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By David Bolton, About.com Guide to C / C++ / C#

Amazing Home Brew Operating System

Thursday November 20, 2008
Losethos screenshotImagine you're a programmer who likes games and over a five year period you write a home brew operating system with it's own compiler, kernel, graphics (albeit looking about 20 years old!) in your spare time. It boots in 2 seconds, is under 20 MB in size (In fact the operating system, compiler, tools, documentation, demo's with their source code is only around 2.2 Meg!). Graphically the display is 640x480 16 color VGA graphics. Like an Atari ST, but better color resolution. Everything runs as kernel access which means speed but also is relatively easy to crash. with two seconds boot time that's not a problem.

This amazing piece of software with a curious name is the creation of developer Terry A Davis and he has even created his own language that you can program in, it's a hybrid of C and C++ (C+ would be a good name!). It certainly shows what you can do, and at 20,000 lines of code in a year in his spare time, an extraordinary focused achievement. There are some fun game demos and the whole point of Losethos is to let programmers have fun creating simple games.

The download is an .ISO file so you'll need to burn it to a CD to boot from or read it with UltraISO. Now if only he could be persuaded to publish the source code or better still make it open source. It could really go places.

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