collapseos/recipes/README.md

Recipes

Because Collapse OS is a meta OS that you assemble yourself on an improvised machine of your own design, there can't really be a build script. Not a reliable one anyways.

Because the design of post-collapse machines is hard to predict, it's hard to write a definitive guide to it.

The approach we're taking here is a list of recipes: Walkthrough guides for machines that were built and tried pre-collapse. With a wide enough variety of recipes, I hope that it will be enough to cover most post-collapse cases.

That's what this folder contains: a list of recipes that uses parts supplied by Collapse OS to run on some machines people tried.

In other words, parts often implement logic for hardware that isn't available off the shelf, but they implement a logic that you are likely to need post collapse. These parts, however have been tried on real material and they all have a recipe describing how to build the hardware that parts have been written for.

Structure

Each top folder represents an architecture. In that top folder, there's a README.md file presenting the architecture as well as instructions to minimally get Collapse OS running on it. Then, in the same folder, there are auxiliary recipes for nice stuff built around that architecture.

Installation procedures are centered around using a modern system to install Collapse OS. This is the most useful instructions to have most pre-collapse and post-collapse because even after the collapse, we'll interact mostly with modern technology for many years.

There are, however, recipes to write to different storage media, thus making Collapse OS fully reproducible. For example, you can use rc2014/eeprom to write arbitrary data to a AT28 EEPROM.

The rc2014 architecture is considered the "canonical" one. That means that if a recipe is considered architecture independent, it's the rc2014 recipe folder that's going to contain it.

For example, rc2014/eeprom can be considered architecture independent because it's much more about the AT28 than about a specific z80 architecture. You can adapt it to any supported architecture with minimal hassle. Therefore, it's not going to be copied in every architecture recipe folder.

rc2014 installation recipe also contains more "newbie-friendly" instructions than other installation recipes, which take this knowledge for granted. It is therefore recommended to have a look at it even if you're not planning on using a RC2014.