Wow, this is fascinating stuff. Just a side question (and please understand I am not a low-level hardware expert, so pardon me if this is a stupid question): does this arch support any sort of speculative execution, and if so do you have any sort of concerns and/or protections in place against the sort of vulnerabilities that seem to come inherent with that?

Thanks — and no worries, that’s a great question!

Right now, PyXL runs fully in-order with no speculative execution. This is intentional for a couple of reasons: First, determinism is really important for real-time and embedded systems — avoiding speculative behavior makes timing predictable and eliminates a whole class of side-channel vulnerabilities. Second, PyXL is still at an early stage — the focus right now is on building a clean, efficient architecture that makes sense structurally, without adding complex optimizations like speculation just for the sake of performance.

In the future, if there's a clear real-world need, limited forms of prediction could be considered — but always very carefully to avoid breaking predictability or simplicity.

I suppose one could always use WindowMaker if they're looking for that experience:

https://www.windowmaker.org/

This is much nicer: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace/blob/master/Documen...

Oh wow that's cool, I'm going to have to check that out. Thanks for the link!

Good 'ol GNUStep. I think the only thing I ran that relied on it was WindowMaker, which was an excellent, minimalistic window manager back in the day.

WindowMaker and AfterStep never had any dependencies to GNUStep.

They were often used together though.

You're bringing back memories. I ran WindowMaker on my Sun desktop (Solaris 2.6, I think?), back in the late 90's. I spent days customizing that system, compiling everything from source.

The Banshee kind of sucked. Voodoo2 12 MB was king in those days.

RocketArena players unite! God I spent an ungodly amount of time playing RA3.

Quake2 with a K6-2 and Voodoo2 was a kickass combo. At some point iD software released the 3DNow! patch for Quake2 which yielded yet another 10 FPS....good times.

That may have even been in the x11amp days.

Where Quake2 really shined was in multiplayer, especially mods like q2ctf.

Quake2 was released at just the right moment to take advantage of both 3D acceleration and broadband Internet access. Playing a game of q2ctf, in 3D-accelerated 800x600 mode, with 60 ms ping was just fucking amazing.

Yep, my Golden Tee 2005 cabinet uses a Voodoo3 2000 or 3000 (can't remember which off the top of my head).

I'm honestly impressed people have golf game cabinets at home. never saw anyone playing those on the arcades.

Definitely one of my great early memories in computing.

I had a similar experience seeing Quake2 running with the Glide renderer (on a Voodoo2) for the first time It was amazing.