had available to it uh mass storage devices with large volume sizes and nested subdirectories for a long time going back to at least 1990 um with the CMD hard drive and then soon after the RAM link and then the ID 64 and then the SD2 IEC. Unfortunately um Commodore 64 software never really took advantage of these drives. So when I started developing C64OS, the uh SD2YC was abundantly available, very inexpensive.

[00:05:00]Some of them were as little as $50 US.

[00:05:02]So I decided to make one compromise in my goal of minimum hardware requirements and say that it is going to require a mass storage device, any one of those that I just mentioned. And uh this one requirement uh enabled me to design the operating system around a more uh modern structure.

[00:05:22]So C64 OS is very modular. Uh and that modularity comes in the form of files.

[00:05:26]There's lots of files. Uh there are over a thousand files and they're all nested neatly into into subdirectories.

[00:05:35]Uh so that consists of like 10 kernel modules, a bunch of device drivers of different kinds. Uh there are relocatable shared libraries. There's an object-oriented user interface toolkit with runtime loadable classes. Uh there are data type loaders and savers. And there a bunch of other smaller components like character sets and fonts and help files and settings and so on.

[00:05:55]Everything neatly organized into subdirectories.

[00:06:00]There are also of course the software that runs on C64S. There's applications.

[00:06:03]These come in the form of bundles which contain themselves other resources, binaries, libraries, icons and so on.

[00:06:10]And there are utilities which are small programs that run concurrently with app the application. And uh okay there however there is no multitasking proper in the operating system but there is something that uh I call fast app switching.

[00:06:29]So this is a conscious design decision on my point on my part um because it gives the foreground application complete control of the machine and the machine has very limited resources.

[00:06:41]However, uh with the ability to run utilities concurrently with the application and uh with the ability to do fast app switching and message passing between the apps, you get most of the benefits of multitasking without uh most of the complications.

[00:06:59]So, I'm going to give you a very brief overview of uh where C64 OS has has come from and where it is today. So, version 1.0 came out in 2022. This focused on the core mouse uh mousedriven UI with um uh fast hierarchical pull down menus and the main architecture for actually moving around between applications and opening and saving documents and some core stuff like the clipboard and drivers and libraries.

[00:07:28]The main application that came out in version one before 1.0 is the file manager. This lets you recursively move and copy uh files and subdirectories between different device types to open documents in applications that are assigned by the uh file extension and it does all that with a flexible easytouse interface. Uh there's also the app launcher which is a desktop-like environment. Some sample apps were included as well uh and a a suite of useful utilities like a calendar and a calculator and a stopwatch and so on.

[00:08:00]Uh the next couple of versions were just kind of bug fixes and uh stability improvements. And then uh version 1.04 came out in mid 2023. This added some multimedia features like a SID player.

[00:08:11]And this version added the data type uh loaders and savers for for graphics files and a new graphics file format for uh animations and uh some 3D stuff.

[00:08:24]Version 1.05 5 was the version that added support for fast app switching and extended memory management.

[00:08:31]Version 1.06 came out in early 2024.

[00:08:34]This added support for hidden files and multi-line text editing uh class and it updated some utilities to take advantage of that.

[00:08:42]So finally finally uh in early 2025 version 1.07 introduced networking. So and it's not just raw access to a modem but a full networking stack. um with swappable hardware drivers and a standardized socket API.

[00:09:00]And the main application that came up with this was the Wikipedia app. So this has a search field and a table of contents and and a a formatted text article viewer with hyperlinks.

[00:09:10]So this the point of reaching this application really was like the realization of a dream for me. Uh, it took eight years to get from just daydreaming about what cool things I could do with Commodore 64 to having the whole operating system architecture, the user interface, the network stack, and an application that can actually access the internet. So, yeah, it's it was really like a dream to reality and uh people who use and see things like the Wikipedia app generally uh will agree that the experience is quite a bit better than using a BBS.

