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Show HN: TreeOS – A 16-bit bootsector Christmas tree demo

by cfallin on 12/24/20, 8:57 PM with 31 comments

  • by gregsadetsky on 12/24/20, 9:46 PM

    I was curious to try, so I followed the project's Makefile to create floppy.img and than ran it in a web x86 emulator. It worked!

    Grab the floppy.img file here: https://paste.c-net.org/CannotCursing

    Then head over to: https://copy.sh/v86/

    Set the "Floppy disk image" to the above-downloaded file, and click "Start Emulation"

    Cheers & Best wishes!

  • by tpmx on 12/24/20, 11:12 PM

    From the readme:

    > that uses the BIOS to load data from the boot disk

    That's not a bootsector demo (it's larger than 512 bytes). From reading the source: It's a hybrid bootloader + demo, in a pragmatic manner.

    Here's an eclectic selection of other nice, not widely known christmas themed demos I found earlier (merry christmas!):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X74bhXltFo (BBC Micro)

    > Bitshifters - Xmas 19 Demo

    ---

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t02TvLbQec (PC, CGA)

    > Una simpatica demo natalizia datata 1986 per l'amato PC. Quante volte l'ho guardata quand'ero più giovincello:o)

    ---

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDitgPGh_MQ (Atari 8-bit)

    > christmas collection demo for Atari 8-bit

  • by trollied on 12/24/20, 10:14 PM

    Just imagine the modern version of this.... 1 terabyte of JavaScript later ;)

  • by rahimiali on 12/24/20, 10:30 PM

    I’m curious about these qemu-first OSes (like this one I’ve been following [1]). Do they usually just work when you boot a modern pc with them?

    [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SerenityOS

  • by mixmastamyk on 12/24/20, 11:41 PM

    Fun, reminds me of some similar holiday-themed DOS executables I made back in the day. They were drawn using a program called TheDraw and then could be dumped onscreen with Turbo Pascal or C. Add a few batch commands to check the date in the login script and you’ve got some holiday cheer.

    Believe I converted some of them into ansi and was trying to get the old encoding into utf8 last Christmas.

  • by arthurcolle on 12/24/20, 10:23 PM

    So if I put this on a floppy and put it in an old computer, it would just boot to this image? Is that right?

  • by hegzploit on 12/24/20, 10:41 PM

    Anybody got any resources, starting points to where i could learn this cool stuff about qemu and bare-metal programming etc..?

  • by app4soft on 12/24/20, 10:18 PM

    Title should be...

    > Show HN: TreeOS – A 16-bit bootsector Christmas tree demo (2019)

    ... as there are no new commits since 25 Dec 2019.

  • by lbj on 12/25/20, 4:04 AM

    I love it - The amount of comments in the code make it a pleasant read.

  • by hrtk on 12/24/20, 10:07 PM

    Did anyone successfully burned it to a USB somehow and ran it ?

  • by amelius on 12/24/20, 11:21 PM

    Now try that with Apple's locked down bootloader.