Omega Progress: Feb. 27th, 2009

I have just about finished building the desktop and I have just now begun to fully support the Arial font type. I am also currently developing support for 24-bit image display and graphical cursor display with mouse synchronization. I have already further developed the boot loader which now provides the end-user the choice to boot into a desired resolution. Right now the choices are 80x25 (8/8-bit CUI), 800x600 (24-bit GUI), or 1024x768 (24-bit GUI).

Omega Progress: Feb. 22nd, 2009

After about 3 solid days of reading specifications and banging out code, I finally have a working VBE 2.0 protected mode driver! I am so excited to have finally seen my first pixel on screen after so many days of failed attempts. It was much more difficult to write this driver than I originally thought, so this one felt a bit rewarding to me when I saw it work for the first time. Now that I have a working graphics driver, I can begin developing the graphics library and designing the GUI!! The real fun begins now.

Omega Progress: Feb. 17th, 2009

I still haven't finished the graphics driver to support higher resolutions, because I was sidetracked by this terribly mundane yet essential PS/2 mouse driver. I have just completed it and it works on both real hardware and emulated hardware. It is amazing to see the mouse finally working. Right now I am just printing a dot in place of a modern cursor and it is pretty cool to see it moving around the screen in sync with my PS/2 mouse. I believe the USB mouse emulates a PS/2 mouse but works using a different IRQ, so I may also take more time to further develop the mouse driver to support the USB mouse as well. All this by the first major release. I hope.

Omega Update: Feb. 8th, 2009

I fixed a bug that would cause Omega to freeze when using the -find command. I also further developed the -find command's output to include the object type. I plan to release the new update as soon as I can find an opportunity to address a few other possible and known problems, thoroughly test the changes, and update our website. In the meantime, please keep sending me your detailed reports and feedback. Thanks to everyone who has been helping to test and improve the Omega Windows Recovery Agent!

Omega Progress: Jan. 31st, 2009

For a while we have been contemplating higher resolution graphics to support a GUI. The first step is to build a custom malloc function which I did do last night. I still need to build a way to free the memory after allocation. I am going to start work on that later today. I hope to have that bit complete by tonight. I also cleaned up the boot loader last night and prepared it to support VESA mode switching.