[00:09:45]uh version 1.08, this is the most recent version released. It improves networking speed and stability and over this past year I've added several other networking apps. Uh world explorer is for webcams that you can look at from cities around the globe. Image search lets you fetch graphics from Google image. It has an integration with Google Maps and uh a cool feature called computer vision which lets you use your smartphone like a digital 8bit uh camera, an 8-bit digital camera.

[00:10:16]And most recently, Ready Chat. Ready chat is an instant messenger with a cool twist. Um, it lets you send chat messages to the ready bot and uh fetch real-time information from the internet in a format that's well suited to a limited computer like the Commodore 64.

[00:10:35]So now we will demo all of this stuff.

[00:10:40]So you can uh come to my table. I'm table number 28 at the show.

[00:10:50]Get this in here.

[00:10:59]Oh my. Can we still hear me?

[00:11:03]>> Okay.

[00:11:08]Okay. So, uh there's always uh at least one application that is running um full screen. So at the moment this here is app launcher and uh applications provide the menus but it is the system that actually implements the menus. So the menus as you can see are very very snappy. They just slide out like that very quickly. They're hierarchical and can be uh up to three layers deep. So I think one more um and they can have keyboard shortcuts which can also include uh modifier keys that use multiple modifier keys in combination.

[00:11:44]Um in the top left corner of the screen we have the utilities menu. So the contents of this menu stay the same across all applications and they give you access to common uh or frequently accessed utilities and you can also customize this menu. Um so this for example because we can access this settings utility uh from within any application you can get to all these various system settings from inside any app.

[00:12:15]So, uh, utilities can be, uh, dragged around by their title bar and they can be dragged, you know, we can drag them off the left, we can drag them off the right, we can drag them off the bottom.

[00:12:26]And you can also see that the window is dragging in in real time, not just an outline. Um, and we can also uh rightclick on the uh title bar to do window shade. This lets us see what's going on behind very quickly. Also the application behind the utility is is still fully active. So you know we can we can access these menus. We can also do things like you know drag a selection box around these items and we can drag these to reposition them. And of course we can do that like like we can drag them right behind that utility window.

[00:12:57]And so this kind of shows that you know the screen is is real time uh compositing.

[00:13:03]Now um let's see here.

[00:13:08]So from this settings utility, uh themes is for customizing our our color themes.

[00:13:14]Drives lets us configure what uh storage devices we have hooked up. Mouse is for our our cursor uh settings. Network, what we're going to come back to later, is for setting up our internet. Usage, we'll come back to later, is for uh getting an overview of how memory is allocated and uh how much CPU is being used. And time lets us uh customize the uh date and time. So I'll open that. And so you can see that when I open one utility, it automatically closed the previous one. And when the previous one closes, it saves its state automatically, including its position that you put it on the screen. So it'll reopen there next time. So from this utility, we can do things like set our date and time. And when we hit set, that'll set the system time. And it'll also write that out to our network hardware. and it'll do that via an RTC driver. This utility also has say a stopwatch and a timer and it has preferences that let us do things like customize the clock. So you can see the clock is changing there and you can hide and show it and so on.

[00:14:19]Okay. So opposite the menu bar at the top is the status bar which runs along the bottom of the screen. So the status bar has three modes. Uh the the first uh mode here is status mode. Um this tells us our online offline status. The next section here tells us our most recent disk status. And on this far end here we have how much uh memory is available, how much main memory is available in the current app bank.

[00:14:49]Um the status bar on the menu bar can also be uh hidden like this with keyboard shortcuts which in certain applications is nice to give you more screen real estate.

[00:14:59]for the app and its content. Um the uh app launcher has multiple desktops and so you can rename these desktops and you can switch between them with this go menu. Uh each desktop can have a customizable background image and uh and color and you can uh add and arrange and color code up to 32 of these aliases uh per desktop. And these aliases are used to launch into C64 OS software uh applications utilities and also to launch a regular Commodore 64 software.

[00:15:35]Now uh we call the app launcher one h the app launcher is one half of what is called home base. The other half is we go to the go menu and we can say choose file manager and we come over here to file manager.

