The ultimate Galaksija talk: Everything about a Yugoslavian microcomputer halfway between a TRS-80 and a ZX 80
(Created page with " ''by Tomaž Šolc ;Galaksija is a Yugoslavian home microcomputer that was popular in the local DIY community throughout the 1980s. It was meant as an alternative to ill...")
Latest revision as of 13:11, 22 July 2013
by Tomaž Šolc
- Galaksija is a Yugoslavian home microcomputer that was popular in the local DIY community throughout the 1980s. It was meant as an alternative to illegally bought contemporary Sinclair and Commodore computers. It is a fascinating product of the time of severely limited availability of electronic components and a widespread disregard for copyright. Even today its deceptively simple design can still teach us a lot of interesting tricks on how to make a usable computer and operating system with as few transistors and bits as possible.
The economic situation in which Galaksija was conceived led to unique decisions on both its hardware and software side. Galaksija can display better graphics than Sinclair ZX 80 with only a small number of general-purpose digital logic integrated circuits. It was meant to be built at home and hence included no specialized chips. Being constrained to a relatively small EPROM, Galaksija's built-in BASIC interpreter is based on a stripped-down and hand-optimised Tandy TRS-80 ROM. It relies on undocumented Z80 features, "racing the beam", executing error messages and floating point constants as code and similar tricks. By not including an auto-run feature the authors also made sure that Galaksija programs were hard to copy-protect, encouraging sharing and an early open-source like approach to developing software.
"The ultimate Galaksija talk" has been originally given at the 29th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, 2012, as a part in a series of ultimate talks by different authors on vintage computers that also included Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. In 45 minutes it includes a brief introduction about the history of Galaksija and home microcomputers in Yugoslavia at the time. It then covers all aspects of Galaksija's hardware design, built-in ROM routines and original software that has been preserved to this day. It ends with coverage of what tools exist today to develop software for Galaksija, either for running in one of the software emulators, on hardware replicas or the real thing.
- About CMOS Galaksija