
Mega Man for TempleOS - robertelder
https://github.com/tramplersheikhs/megaman
======
LVB
Whenever I watch one of Terry's videos, I get highly motivated to program. Not
read a blog post comparing frameworks, or a debate about some programming
idiom, or even designing some larger project. But literally type stuff into a
computer and make things appear on the screen. It is remarkable how watching
his TempleOS videos uncovers the fascination I had of computers from my youth,
30 years ago.

~~~
runeks
You've got me curious.

Who's Terry? And where can I see one of his videos?

~~~
pkd
One should probably add a trigger warning. He is schizophrenic and not quite
himself at times, especially in the comments. Not to take away from his
technical feats.

~~~
dajohnson89
I think it's worth being specific here -- he uses the word "nigger" frequently
and regularly makes other nasty comments about black people and other
minorities.

~~~
panglott
When I've seen his website in the past, the crazy religious stuff has always
been there, which I can look past, but now it seems like the crazy racist
stuff is way way more prominent, which I just cannot.

~~~
dajohnson89
Completely agreed. I understand that he's mentally ill, and I wish him all the
best in that regard. But I can't help but see him as just another racist hick.
Super cool project he has, but I want nothing to do with him or anything he
works on.

~~~
ng12
Do you understand what schizophrenia entails? If it makes you uncomfortable
that's one thing, belittling him as a "racist hick" is another.

~~~
dajohnson89
See my post below.

He is a racist hick, who happens to be ill. If that's "another" thing, then so
be it. Don't really care which came first. I will not let racists duck
undercover of his illness. I stop short of being genuinely​ upset at him, but
hate speech is hate speech. Since he has a large-ish audience, his ideas are
becoming part of culture. Agree with him or defend him or apologize for his
racism all you wish -- you are kinda/sorta part of the problem.

~~~
ng12
What an absolutely absurd opinion. I really don't think you appreciate the
manifestation of schizophrenia. Would you feel the same about someone
suffering from Tourette's for swearing in front of a child?

The guy believes lots of crazy things: men in suits are after him, aliens put
things in his body, that he has conversations with god about music, etc. He
translates random number generators into ASCII attempting to divine messages
from god. He writes long-winded nonsensical rants jumping from detailed
technical dissertations to rambling about old war movies. Schizophrenia
literally means "split mind" \-- ideas, concepts, hallucinations attack his
brain and he has no basis for dispelling which are grounded in reality and
which are not. It's the biological equivalent of radio interference or a loose
wire.

A large chunk of the things he writes are unintelligible. Yes, people focus on
his work, because it's pretty amazing that somebody suffering so profoundly
from an illness can do such interesting (and esoteric) work. The fact that a
subset of his schizophrenic attacks include racist language is something I
feel sad, not angry about.

~~~
dajohnson89
Yeah, the sadness really shows. I wish I could share your clinical detachment.
I guess I'm too PC (as someone else implied) or ignorant of mental illness (as
you implied). Let's agree to disagree about our opinion of Owens. He's a
deranged and schizophrenic genius, I get it. We can agree that he's brilliant
and is producing something really cool.

I'm not bothered by his racism -- it's too common for me to be really upset by
it. What bothers me is how you and others are so quick to point out how cool
TempleOS is, and how smart he is, and how his hate speech is OK because he's
ill. You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he
says, which is telling. Enjoy his streams, hell -- make TempleOS your default
OS and mail all of your friends/family a copy of it.

Just consider that white males happen to make up the vast majority of his
audience. Blacks and whoever else he hates will have a harder time than you do
sympathizing with his hateful speech, schizophrenic or not. Again, Hitler was
a schizophrenic but that doesn't make his hateful rhetoric OK does it? Oh
wait, Mein Kampf was recently a bestseller in Germany and we have a former
Breitbart editor in the White House. Touché.

~~~
kstenerud
"You've defended him more than you've defended my disapproval of what he says,
which is telling."

It's very telling. When someone does something out of mental illness, there is
no reasoning them to change their course. When someone does it out of bigotry,
there is.

------
tsheikhs
Cool! This project started out as a way to learn Gr library routines in HolyC,
and kind of Frankensteined its way into a game engine. In the coming weeks
I'll be doing lots of refactoring to bring the code in line with proper TOS
guidelines naming conventions.

(Author here: I cross-posted this comment from a reddit thread, hope it isn't
against the rules..)

~~~
abrookewood
Can I ask why you decided to do this rather than learning on a more
conventional platform?

~~~
cyberpunk
I was kind of interested in writing something for the temple (well, okay, I
spent a bored afternoon contemplating giving it a go and half heartedly
booting vms and reading code ....)