[00:15:51]So with file manager, you can uh launch applications. So here's the app. Here are the applications I have installed.

[00:15:59]You can launch utilities. So here are some utilities. We're not going to have time to go into most of these. Um and uh file manager can also be used to open documents that uh will open in an application that's been assigned to that file type. So we have four tabs along here uh that let us be in multiple uh places at the same time and you can navigate the file system from within a tab by uh starting over here at your list of devices. So we can click on a device and it'll go into the device and you can go into its partitions and so on. Below the list of devices, we have a set of favorite places which you can configure.

[00:16:43]And if you click this, we have a list of uh recently opened uh files that you can jump to and and open again.

[00:16:54]The uh user interface is built on the object-oriented UI toolkit. So it's very it's very flexible. Um you know we can we can resize this uh sidebar and you can see um let me go to um let me go to maybe here.

[00:17:15]So we can see here that we can scroll both vertically like this and we can also scroll horizontally which is pretty cool. And uh we can also do things like we can sort by our columns here by uh clicking these. We can also resize columns by re uh dragging them like this. And we can also uh make complicated selections by using combinations of the shift key like this and the commodore key like this. So you can very quickly and easily scroll through and make uh you know rich selections like this. And you can then copy or move. You can scratch these or you can copy and move them. And if you've selected subdirectories, this is going to recursively copy all the content under that subdirectory simply by going file, copy to or move to and selecting another tab. And then they'll be copied to wherever you have positioned that other tab.

[00:18:10]um that can be uh between directories on the same partition, between partitions on the same device or between different devices of completely different uh kinds and they all behave the same way which is really nice.

[00:18:26]Um so the next thing I will do is I will show you opening a um we'll show you opening a file in um which one should I open?

[00:18:44]Hang on here examples.

[00:18:54]This one's really good.

[00:18:56]Okay.

[00:18:59]So shoot. Okay. So um by double clicking that file um file manager has opened this application which has been assigned to this uh document type and this application has taken this document type and looked up a data type loader and used it to open the graphic file format that this file is in. Now you may have noticed that uh C64 OS is in uh character mode. This is what makes the menus fast and the ability to drag utilities very quickly. But there are times of course when you want to be able to see bit mapap graphics. So in order to do this uh the operating system has uh built-in support for uh graphical split screen. So we can actually just drag this status bar up like this and uh we can see the graphics mode below the split. Uh so it's looking a little little bit like the little bit like the Omega um which is pretty cool for Commodore 64. So in the top half uh of the interface, you know, this this part is still active and we can still, you know, click on things and do things. And we can also click on and do things in the the graphical half with the uh the mouse. For example, I can double click that to switch into full screen. And I I double click it to to get out of there.

[00:20:16]And there's also keyboard shortcuts and so on for for switching into and out of these modes.

[00:20:21]So let Okay. So to leave an application, you choose go home from the uh first from the bottom of the first menu and that will take you back to home base. So it'll take you back to file manager or app launcher depending on where you you left from. Now, um, let me open another one of these files, except this time, um, I'm gonna hold the control key as I as I open it. And that overrides the, uh, launching of the application that is assigned to this file, and it opens instead this opener utility. So, this uh is showing us what the file type is here, and it's highlighted this app because this is the app that's assigned to this kind of file. So, we can actually just change, not that one. We can just change uh what app is is the assigned opener for this kind of file.

[00:21:14]We just pick another app and click assign. Of course, I'm not going to do that uh right now because image viewer is good. We can just hit open. And so, boom. Uh we're back in this app. It's a different kind of file. So, the application has just located and used a different data type loader that knows how to open that kind of uh data. And um this is actually also in a different video mode. The previous one was high-res. This one is multiolor. And and there you go.

[00:21:45]So when we go home again, boom. You see how like quickly it it just jumps back from one application back to this application. Um that is the result of uh fast app switching. So fast app switching requires an REU and you can uh customize how you want to split up the memory in an REU between uh fast app switching banks and the remainder of the space left over is uh can be used by applications for their own data and whatever whatever they want to do.

