Are there any other apps for NANO-S32 (or -S16) ?

[informer2016]

Good day @vialamo ! Please tell, are there any other apps for NANO-S32 (or -S16) ? I tested your floppy in QEMU, tried your "sample" example and also a text editor - everything seems to work. By the way I fixed a small typo (just made a pull request) and also found your beautiful easter egg ASCII art 😜

[vialamo]

Hi! Thank you a lot for your contribution and for your interest. At the moment I have not developed more apps. I have the idea of continue developing NANO, but this should happen slowly. Is your interest based in any chance of using it for some "real" purpose? As said, thank you in any case!

[informer2016]

@vialamo Yes, I am looking for promising floppy-based OS for using them as a part of open source coreboot+SeaBIOS ROM of my Lenovo G505S with AMD A10-5750M quadcore CPU and 16GB RAM (mentioning this because some people think only some old hardwares are supported by coreboot, however there are some great relatively modern PCs like this one, btw A10-5750M does not contain any Intel ME / AMD PSP hardware backdoors inside it) . After I replaced the crappy proprietary UEFI with clean&efficient coreboot+SeaBIOS, now I have less than 1MB occupied of my 4MB SPI Flash BIOS chip and could use the rest of flash space for some great floppy OS . LZMA compression is supported for those "virtual floppies" so its possible to put many of them without a problem - and I see all of them as a boot entry inside SeaBIOS boot menu. Just one easy cbfstool command is needed to add any floppy, and not just 1.44MB but also 2.88MB floppies are supported there so I could extend any interesting floppy to 2.88MB and add some cool stuff inside it.

"Real" purpose - maybe doing it not just for fun (although I really love playing with floppies) but probably also could do some custom nrption stuff without worrying about the possible bckdors/vulnerabilities found at many popular OS such as Windows and Linux-based

If you are interested, please check the list of coreboot-supported motherboards - https://coreboot.org/status/board-status.html - maybe you already have a motherboard from this list or a real chance to get one. E.g. my laptop could be found just for $100-$150 in good condition, although to upgrade it to 16GB RAM easily costs another $100 . And if you have any questions, just ask and I'll provide more info

[vialamo]

This sounds great. If you have any suggestions, or ideas that will make this fit better in your purpose, I would like to know and think about.

[informer2016]

@vialamo I just put the latest NANO-S32 floppy inside my coreboot+SeaBIOS build for this G505S 😉 And tried to boot: after SeaBIOS printed its' Booting from Floppy... message, the screen resolution slightly changed (at least regarding the Y axis) - and I'm sure that NANO-S32 did it - but then I only see a blinking _ character, not booting further... I wonder what is the problem and could participate in debugging if you would provide the instructions or maybe a special floppy build with some debug info printing

[informer2016]

@vialamo By the way, NANO-S16 seems to boot slightly further: the whole screen is cleared and then at the top of the screen, right upper corner, there's what seems to be some really distorted message (impossible to read) and I see the blinking "_" in the top center of the screen. NANO-S16 can boot in QEMU successfully, but NANO-S32 can't boot even in QEMU (coreboot build for QEMU, to which the NANO-S32 floppy has been added in the following way - https://visopsys.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=292&start=10#p1462 . Hopefully you'll find some time to take a look...