Copal Linux Operating system
One Alpine installer. Many targets. An SD card for a Raspberry Pi, a UEFI disk for a PC, or a virtual machine under UTM on an Apple Silicon Mac — the same eighteen stages, whichever medium you point them at.
Paul Richeson
Electrical engineer · www.paulricheson.com · github.com/vonglurt
Systems, silicon, signals and software — and the things I build with them.
Summary
Paul Richeson is an electrical engineer whose working life began at a refinery and a power company and has since run through the data center: the deployment and lifecycle management of software applications, from first install to retirement. From there the work reaches outward into software architecture, CPU architecture and FPGA design, and down to the physics underneath — high-frequency radio communication, the propagation of electromagnetic signals, and digital signal processing. This site collects what he builds on his own time: an operating system and its tools, instruments that read the physical world, and games, both new and very old.
Areas of work
| Area | What it covers | On this site |
|---|---|---|
| Data centers | Operations of production computing; keeping a fleet observable and recoverable | Copal fleet tooling, Orrery, copal-tm |
| Software lifecycle | Deployment, packaging, release and retirement of applications | The Copal installer; releases on crates.io |
| Software architecture | Layered, source-pluggable systems with one read model | Orrery, Static Stream, TrendCatcher |
| CPU architecture | Instruction sets and machines, down to 8-bit | ASCITTY and UR FINKEL on the Commodore Plus/4 |
| FPGA design | Digital logic in programmable hardware | — |
| RF and propagation | High-frequency radio communication; how electromagnetic signals travel | — |
| Signal processing | Measurement, spectra, and error-correcting codes | RadBeeper's spectrogram; Static Stream's Reed–Solomon codes |
Projects
Systems
copal-tm Task manager
An instrument panel and a process browser, in one terminal window. The task manager for Copal Linux's full install. One Rust crate, zero dependencies.
Orrery Fleet console
The Copal fleet's console: the wall, the seat, and the verbs. A web console, a full-screen terminal seat, and a native museum interface — three faces on one read model, served by the warden. Zero dependencies, Rust.
Static Stream File format
A stream stopped in a file, and let go again. A stream written into a .sstr file with its order, its pace and its tolerance for damage intact — protected by Reed–Solomon codes and parity, checkpoints signed with your SSH key.
Linux Antiquity for Copal Desktop theme
Art nouveau and old star charts, put on a keyboard. diinki's Linux Antiquity theme, distilled for Copal Linux: no systemd, no GPU required, and every part reachable without a mouse.
Instruments
RadBeeper Radiation monitor
See what your Geiger counter is counting. Keep a record of it, and put it on a web page. For the GQ GMC-320 Plus, on Linux.
birdshot Camera software
Bird and sky capture for the Raspberry Pi HQ Camera. An IMX477 on a Compute Module 4, driven properly: metered auto-exposure that holds through a changing sky, quality gates, and a storage cascade that runs until the last disk fills.
Games
Crabminer Browser game
It's a crab mining game. Run a crew of robot crabs on the sea floor: scout for metal, drill it, smelt it in lava, and sell it up to the surface for crab profit. The sea behind this page comes from it.
ASCITTY Real-time raytracer
A raytraced city, made of typeable characters. Rendered in real time on a colour terminal and on a Commodore Plus/4 — and a taxi game inside it.
Codex of Conquest Adventure RPG
An entire RPG in one HTML file. Combat engine, world map, NPC dialogue, quests, saves, hundreds of monsters and eight acts of story. No server, no build step, no install.
Yodacon Space trading, since 1997
The ship got built. Team Yodacon revives ConEx, the 1997 Escape Velocity plugin, and expands it into a commodity-trading game with a landing sequence driven by real reentry-heating physics.
UR FINKEL Retro game
The Royal Game of Ur, for the Commodore Plus/4. The oldest playable board game, on an 8-bit computer. Play it in your browser: a Plus/4 boots inside the page and runs the game.
Gonex Space combat
The third generation of the same little space war. A Go and Ebitengine port of konex — itself a 2005 C++/OpenGL remake of ConEx, the 1997 Escape Velocity plugin. Team deathmatch with twelve ships, plus one recovered from 1997.
konex Space combat, 2005
ConEx, ported to the PC. Joshua Bussdieker's 2005 C++/OpenGL remake of ConEx, the 1997 Escape Velocity plugin — the middle generation between ConEx and Gonex.
Tools
TrendCatcher Market research engine
The meme stock zeitgeist engine. A layered Node.js engine that aggregates r/wallstreetbets attention and congressional-trade disclosures into a ranked, terminal-styled pick list. Source-pluggable, and brutally honest.
Retrocomputing
PDP-11 Minicomputer
A PDP-11, soldered together. A simulator of DEC’s 16-bit minicomputer, the machine Unix and C grew up on, built by hand on the bench.
Commodore Plus/4 repair Repair
A 1984 Commodore, back on the bench. Repairing a Commodore Plus/4, the 8-bit machine that ASCITTY and UR FINKEL are written for.
6502 Game Log Game log
What’s worth playing on a 6502. A running log of games played on Commodore machines, the Commander X16 and other 6502 computers: the game, the machine, and a short review of each.
Websites
- www.cyberpoints.org, A symplectic asteroid-belt simulator: five hundred asteroids around the Sun, stepped by leapfrog as a kick and then a drift, beside a naive Euler run for comparison. The lesson is the order of the maths: velocity first, then position, and the energy stays put.
- destruct.us, Psychedelic Missile Command: six houses on the ground, waves of missiles from the sky, and your interceptors in between.
- 8bitsys.com, An arcade game on a green-phosphor screen: steer up and down, speed up or slow down, and a special power that slows time.
- articlesalad.com, Oregon Trail Typing Hunt: a typing game on a green scanline screen, where hitting the target means typing the word.
- derp.page, A platformer of emoji characters with wands: move, swim and jump across floating platforms, and wiggle your wand.
- guildofglory.com, Witch Joust Arena: a Joust game on brooms. Flap to stay up, the higher broom wins the pass, and an eye on the ceiling shoots lightning at campers.
- iusethis.org, A register of software actually in use: one static page styled as a continuous-form greenbar printout, with a plain-text article pipeline behind it. MIT.
- pacbrah.com, Ion Collector: collect ions, with score, level and ion power on the screen.
- perje.net, Psychedelic Pear Tree World: a world generated from a seed, so the same seed replays the same world.
- www.serphpent.com, A Snake simulator on a Commodore 64 blue screen: the mouse guides the snake, it hunts food on its own after five seconds, and its trail fades behind it.
- www.streamschedule.com, A cookie jar of streams: paste a stream link with a title, a date and a note, and keep them in the jar.
- vortexforces.com, A helicopter game on a custom renderer: fly by keyboard and mouse across sectors, with altitude, speed, targets and health on a green HUD.
- wallofsubmission.com, A Championship Ranking System with a 3D view of the standings: each player a cube with rank, score, chain height and a hash; the mouse moves the camera.
- badlogic.org
Elsewhere
github.com/vonglurt (Personal projects) · github.com/copallinux (Copal Linux) · github.com/yodacon (Team Yodacon) · github.com/crabminer (Crabminer)
This is the text-only version of www.paulricheson.com, laid out for printing. Every project has a page of its own there, with pictures.