[00:22:25]So uh from the bottom of the utilities menu, we can get to this uh switcher.

[00:22:32]So the switcher uh shows you you can use this to quickly jump into any application that's currently open. So this shows us all the apps that are currently open. And we can also uh see down here um if any of these applications has unsaved state, uh it will actually say unsaved here. And it'll also uh tell us uh how much expanded memory in 64 kil in 64 kilobyte increments um of expanded memory the application is using. Now if we uh we don't actually uh have to quit apps from this. You can quit an app from here if you want but uh the system automatically manages the app banks. So uh when you open a new application it just automatically allocates a new app bank and if you uh don't have an available app bank then the the system is tracking the recency with which you have access to the applications and if it needs an app bank and uh there isn't one available it will automatically expune and quit the most the least fre the least recently accessed application.

[00:23:48]But it is smart enough to know uh that if the application has unsaved changes, it will not expunge that. So it'll it's the least recently accessed with no unsaved changes.

[00:24:03]Okay. So uh the next thing that we can do from the uh from again inside any application uh this available memory uh indicator down here you can double click that and it will open the usage utility.

[00:24:18]So the usage utility uh shows us the allocation of all of main memory for this app bank. So this is 64k here and we have a key and we can see how this memory is being allocated. We can actually click on these various pages.

[00:24:35]We can hit peak if we want to examine the contents of this memory uh live while while the OS is using it. The reu tab shows us uh how much expanded memory we have uh in total and this shows us how the um reu is distributed. So for example, I've I've said I want this many banks for fast app switching and currently this many of them are being used by open applications and all the rest of this space here can be used by applications to load in uh their own data.

[00:25:12]And we have this cool uh CPU monitor here which uh I I made just for fun. Um, so as we go like this, you can see that the uh the CPU got a little a little bubble there just to just to show that, you know, that it's actually tracking CPU usage. Uh, I don't know how useful it is, but I think it's pretty cool. So So I put that in.

[00:25:36]Okay.

[00:25:42]Okay. So, uh if uh a cool uh object oriented uh widget toolkit and um a graphical split screen and the fast app switching stuff isn't cool enough for you, uh there's also a full networking stack.

[00:26:01]So, um we can open the network utility which I happen to have here uh on the desktop.

[00:26:10]And this is the utility that you use to configure your uh network settings. So from the driver tab uh we can pick our driver and we can set our uh modem speeds. From the Wi-Fi tab we can specify uh what our SSID and password are. And lastly here from the CNP tab we can fill in our CNP credentials. So CNP stands for uh Commodore network protocol or C64 network protocol depending on uh if Commodore doesn't want me to use the word Commodore. Uh and this server is a proxy server that um allows C64OS applications to be able to connect to multiple network services at the same time and it uh gives the data to the applications in packets that are delivered to sockets.

[00:27:04]Um, so you do not have to uh once you've configured your network settings, you don't have to keep opening this network utility. Um, as soon as you open any application that needs to use the internet, it will take these settings which have been saved somewhere lower in the system and it'll just automatically take you online and connect you to uh the CMP server. But because I'm here, I will just click start. And so these have grayed out. I'm now online. And so we can see down here in the status bar, this has changed to say that we are online.

[00:27:37]So the first network-based application that I wrote was uh the Wikipedia client. So again uh this application uses a uh widget toolkit and um you know we can we can turn these sorts of settings on and off. We have a search field, table of contents and an article viewer. I can resize this. And I can search for anything. So, I'm going to search for uh Bilbo Baggins because I've just been watching Lord of the Rings.

[00:28:07]And you can see this status down status bar. If you notice that it showed the download uh progress and this has just been downloaded live off of Wikipedia.

