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  • Sure are cute little pieces of history:

    https://duckduckgo.com/?q=zx+spectrum&ia=images&iax=images

  • It _does_ look really cool, genuinely, but calling it a "labour of love" and then having AI write the readme/docs seems conflicting.
  • I hate the fact there is more discussion on things on HN about whether or not its vibe coded than the actual merits of the project itself. I really dont understand peoples attitude of immediately turning off something once they know ai is involved. These people are going to become pretty conflicted when somebody finally vibe codes some software they really like or have wanted forever.

    As far as this project goes, the spectrum was the computer of my youth, and seeing this and getting to mess around with it brings my heart joy and my mind lots of nostalgic thoughts. Thanks for sharing!

  • I had fun playing around in Claude getting it to write 6502 assembler for the BBC Micro. It is fun to imagine what we could have built on those old machines with these new coding agents! But it is kind of hollow isn't it.
  • Wow I did so many of those when i was 12 or around that age. Mostly I tried copying the Amiga Workbench on my +2A (the gray one).

    Obviously at that age my knowledge of coding and window managers wasn't exactly deep and i mostly only had seen other OS from magazines. I don't think I even knew what 'drag-n-drop' was and was a bit confused at what the Trash bin should do (i loaded code from tapes).

    Good times i guess :)

  • This is the sort of thing I've wanted to write for a long time. Yes it looks like this is vibe coded but I'm glad this was made because it's cool to see what can be done, and it's interesting seeing how AI can be used as a compiler essentially given the output is assembly.

    I'd be interested if the author would tell us more about what they did here and what went into the design and evolution, rather than the AI README.

  • > Three rules that earned their place:

    > One commit per verified piece of work, with the acceptance numbers in the commit message

    Project: One single commit: "ZX Desk, first release"

    ???

  • Related: The SymbOS operating system and graphical desktop for Amstrad CPC, MSX and some other Z80 machines was coded entirely manually - the first release was in 2006. https://www.symbos.org/

    Of course for the Commodore 64 the GEOS desktop was already released as a commercial product in 1986. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)

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A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum · Birbla