Mo5

For this vibe coding session, I decided to test Copilot Pro, taking advantage of the few free trial days. And to put all the chances on my side, I started directly from Olivier P’s repository: 👉 OlivierP-To8/BootFloppyDisk My objective With ChatGPT, I hadn’t managed to create my own code nor to use Olivier’s project to generate a working disk image for the MO5. Yet, in theory, everything seemed simple: I take the same source, copy it into my repo, compile it, use Olivier’s tools… no reason for it to break. ...

As part of my job, I had the opportunity to test Augment. During those professional tests, I found it very relevant, almost “proactive”. By proactive, I mean: not only answering the request, but also anticipating unexpressed problems, proposing alternative solutions, and drawing attention to critical points… you get the idea. I was honestly impressed. Augment offers a 7-day free trial for its coding agent, which was perfect timing: I was planning to run my experiments over the weekend anyway. ...

After my experiments with Augment, I had an idea in mind for a few days. Create my own C library to make development on the MO5 easier. Nothing huge. Just something to avoid rewriting the same bits of code over and over again. Augment had already generated a few utility functions. But the ones that felt truly fundamental to me were these: char mo5_getchar(void) { asm { swi fcb $0A } } void mo5_putchar(char c) { asm { ldb c swi fcb $02 } } In my head, everything started from there. Those two functions as a base, and then rebuilding the rest around them. ...

Following Day 7, I reached an important milestone in my exploration of C development on the Thomson MO5: I finally had two fully functional tutorials. They were still simple, but they were stable, reproducible, and understandable. At that point, they relied on two very different approaches: one tutorial using my home-made string, stdio, and ctype libraries another tutorial based exclusively on cmoc.h It was the right moment to step back and analyze what CMOC really provides. ...

In the previous episodes, I talked about my RAG server, why it exists and how it helps me provide context to AIs. But as my experiments progressed, I realized an important point: a RAG server, no matter how well built it is, is not sufficient for a smooth and robust integration with modern AIs. There is a missing building block to connect coding agents to my RAG server. In this article, I will explain: ...

Following the previous episode (/mo5-blog/days/day-6-rag-server/), I wanted to go one step further: deploy my RAG server on the Internet. The goal was twofold: make the server accessible from the outside allow coding agents (Copilot, Augment, etc.) to have a precise context to help with MO5 development (the project is described here: https://retrocomputing-ai.cloud/) Deploying a RAG, but not just an API To connect coding agents with my RAG server, I created an MCP server. It acts as a standardized interface between AI tools (Copilot, Augment, etc.) and my RAG API. ...

Creating a MO5 template to stop fighting the build Lately, I had way too many topics open at the same time. Way too many 😅 In no particular order, there were: continuing my experiments to better understand how graphics mode works on the MO5 completing the documentation of my RAG server modifying that RAG server to simplify keyword management, then redeploying it with the new documentation hosting my MCP server building a small graphics-mode game on the MO5 And in the middle of all that, a very down-to-earth problem kept coming back: ...

On this new day of MO5 coding, I did quite a lot of things, and especially a lot of experiments around graphics mode. Generating sprites from images I tackled a fairly classic problem: drawing sprites in C for the MO5 is… how can I put it… not the most fun thing 😅 At first, I went for a very “handcrafted” approach: drawing in text mode via Notepad, with a space for the background color, an X to draw the shape color, then using a PowerShell script to transform the text into a bit array. ...