[00:28:16]Uh so we have um table of contents and we have uh the first section the section of the article that is selected here is displayed over here. Um this uh we can when when when we resize the um sidebar you can see that the text is actually refflowing in real time which is really cool. And also that scroll bar over there is actually changing height to reflect how long the content is given given how much it's wrapping which is pretty pretty awesome. Um so we can for example grab the scroll bar. We can scroll up and down it like this. We can also use the mouse wheel. Um so you can use a mouse wheel in any uh anywhere in C64 OS where there's a scroll bar. You can use the mouse wheel. We can also use cursor keys to scroll through or we can use uh spacebar for example to page like this. Um and uh we can click on other other article sections. See this downloading there like that this and we can browse Wikipedia. So um the articles are are uh converted into a format I call MEX.

[00:29:33]uh which is a kind of lightweight marked text. Um M text supports left uh right and center line text. It also supports uh standard body text, bold and uh and emphatic text. This these are the two colors. Uh and it also supports links.

[00:29:55]So uh the colors of the styles come from the operating systems color theme. So if you customize your color theme, these colors will take on the color theme that you chose. Um, and MTEX can also do absolute colors. You can do kind of cool cool effects. Um, and it also supports horizontal rules. So uh, if I click on a link, see, so this link says dwarves, but when I click it, um, it puts dwarf Middleear into the search field. So that's just to show you that the uh the link text and the link value are actually different just like real hyperlinks would be and the link value is is hidden away behind the uh the link text.

[00:30:42]Yeah. So that is Wikipedia.

[00:30:46]So next I'm going to show you uh ready chat. Um ready chat. Um, so Wikipedia of course is still open, right? So we can we can actually fast app switch back to Wikipedia and uh and and and so on. So uh ready chat is an instant messenger and we have our list of our friends over here and we have the uh a bit of the history of the conversation of what's going on with the user that we've picked over here. So let's say I'll click on this user, Jim Kirk is my test user. Um, and we have this uh text field at the bottom here where we can uh type a message. So I can say like I'm demoing now. Oops. I'm demoing now. Okay. And that will send a instant message instant message to that user. Now uh the users do not have to be online at the same time. Um, when you open Ready Chat, uh, the order of the names is always displayed in the order of who you've been chatting with most recently.

[00:31:53]And, uh, any names here will appear in a highlighted color like blue in the normal uh, theme uh, if there are any unread messages. So, you open ready chat, you can see, oh, there's I've got unread messages. You just click that person and you can you can chat back to them. Now in addition to chatting with uh people there's also this ready user at the top. So this is a kind of bot to which you can uh send messages.

[00:32:25]So uh ready uh has a plug-in architecture and there are over 35 plugins which uh expand the set of commands that ready can accept. So we can type help list and this will list the available commands and you can also say help and then a command and you can get help information about any one of these commands. So um for example I can do this I say translate into French. Uh I am very happy to be here with you at VCF Montreal. Montreal. Okay. go like this and boom. Uh for those of you who understand that uh you can you can do translations right here in C64 OS. It's pretty neat, right? Um okay. So here's another one. We can say currency and we say um what is $50 Canadian uh in I don't know say euros. Okay. And so that is telling us uh that's real time pulled off the internet telling us what 50 bucks uh is in euros.

[00:33:33]Uh we can also say try this one weather Montreal if we want to scare ourselves.

[00:33:39]Uh so we can get a weather report here low of uh - 255.7°.

[00:33:45]Um and we can also ask for uh weather for some number of days in the future.

[00:33:53]So if we want one day from now, we could just say one and that'll give us the weather for tomorrow. And we can see that it is uh 7 degrees warmer. So that's going to be fun. Um, okay. You can also do some really cool nerdy uh stuff. Uh, I think this one is pretty cool. So, we can go calc if random times 100 is greater than 50 then say heads otherwise say tails and I will copy this. So, I just said commodor a to select all. I'm going to copy that to the clipboard and then I will uh send that. Okay. Okay, so I got heads and now I can paste that in and send it again.

[00:34:34]And now we'll see how many times does it take before I get tails.

[00:34:39]Come on.

[00:34:43]There we go. So, it's random. It's pretty cool, right? So, this is a kind of nerdy example. Uh here's another uh here's another one that's pretty rad. Um we can also send messages to chat GPT.

