alt Hacker NewsShow HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
Hello HN,
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/32 (https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32) works on i386+, requires 4MB of RAM and VGA display supporting 640x480x16 mode or any 256-color VESA mode.
- GentleOS/16 (https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos) works on 80186+, requires less than 192KB of RAM and a CGA display supporting 320x200x4 mode.
You can find more details in the repos.
Comments
I think this is fantastic! I love that the code is so clean my dumb ass can understand it despite not using C much.
This is great, thanks for releasing your work. Very impressive.
You may get some interest from others in the retrocomputing/permacomputing sphere if you implement an Uxn emulator; it is extremely simple and can run on very limited hardware. https://100r.co/site/uxn.html
Vintage hardware would be a great host for Uxn programs, so I suspect this would generate some excitement.
Kind of an odd statement I think, but I really like the aesthetic of early OS GUIs where you could tell half the tools were pretty much there as developer tools.
A pre-build floppy disk image would be great, so I could run it on my IBM PS/1 from a floppy.
Nice! The project also has a 16-bit variant https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos, not clear if it works on 8086 IBM PC, but I'll give it a go. Been looking for a reason to power up my IBM PC again.
GUI looks a but BeOS inspired, but somehow even cleaner.
Made me think of Breadbox Ensemble, which is GEOS, and was really lovely.
There weren't too many GUIs that used the PC-BIOS font. Most of them wanted to get away from that.
Part of why these images look so nice is because these systems were not so locked down.
Ahh the Librettos... I had a couple of 50s at one point, one of those looks cool unusable thing and the brittle plastic damn, I opened it and the hinge snapped lmao my heart my soul
Unusuable because of how small the keys are
Am I crazy or are the "photos" generated? I did have T1800 and it never looked like this. It had a very early very bad grayscale LCD wiht fiddly contrast control, not a perfect crisp vibrant OLED like this page shows.
example how one looks like irl https://allegrolokalnie.pl/oferta/laptop-toshiba-t1800 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxIc_UVKxvc
Love the photos of it running on 386/486 laptops. So cute!
What a lovely-looking OS! Also great to hear that the project isn't aiming for infinite changes!
Will be digging out some old hardware to test it out very soon, this is exciting!
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This reminds me of the era when operating systems felt more approachable and visually distinct. Modern UIs are often cleaner, but many of them have lost some of the personality that older systems had.
> A hobby operating system for vintage 32-bit PCs.
I am all in favour of great projects, but why a differentiation between 32-bits or 64-bits? I don't understand that. Is a computer that is 32 bit or 64 bit, either way which, not worthy?
Edit: I understand a motivation if it is on simplicity choosing one or the other, but other than that I don't see why that should ever be a goal worthy to be pursued. Software should really "just work" no matter the number of bits and bytes.
> The only future plans are bugfixes, optimizations, and adding more apps.
Perfect. Nice to see a platform target stability instead of constantly reinventing itself and its APIs. Definitely want to give it a go!