Atari 8 GUI Project

[zapiy]

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Atari 8-bit fans have long hankered after a GUI similar to GEOS on the Commodore 64. Diamond GOS went some way to addressing this deficiency, and since then there have been several creditable attempts at implementing a GUI OS on the A8. Now there's another one in the pipeline: an as yet unnamed project which aims to bring a pre-emptive multi-tasking graphical operating system to the 8-bit Atari.

This looks amazing, just unreal what people are doing with old systems these days.

You can read more HERE

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[TrekMD]

Pretty cool. 

[retromod]

Great project I monitor for a while. I already developed a GUI for the Atari nearly at the same time GEOS appeared. It's name was "Move" (mouse operating visual environment). The commercial success was less. Only a few versions were sold on a trade show. I developed version 2.0 nearly 2 years but then stopped the project. One issue was the 40 character limit I extended by using own character set of 60 chars/line. But finally the 320x192 mode was the main issue. On pal TV you'll get patterns and cross colors which finally looks ugly.

I then started using my own graphics mode by antic using 4 colors but only allow limited access of 320x192 pixels with very heavy limitations. It looked much cooler and nicer similar to Geos but you'll lost control of free drawing. The NTSC version in 320x200 pixel mode was not affected that heavily by this "color/pattern" issue.

Finally Geos failed due to limited support by developers and limited possiblities. As the 16-bit computers started there was nearly zero interest for a GUI on 8-bit computers. Specially as you switch off the computer all the time if you load new applications. So every effort to offer an environment for applications/disk management etc. is failing sooner or later.

The planned but finally cancelled new Atari 8-Bit computer Curt was also interested in used another concept: offering a GUI starting different instances of the computer. So a GUI was planned starting and managing the hardware, starting, freezing and restoring the instances the user having active. So the gui works in larger resolution providing windows for the instances or fullscreen mode independant from A8 itself (powered by a 32-bit CPU).

so this project here is a nice technique demo only specially as there is zero support by older software and newer software will be limited to the 5-10 titles GEOS offered - and it failed nearly 30 years ago!