[00:34:55]So we can say Java GPT what is VCF with respect to retro computing because there are probably many acronyms that use that and uh it's pretty awesome right we can just get a we can get information back uh right here like that on our Commodore 64 pretty cool and and and there there are so many more that I just don't have time to show you.

[00:35:24]Um there's lots of stuff that um I I just don't have time to show. So um please come to my uh table if you want to see more of this stuff. So uh this is the image search app. This is the last app I'm I'm going to show today. Um this also has a nice flexible toolkit user interface. You know this is using the same tables and and checkboxes and scroll bars and splitters and so on as as say file manager. Um, and uh, we can type in here anything we want. And uh, I already have this saved in here, so I'll just hit search. And so this is uh, going to hit um, uh, this is downloading from Google image. And you can see we have a bunch of search results. And so I'm going to open uh, turn that off. And I'm going to open um, this one.

[00:36:16]Okay.

[00:36:18]And here we can see it downloading a graphic right from uh the interwebs.

[00:36:24]Isn't that neat? It's pretty cool, right? Um so let's try uh another one here. Let's try um let me turn my page.

[00:36:36]Let's try Deanna Troy. And I think I want to do WordPress. I've already looked up these images just to see if I can find some cool ones.

[00:36:47]Um, so let's see if this one is the one.

[00:36:57]Yeah. Yeah, it's a cool one.

[00:37:00]Okay, so that's kind of cool, right? So, um, we have all these different dithering options and settings and so on. Um, in including aspect ratio. I'm not really going to get into it, but you can adjust the aspect ratio for the screen. Um, but I wanted to point out that you see that the source images here are sometimes much higher resolution than a Commodore 64 can actually display. So, they're being scaled down obviously, right? But there is a very cool feature where we can actually just click and drag a box around a section of the image and it will uh Come on, please. Yeah, there we go. we'll zoom in on that part of the image and uh show you more detail from that actually exists in the original source image. Uh and uh that is very awesome.

[00:37:48]So um now in addition to uh just searching straight up for things on um Google image, we can also um use the search field to integrate with other services. So we can type in here maps colon slash and then we can just put in here Montreal, ca and we get back the set of search results here. it. These are not search results from Google image, but these are um hang on.

[00:38:26]These are uh zoom levels that we can uh that we can go into. So, for the maps, I like to change my pallet. So, I'm going to change the pallet to this. And I like to change my uh my dithering settings because I I think maps look a little better with these uh these dithering settings. And we're going to start by going to say the country level.

[00:38:49]And so this is being downloaded directly from Google Maps and it's uh showing the kind of uh kind of this zoom level puts Montreal right in the middle and gives you some context for where Ottawa and Toronto and the lake and the river are and so on. And we can uh then come back here and we can go into say one of these uh closer zoom levels. And here at this zoom level, we can actually see the uh the island and we can see this is Laval.

[00:39:18]This is where my parents met each other.

[00:39:20]Um yeah, and so there you go. You can you can be integrated with Google Maps.

[00:39:26]Um so uh wrapping up um we have uh a cool uh desktop environment where we can customize it all to your preferences and you know you can make your own desktop backdrops and uh cool stuff like that. We have a pretty advanced uh file manager with all kinds of uh cool features um that I don't really have time to get into. And uh we can launch applications and we can um we can uh fast app switch between all of our our apps that are currently open. So I'll just go to switcher here again and just show that you know look Wikipedia is totally still open. This this whole time Wikipedia is open. We can click on another article and um and this you know uses this robust networking stack and uh there's a lot more to come and so that is all that I had prepared to actually show you and I needed to leave time for uh questions if there's any questions and uh I would love to take questions if there are any.

[00:40:43]How did you do that?

[00:40:45]>> Hang on a second. We have a microphone here.

[00:40:47]>> You asked how I how I developed this.

[00:40:48]Um, I wrote uh everything is written in 6502 assembly and I programmed everything on a Commodore 128 uh using a Turbo Macro Pro and an REU.

[00:41:04]>> Yeah.

[00:41:06]>> Any other questions? that question over here or >> what are the plans for the next versions?

