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. ...