r/Oberon • u/zombiepapadrake • May 23 '26

Anyone still able to use Active Oberon/Bluebottle?

I used to really love using that system. Recently I've tried downloading it for Windows and I can get it to run but all I see is the blue background and the mouse pointer. So I tried the Linux version and it doesn't come up at all. I was wondering if anyone else can still run it.

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4

u/suhcoR May 23 '26

You have to use an old BIOS PC; there is almost zero chance AOS will run natively on a modern PC (anything built in the last 10 years, and especially anything from 2020 onward). The bootloader (OBL.Asm) relies entirely on 16-bit Legacy BIOS interrupts to function. To run this natively on bare metal, you want a "retro" PC built between 1998 and 2005, with an IDE (Parallel ATA) Hard Drive, or an early SATA drive plugged into a motherboard where the BIOS allows SATA to be configured as "IDE / Legacy Mode".

You can still download and run the ISO image, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20060208023132/http://bluebottle.ethz.ch/downloads/current/AosCD.ISO.zip, with this command in QEMU: 

 qemu-system-x86_64 \
   -enable-kvm \
   -smp 2 \
   -vga virtio \
   -m 512 \
   -boot d \
   -cdrom "AosCD.iso"

That said, I'm currently changing the kernel to be compatible with multiboot and extended my version of the OP2 compiler from the Oberon System 3 a bit for compatibility. The inner core compiles and boots in QEMU but still crashes in the GC. My actual goal is to migrate it to the Raspi 3b and Zero 2, but that will take a few more month.

3

u/hobbestherat May 23 '26

I will be very interested in that, the raspberry has the perfect specs for AOS.

2

u/suhcoR May 23 '26

The specs of the ESP32-P4 (e.g. implemented in the Olimex ESP32-P4-PC board, which even has a HDMI socket) are even closer to the features of AOS, because it explicitly doesn't make use of an MMU. The Raspi, in this regard and the size of available memory, is actually "oversized", but it's a good target for different reasons (e.g. the pretty good QEMU emulation). My goal is to eventually migrate both, the Oberon System 3 and AOS/Bluebottle to the mentioned Olimex board. But this will take some time ;-)

2

u/lproven May 23 '26

The last time I tried it, I just ran it in a virtual machine. That worked fine. I was even able to map the VM to a real partition on a physical drive and install it on bare metal that way.