[00:41:10]>> What are the plans for the next versions? Um, I am working on uh I haven't really announced this part, but I I'm working on uh an app store. So, uh that's that's the kind of next major networking app that's coming. Um and I think it's going to be pretty cool. I'm not going to give a lot of details on it right now, but I think it's going to be pretty cool. Um and uh yeah, there's there's a bunch of other stuff in the in the pipeline as well.

[00:41:34]>> Raise your hand if you have any questions. Here we go.

[00:41:39]>> Well, I think uh we all want to know what is your fart software.

[00:41:43]>> Oh, yes. Um I don't know if there are speakers uh hooked up. Um but uh yeah, I I for for fun last year I wrote the fart app because uh every operating system needs a fart app. So um it's also full of fart jokes. It's just so many fart jokes. Let's just see if it'll it'll play.

[00:42:07]There you go. Uh yeah.

[00:42:12]Okay. So, yeah, one more.

[00:42:18]Yeah. So, uh lots of lots of fart jokes.

[00:42:20]Uh lots of Easter eggs. This app is like full of Easter eggs. Okay. Uh any other questions?

[00:42:28]>> Oh, we have one here.

[00:42:31]Uh I was just wondering if uh for that image viewer is that decompressing and dithering everything on device on the commodore or is that using partially handled by the the proxy for the network?

[00:42:42]>> Uh is this the here in this image search here? Yeah. So um no the uh what happens is there there is a uh proxy server just for this application. So there's a pro there there's one server for doing the networking in general like the packet whatever and there's a completely separate proxy server for the Wikipedia app and a completely separate one for this nice >> and uh basically the these settings get sent up to the server along with the request for what image you want. The server downloads the image converts it using the uh dithering settings that you have specified and then sends it back and uh it it gets downloaded directly into video memory.

[00:43:19]>> Sweet. Yeah, that's awesome.

[00:43:21]>> Thanks. Thanks.

[00:43:22]>> Any other questions?

[00:43:26]>> Oh, we have one here.

[00:43:30]>> Thank you. Um, can you switch back and forth to basic? Yeah, I actually I can.

[00:43:35]Um, so uh let's go say um yeah, you can also do it from inside an app. So, let's say that I'm in uh where where would I want to be? Hang on here. Let's say that I'm in uh Wikipedia.

[00:43:52]So, if I'm in Wikipedia and I I just want to drop straight to basic, um you can go to the switcher here and you can click drop to ready. You go like this and uh you're in you're at the ready prompt. And then to go back to the OS, um we can just tap that uh reset button and we're we're back in the uh we're back in the operating system. Yeah.

[00:44:14]Yeah. You you can also uh if you have if you're in an application with um if you're in an application with uh that has an open file, you can also hold the control key when you drop to basic and it will keep the storage device in the directory where the open file is and then you can do like command line file management like make a copy of the file or like make a subdirectory or something and then you go back into the OS and you're you just carry on like that.

[00:44:41]>> Any other questions?

[00:44:42]>> Any other questions? Uh, we have one there, Rick.

[00:44:46]>> Probably we're getting low on time, but yeah.

[00:44:57]>> Can you still run standard uh C64 applications?

[00:45:01]>> Yes, you can do that, too. Um, so let me uh you can launch them straight from the uh desktop if you set that up. Uh, or you can go to um let me go here to my games directory.

[00:45:13]And let's say I pick this game here like this. And we can say uh go like this.

[00:45:19]And we just click run.

[00:45:22]And um this will do basically a controlled restart of the computer and load the game. And then the game is loaded in.

[00:45:34]And you can uh you can play it like this. And then once again, And then once again, you just hit the button like that and you're back in the operating system. And then if you want to launch into like another game, you could just like click this. You can hit run and it'll do the same thing to jump into that one. Yeah.

[00:45:56]All right.

[00:46:03]Okay. Uh are we out of time or >> Yeah, we're pretty much out of time. All right. Thank you very much everybody for uh sticking around and asking your your great questions.