Wheels (operating system)

Wheels
Source model Commercial software products

Wheels is a defunct operating system for the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 home computers partially based on and an upgrade from (plus generally backwards compatible with) GEOS. Wheels gave new abilities to the C64 and 128: the ability to open several, movable, resizeable windows on the desktop and limited graphical web browsing (and limited server abilities.) At the core of the Wheels OS was the new Dashboard and Toolbox. The Dashboard was the name for the new desktop environment which made using the C64/128 similar to using modern Mac or Windows operating systems with icons and a menu bar. The Toolbox was the replacement for the GEOS Configure app.

System requirements

Wheels required at least a 128 KB RAM expansion to operate. However, it also supported hardware that standard GEOS and the standard C64 KERNAL couldn't handle, including Creative Micro Designs HD hard drives (up to four GB), high-density FD-2000/FD-4000 floppy disk drives (up to 3.2 MB), RAMLink with expanded RAM addressing (up to 16 MB), and SuperCPU 20 MHz accelerator with SuperRAM up to 16 MB.

As a GeoProgrammer update:

Concept was the first update to fix all known GeoProgrammer bugs, but did not support the Super CPU. Concept+ supported the SCPU, allowed faster code assembly and faster application linking, and took advantage of programming 16-bit applications.

Concept and Concept+ also allowed "linking" any 6502 or other compatible processor 6502 Hex or assembly code. Although so far as is known 8-bit applications could still be coded, desktop accessories, drivers etc. with Concept or Concept+; Concept and Concept+ were the preferred way to learn GEOS/Wheels 6502 machine language because of their updates fixing original bugs in GeoProgrammer.

License

Wheels 64 and Wheels 128 are commercial software products. The Wheels operating systems were available for sale alone and in bundles.

See also

External links

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