We are using JSLinux over at https://barebox.org/webdemo to let potential users see the conveniences of the bootloader's shell without having to flash it to actual hardware.

I am glad to see all the forks mentioned here, need to see which one runs bareDOOM best and if any have working sound perhaps..

https://barebox.org/demo being the correct link..

barebox can be compiled as EFI payload and used on Desktop systems. The main impediment is packaging it for the OS and scripting the hooks that would write e.g. bootloader spec files on kernel updates.

Nice writeup! This reminds me of the barebox bootloader April fools two years back, which will connect you to #barebox, when all other boot targets fail[1]. :-)

The focus there was on adding TCP support to barebox though and it lacks your nice GUI elements. Only interface was CLI (which can be drawn on top of EFI GOP when barebox is built as EFI payload).

[1]: https://lore.barebox.org/barebox/20220401145902.GF4351@telli...

Quote: "PyPI has wrongfully classified project Cheetah3 as “critical”. This puts a burden to use 2FA to manage the project at PyPI. To avoid the burden the project is renamed to CT3 at PyPI. There will be no updates for Cheetah3. Sorry for the inconvenience!"

I had used Doomgeneric as basis for bareDOOM; DOOM running within the barebox bootloader. Back then there was no sound, but it was fun adding support for PWM PC speakers.

If curious, here's the online demo: https://www.barebox.org/jsbarebox/?graphic=1

I've been using bootloader specifications in a number of embedded system projects and I really like it. The only configuration that's required for you in the bootloader is to select a boot medium and bootspec does everything else. barebox takes it one step further and supports a linux-appendroot option, which automatically appends a file-system specific root= option to the kernel command line. That way you can have multiple slots with the same bootspec (e.g. for A/B booting scenarios) and you can transparently boot the same rootfs whether it's locally on SD, NAND or even on NFS. Good stuff.

(Disclosure: I do get paid to work on barebox. This post is on my own dime though :^)

UCS-2 is always 2 octets, UTF-16 allows for so-called surrogate pairs which expands the bits available making it variable size.

Getting DOOM to run macOS was straight forward. Lacks sound though: https://github.com/a3f/doom

AFAIK, A process isn't required to have a stack.

You had a VGA controller? That's nice. I had to design my own back in the days. https://github.com/a3f/r3k.vhdl/tree/Demo-v1/vhdl/io/vga

You have an FPGA ? That's also nice, all I have is a bunch of resistors and a MCU :) https://hackaday.com/2014/02/23/the-bitbox-console-gets-upgr... (nice project btw !)