While I can't answer for the OP, my motivation was _specifically_ that this is
kind of an alien environment and the challenge involved in even getting to
hello world would definately have seen me walk away at the end the better for
the exp, even if walking away from those hours without having gained some
marketable understanding of framework foo or language bar.

In the end I didn't do that because the code is insanely complicated (all
single letter vars) and my downtime is too precious for such masochism
currently; I don't think it's too much of a strech to understand why others
might be interested though.

I'm glad to live in a world where such an outstanding personal achievement
like Terry's OS really is can exist, and that there are people out there
prodding at it.

Isn't it cool that we don't always do things for the money?

I dearly hope that none of the recent templeos projects are attempts to
antagonize Terry though. He is a profoundly accomplished software engineer and
deserves nothing but respect for his technical achievements from us all
alongside understanding of the rest of the package.

~~~
timv
> half heartedly booting vms

I initially read that as VMS rather than VMs. Very confusing.

I don't think too many people half-heartedly boot VMS. Reactions tend to be
one extreme or the other.

~~~
bluejekyll
Wouldn't a half-hearted boot of VMS be Windows?

------
huangc10
Per wikipedia:

TempleOS (formerly J Operating System,[1] SparrowOS and LoseThos)[2] is a
biblical themed lightweight operating system created over the span of a decade
by the American programmer Terry A. Davis. The software is a x86-64 bit,
multi-tasking, multi-cored, public domain, open source, ring-0-only, single
address space, non-networked, PC operating system for recreational
programming.[3] The operating system was designed to be the Third Temple
according to Davis and uses an interface similar to a mixture of DOS and Turbo
C. Davis describes the operating system as a modern x86-64 Commodore 64 with C
in place of BASIC.

~~~
corndoge
I'll bite.

Why did you paste a paragraph from the Wikipedia article?

~~~
tracker1
Because many people will have no idea what TempleOS is from the link, or the
demo video on the GH page.

~~~
corndoge
But if they are reading HN, surely they know how to use Google and Wikipedia
and could acquire this information in seconds?

~~~
largeprime
as an incredibly lazy person i found it to be helpful

~~~
udkl
You logged out, signed up for a temp account and then logged back in - just to
post this comment. That IS incredibly lazy ;)

~~~
rangibaby
He probably doesn't want to be on record saying that he is lazy

~~~
udkl
Is that you there, Mr Obvious ?

------
fiatjaf
I find TemploOS a pretty normal name, but HolyC is an amazing name for a
language. I always laugh when I see it.

~~~
wolfgke
> but HolyC is an amazing name for a language

For those who don't understand the pun:

>
> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_See](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_See)

~~~
fiatjaf
I didn't think of this pun.

~~~
sambeau
Me neither, I assumed the pun was to do with "Holy Cow"

------
mikejmoffitt
It's interesting and fun that Terry's odd but impressive project is getting a
little cult traction. This is kind of neat, though the physics and animations
could use some work.

------
jancsika
Can someone explain the TempleOS author's sprite and graphics interface? From
one of his videos it appears that:

1\. Once a sprite set has been defined the user can manually
(programmatically?) rasterize it 2\. User can set affine transforms 3\. It
_seems_ like the boundary between 2d and 3d API is small, or easily
traversable, or non-existent. In one of his 2d examples it appears he changes
a parameter to get animation in the z-axis. 4\. Sprites are somehow part of
the language (or at least seem to be integrated deeply into it).

To me it looks a bit like editing an SVG, automatically converting it to HTML5
canvas, then switching to WebGL, seamlessly.

~~~
evv
Sometimes it is nice to browse HN with 'showdead' enabled, because you can see
Terry commenting on these threads. (his comment is sibling to mine)

Terry, keep up the great work! Its super refreshing to see your commitment
over the years on such an ambitious project.

~~~
jancsika
> Sometimes it is nice to browse HN with 'showdead' enabled, because you can
> see Terry commenting on these threads. (his comment is sibling to mine)

Did he give a relevant technical response to my technical questions? If so,
are you or someone else willing/able to repost that here?

