TinkerOS is essentially TempleOS renamed with some changes that allow it to run bare metal on some more modern machines since it "only" requires real or emulated PS/2 keyboard and mouse input and legacy boot support. TempleOS on the other hand requires hardware which supports Terry's hard coded 640x480 video mode which has been deprecated on some newer machines. Also TempleOS requires an IDE drive interface or legacy ATA SATA support. I created a "Live CD/USB" version which may allow you to use it installed on a RAM disk which allows it to run on modern machines which do not support legacy storage modes. If your machine uses the newer EFI boot method, it will still need to support legacy booting (via CSM) which you may need to turn on in your BIOS. Also note the processor bring up mechanism TempleOS uses is not acceptable on some newer boards. For example only 1 core is seen on a 12 core Ryzen system it was tested on. Lastly know that many laptops have keyboards and trackpads which are not PS/2 compatible (this is especially true of ultra thin laptops and chromebooks). Contributions are welcome, but please do not create an issue you do not intend to create a pull request to fix.
- Keep a TempleOS like feel and do not make horrible refactoring and API changes which break compatibility with most existing TempleOS applications (ahh, ahh, ahh Zenith, sorry I had to sneeze).
- Live USB boot mode to allow trying it without having to install it that also works on systems lacking legacy storage support. You are able to add your own files to be injected onto the RAM disk as well by placing them inside another RedSea ISO image and following the instructions to append it to the Memdisk ISO.
- Cleanup some unfortunate language that was left in TempleOS.
- Bring back some old TempleOS features and add new features, popular apps, and games.
- Make most apps and games work and look decent on both 4:3 and widescreen monitors (install using either 640x480 or 640x340)
- Make higher resolutions modes (mostly for programming) on both 4:3 and widescreen monitors (install using either 800x600 or 1280x512)
- Improve documentation.
- Any bug fixes are welcome.
- Possibly new device driver support for modern storage and/or networking.
- Document bare-metal device compatability. Please make a pull request to update Compatibility.csv if you want to help.
- Documentation similar to templeos.holyc.xyz, but functions are linkable and content which normally can only be accessed within TempleOS is now available on the web (see here.)
- VBE2 video mode support, provides 2x 4:3 (640x480 or 800x600) and 2x wide screen resolutions (640x340 or 1280x512). This can be configured using the auto installer or when building/configuring the kernel.
- Modified installer to make it easy to install with different resolutions and easy to optionally copy additional software to your installation.
- SSE support is enabled on the CPU (for now only used by some 3rd party apps)
- If you have more than 1 core a second core is used to help render providing a faster system (since normally everything by default happens on core 1). This is particularly useful when running it on slow Intel Atom chips or under QEMU on other architectures.
- Added AfterEgypt and Chess so you don't have to dig into the supplemental discs to run them.
- Fixed Chess and Titanium (now called SpyHunt and changed a bit).
- Added an old school Oregon Trail text adventure.
- Minor improvements to Kernel to cause it to use less calls to MAlloc.
- Slipstreamed additional software in Extras folder so you can just use MountFile to mount extra discs and don't have to deal with changing virtual cd drives.
- You can dynamically change the frame rate SetFPS(60);
- Some people are annoyed by blinking and scrolling, functions ToggleBlink and ToggleScroll exist.
- You may access the up/down state of multiple keys without message parsing, see new KeyState Demo
- When on the command line if you mis-type a command followed by a ; and hit enter, you may be able to re-paste your last command if it is still scrolling as text in the top of the window by using the F8 key.
- BMP file support has been restored.
- Raw mode text is also dumped out COM1 which helps when debugging the kernel without a display.
- Compiler now has an option to not warn about unused externs.
- When on the command line a Cd is frequently followed with a Dir so Cdd was born to do both.
- Modified Find to have optional parameter max_cnt which will limit number of results returned (otherwise for some patterns it can find so much it crashes the entire OS).
- Modified Profiler to output the function with the largest CPU percentage at the bottom of the output.
- Improvements to TaskRep output and FindTaskByTitle helps locate tasks by name.
- Mouse no longer dumps random characters into the debugger.
- Some exceptions have been tweaked so parts of the exceptions which previously were covered are now able to be seen.
- Pruned and refactored Adam so some things can be disabled in MakeHome.HC to improve performance on low power machines.
- Moved some of Adam to the Kernel so many useful file operations are avaiable before Adam is loaded.
- Removed Task Memory address from top bar to make room for more CPUs to be able to be displayed.
- Fixed Dir missing default arguments (which prevents default usage when KernelC.HH not in scope).
- Fixed IsDir hang if called with a path to an unmounted drive.
- MountIDEAuto now has ability to mount only ATAPI drives via optional parameter.
- Though only 16 colors are used at a time, the graphics mode is 32-bit. The frame buffer is linear and has resolution FB_WIDTH by FB_HEIGHT which maybe larger than GR_WIDTH and GR_HEIGHT. You can always suspend the window manager and draw whatever graphics you want instead. text.fb_alias is a pointer to the frame buffer.
- Debugger doesn't accept keyboard input on all machines (can be resolved in QEMU by clicking the mouse).