Ceylon Development Log — September 19, 2026: The Controller Was Ready. It Still Wouldn’t Run.
Today I submitted Project Ceylon to the Hackaday Retrocomputing Contest.
Workshop
Ceylon Development Log — September 18, 2026: Why an Operating System Needs a Game
Today Ceylon's first native game stopped being a side idea and became something much more useful: a plan for a real application that can entertain people, stress the…
Ceylon Development Log — September 17, 2026: When a Crash Needs to Leave Evidence
A real fault exposed an important distinction today: Ceylon can detect and contain a crashed component, but that is not enough. If the machine is going to recover from…
Ceylon Development Log — September 16, 2026: Static Foundations, Dynamic Systems
Ceylon is learning how to become dynamic without abandoning a static, bounded and predictable foundation: leased execution workers, mirrored VSpace cohorts, bounded page…
Ceylon Development Log — September 15, 2026: Locking the Baseline Before Moving Forward
A day spent proving the new low-level foundation: DMA and interrupt isolation, multicore FPU safety, runtime boundaries, and an integrated harness that learned to trust…
Ceylon Development Log — September 14, 2026: Strengthening the Foundation
A long day of audit closure and microkernel migration work froze a reproducible Ceylon baseline and advanced the new foundation to the B0 validation gate.
Ceylon Development Log — September 12, 2026
September 12 was a day of architecture review, development governance, and a closer look at what modern Amiga users actually want from a workstation.
A Night Off, a Looney Tunes Movie, and a Hard Look at Ceylon
A night away from Ceylon turned into dinner, a movie, a serious software audit, and a complete rewrite of the rules for building the operating system.
Ceylon Dev Log: When "Restart" Doesn't Mean Restart
Tonight Ceylon closed the authentication publication race and uncovered the deeper distinction between execution restart and full service reincarnation.
From First Light to First Key: Ceylon's Keyboard Path Comes Alive
Ceylon reached first light this morning. Tonight it went further: a real USB keyboard, discovered, configured, and decoded into semantic key events flowing through…
Project Ceylon: Keeping the Architecture, Rebuilding the Assumptions
Project Ceylon keeps the architectural ideas that made the Amiga compelling while rebuilding the assumptions underneath them for modern hardware.
The Backstory Is Live. Tomorrow, Y'all Get the Mess as It Happens.
The retrospective is caught up. From here forward, Project Ceylon becomes a real-time record of the work, wrong turns, breakthroughs, and whatever happens next.
Where Project Ceylon Stands Today — September 6, 2026
This closes out the retrospective backfill with an honest accounting: what's proven, what's partial, what's planned, and what flatly isn't built yet. Starting tomorrow…
52, 53, and Other Numbers That Ruin Your Evening
With the scheduler starvation bug fixed, the next client finally ran — and immediately failed for a much dumber reason. Shared logic assumed channel 52. It was actually…
The RNG Bug That Wasn't an RNG Bug
Two SecureRandom client tests were failing. Every instinct said the bug was in the random-number code. It wasn't. It was a busy-spinning restart starving lower-priority…
Random Numbers Turn Out to Be a Whole Damn Subsystem
I expected to spend an afternoon on random numbers. I spent a lot longer than an afternoon on random numbers, because it turns out trustworthy entropy is genuinely its…
One Management API, Whether You Click It or Type It
Whether you're driving Ceylon through a GUI or a terminal, it should be the same semantic backend underneath, not two tools that happen to overlap most of the time.
Applications Without Pretending We're Unix
An application on Ceylon isn't automatically a Unix process wearing a different hat. Building the runtime meant deciding, on purpose, what to borrow from that model and…
Ceylon Horos: The Lion at the Boundary
Horos is Ceylon's security umbrella — the conceptual boundary between identity, credentials, authentication, sessions, and authority. The name comes from an old Greek…
From Nu-Day to Ceylon: Stop Building the Workstation and Build the Computer
The pivot: one shared platform, validated across multiple profiles — workstation, server, security appliance, media workstation, development — instead of one…
Why Project Nu-Day Failed
"Failed" doesn't mean nothing worked. It means the project's boundaries stopped making sense. Building a real media workstation meant building an entire operating…
Project Nu-Day: What Actually Worked
Before I get into why Nu-Day didn't survive, it deserves an honest accounting of what it actually proved. A working path is not the same thing as a finished subsystem…
What It Actually Takes to Drive an Intel Arc A770
Good documentation gets you past the product page. What's underneath is PCIe, MMIO, firmware, command submission, and a long staged plan instead of one heroic attempt at…
Could an Intel Arc A770 Be the Modern Amiga Custom Chipset?
The Arc A770 isn't a literal replacement for Agnus, Denise, and Paula. But one of the actual deciding factors in choosing it had nothing to do with raw performance…
Why a Modern Amiga Needed a Secure Multicore Microkernel
The display failure was a symptom. The actual disease was an architecture with no real boundaries between components. The fix was moving to a security-certified…
Well, Hell: The Iris Math Doesn't Work
Pixels appearing on screen is not the same thing as an architecture that scales to real high-resolution video editing. I found that out the hard way, and I was irritated…
Why I Built the Computer in QEMU Before I Built the Computer
QEMU was never the destination. It was the laboratory — a reference machine where I could isolate architecture mistakes from hardware-driver mistakes before either one…
Project Nu-Day: Okay, Y'all, Let's Actually Build Something
All that research had to turn into something eventually. Project Nu-Day was the first real attempt: a modern media workstation, built for x86-64, inspired by the Toaster…
Old Source Code Is Useful. Copying It Isn't the Point.
Having thirty-year-old source code available doesn't mean the job is to transcribe it. Here's how I actually use historical material as research instead of a shortcut.
Then I Found the Video Toaster Source Code
NewTek released the Video Toaster's source publicly years ago. That's where the real research thread started — not the Amiga's OS, but the thing that made the Amiga…
What Was Actually Worth Saving From the Amiga?
Before building anything, I had to separate what I actually loved about the Amiga from what I just remembered fondly. Those turned out to be two different lists.
What If Amiga Development Never Stopped?
Commodore went bankrupt in 1994 and took continuous Amiga development down with it. This is the question that started everything: what would still be true if it hadn't.