I _really_ don't want to dig into HN caves and learn about its subculture. I
just want to discuss a technical topic that I find interesting (and apparently
others do, too, if those little numbers next to the post mean anything).

~~~
kennethbgoodin
He said

"I wrote everything from scratch. I am the smartest programmer ever lived with
divien intellect.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EDLCs4fBJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EDLCs4fBJc)
"

------
milkey_mouse
4chan's /g/ is especially obsessed with TempleOS and Terry's livestreams;
there's typically a /tosg/ thread somewhere on the front page.

------
frostirosti
[https://youtu.be/5gfoDHycEi0?t=2m12s](https://youtu.be/5gfoDHycEi0?t=2m12s)

That sentiment! I know that feeling so well.

------
PhilWright
"God's favorite game is Donkey Kong."

Surely the best quote of all time.

------
dylz
What the hell is that top comment on the YouTube?
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DepFpVt-
mIo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DepFpVt-mIo))

~~~
lobotryas
It's a meme. Google "defend kebab" for more info.

As for why it's there? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
muterad_murilax
The in-game music is a chiptune version of the "Defend Kebab" song.

------
kristofferR
Some background, for those who haven't heard about TempleOS before:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8658283)

------
nikolasavic
Vice wrote a piece on him in 2014:
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gods-lonely-
progr...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gods-lonely-programmer)

He drinks a lot of caffeine and lives mostly on a 48-hour schedule: "I stay
awake 16 * 2 and sleep 8 * 2."

------
register
Did I understand correctly that HolyC is a C like dynamic Language with AOT
compilation and dynamic binding? Does this mean that functions can be
redefined in the REPL while the code is running? Looks like a pretty cool
language!

------
nickpsecurity
So, they put a game I used to love and hate on TempleOS. Guess I finally got a
reason to visit the Temple. Although that comment about the HolyC going into
the shell, compiled, and running was pretty cool.

------
bitwize
Looks better than Mega Man for DOS!

------
partycoder
TempleOS is a very interesting OS with many original innovations, as mentioned
in the "constructive review of TempleOS" (which you can look up).

However it is a ring 0 only OS, with all the consequences that implies. You
can make irreversible mistakes in this way, especially outside a VM.

Other OSes worth looking into are:

\- Redox OS (Rust)

\- MenuetOS / KolibriOS (x86-64 Assembly)

\- Haiku OS

\- GNU Hurd

~~~
pekk
Did you pay attention to what TempleOS is for? Do you know what it was like to
program for the C64? It is ring 0 only on purpose! That's the whole point!

The idea that someone would go into a thread about TempleOS, trash TempleOS
for one of its central and distinguishing features, and then use the thread as
an opportunity to promote some new OS written in Rust is boggling my mind.

~~~
partycoder
Well that's one aspect of TempleOS that appeals to some and that is fine.

But you an also appreciate TempleOS from other perspectives such as how HolyC
is compiled, dynamic documentation, etc.

------
knd775
This isn't Terry, is it?

~~~
thesmallestcat
No, but the Github user sure is interesting. Have to wonder how Terry feels
about
[https://github.com/tramplersheikhs/hgbd](https://github.com/tramplersheikhs/hgbd)
and
[https://github.com/tramplersheikhs/uriel](https://github.com/tramplersheikhs/uriel)
\-- is the Temple being desecrated?? Either way, seriously cool stuff.

~~~
mintplant
Terry has stated that, apart from serving God, the goal of TempleOS is to
encourage C64-like hobbyist experimentation. He seems quite happy with
outsiders writing software for his system, and has endorsed this MegaMan game
on the TempleOS software page:

[http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Web/AppStore/AppStore.html#l...](http://www.templeos.org/Wb/Home/Web/AppStore/AppStore.html#l1)

~~~
shultays

      Supposedly, there is a guy on E-Bay selling TempleOS merchandise.  It's okay.
    

Heh, what a cool guy.

------
bredren
Is it just me or is the official templeos site hacked / defaced right now.

~~~
problems
Nope, it's standard, Terry Davis is the author and he's a very religious
schizophrenic. He's a very smart guy, but he got banned many times on HN and
Reddit for going off about "India niggers" and spamming blocks of random
words.

~~~
pekk
Actually all the times I've read him use the word "niggers" (and it is an
offensive word, I won't dispute that) he actually means something different
than you would expect.

------
faragon
Amazing project! :-D

------
amsheehan
Weird. Makes me want to start a crusade.

~~~
sctb
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13973144](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13973144)
and marked it off-topic.

------
Orangeair
A cult following for the God-given operating system. Huh. Sounds a bit
sacrilegious.

~~~
krylon
Isn't that exactly what God would want?

I just wonder how long it'll take for some heretical sect to start a fork and
add blasphemous features like networking or 32-bit colors... ;-)

~~~
bri3d
Fear not:
[https://github.com/minexew/Shrine](https://github.com/minexew/Shrine)

~~~
krylon
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction, as Bad Religion used to sing. ;-)
(NB what a great name for a band that is in this context!)

