Show 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.

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iamnothere 18 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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luke8086 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Thank you so much! Somehow I haven't heard about Uxn before, but it seems very cool and I'll definitely look into it.

	▲	iamnothere 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You’re welcome. You’d probably appreciate its focus on long-term stability; the authors wanted an environment for their software that would ensure code could stay frozen in a working state forever. The only thing that may need updates is the VM, as the host OS and userland will shift over time, but the VM is designed to be exceptionally easy to implement and maintain. That comes at the cost of some capabilities, but they were specifically aiming for simpler software, so it works out.

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sandos 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Heh, the "small virtual machine" was NOT a lie! Is that less than 200 lines? Very nice!

Now I feel like integrating that into various things....