GentleOS - A pair of hobby OSes for vintage PCs

[luke8086]

Hi all,

I've been working on a simple OS for tinkering and running bare metal apps on vintage PCs.

Since I couldn't quite decide whether to target pure 16-bit, or slightly more capable 32-bit machines, I ended up with two separate versions.

GentleOS/16 is confirmed to work on 80186+. It requires less than 192KB of RAM and a monochrome CGA display with 320x200 resolution.

GentleOS/32 works on i386+, requires 4MB RAM, supports VGA in 640x480x16 mode or any 256-color VESA mode.

By design they're both entirely monolithic (single binary, single thread) and only support standard PC devices (CGA/VGA, 8042 keyboard, PS2 mouse, serial mouse, PC speaker, etc). The only plans for the future are bugfixes, optimizations, adding more apps, and testing on different hardware.

Below are a few photos/screenshots, you can find more on GitHub.

Cheers!

[BenLunt]

Hi,

It looks interesting. Your laptops caught my eye.

I too have a few older computers, two of those being Tandys, though mine are desktops, not laptops.

May I direct you to the paragraph marked 1) of an older post of mine where I mention that you might not get much feedback if you don't have an already built image file, instead of instructions on how to build it.

It looks obvious, but do both versions run on QEMU with a single floppy/hard drive image file? If so, it might imply that it would boot via Bochs as well?

Anyway, very interesting, especially using only 16 colors. :-)

Ben
- https://www.fysnet.net/osdesign_book_series.htm

[luke8086]

Hi Ben,

Nice collection, I love the lunchbox!

Fair point about pre-built images, I've just added them to both repos under Releases.

Both versions run from a single file, and in theory they should work with any emulator, but you never know until you try. I've only been testing in QEMU.

Cheers!

[BenLunt]

Thank you. When I get a chance, I will have a look and let you know if I find an issue.