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.

Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
github.com

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.

There seems to be an 8 meg image here: https://github.com/luke8086/gentleos32/releases/download/202...

Someone prepare a set of floppy disk images so you can get the proper installation experience.

I think it's that yellow bar what it makes it look like BeOS. And maybe the right hand menu bar. But once you check a B/W version, it doesn't look like BeOS that much.