This is the Github organisation for the Neotron Project. Neotron is a family of 1980's style home computers, powered by ARM Cortex-M processors, with a ROM written in Rust, and a fully open-source design.
The Neotron BIOS is a similar concept to the IBM PC BIOS, or the BIOS used on CP/M systems. It boots the system and provides hardware abstraction.
The Neotron OS runs on all Neotron machines. It expects to access RAM starting at 0x2000_0000, and gets all other information about the system from the BIOS.
The Neotron Shell is a cross between COMMAND.COM on MS-DOS, and the BASIC interpreter you get on something like a Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum.
The Neotron Shell can ask the OS to load an application, which will then run. A well-behaved application should run on any system running the Neotron OS, provided it has enough RAM available. You can also get (perfectly valid) badly-behaved applications which reach out and touch the hardware directly - like MS-DOS, there's no memory protection here!
- The Neotron Book (Github) (Rendered)
- Our book covering the Neotron Project, the ideas behind it, and introducing the important concepts
- Neotron OS (Github)
- The Neotron OS runs on any computer with a Neotron BIOS implementation
- Neotron Common BIOS (Github)
- Code and API shared between the Neotron OS and every Neotron BIOS implementation
- Neotron BMC (Github)
- Firmware for the Board Management Controller (BMC) fitted to various Neotron computers
- Neotron SDK (Github)
- Software Development Kit for writing applications that run on Neotron OS
- Neotron API (Github)
- The low-level API shared by the Neotron OS and the Neotron SDK
- Neotron FFI (Github)
- FFI safe types used by Neotron Common BIOS and Neotron API
- Neotron Common Hardware (Github)
- KiCAD Schematics, Footprints and Symbols shared between different Neotron computer designs
- Neotron Expansion Template (Github)
- Template Design for an Expansion Card that will fit in a Neotron Pico and other computers with a Neotron Bus
A microATX form-factor computer powered by the Raspberry Pi Pico (or rather its RP2040 Microcontroller)
- Neotron Pico (Github)
- Schematics and PCB designs for the Neotron Pico
- Neotron Pico BIOS (Github)
- A Neotron BIOS for the Neotron Pico
A Neotron BIOS that runs as a GUI application on Linux, macOS and Windows, and can run a natively compiled version of Neotron OS in a window. Unfortunately, because Neotron OS is compiled for your host machine, you cannot execute Neotron applications in this build - for perfectly understandable reasons, modern OSes have security restrictions that stop you load some data from disk and blindly executing it.
- Neotron Desktop BIOS (Github)
A Neotron BIOS that runs inside the QEMU ARM system emulator, using QEMU's serial emulation as the console instead of video output. QEMU should be configured to emulate the Arm MPS3-AN547, which is their FPGA based Cortex-M55 developer kit.
- Neotron QEMU BIOS (Github)
A small form-factor computer powered by an Texas Instruments Tiva-C Launchpad. No longer updated.