GentleOS/16

A hobby operating system for vintage 16-bit PCs, built for tinkering with old hardware on the bare metal.

You can find more information on its website.

It's a simplified version of GentleOS/32, targetting i386+ devices.

Building

The only prerequisite is DOSBox, the entire toolchain (OpenWatcom, NASM, Perl) is included in the repo.

To build GentleOS, start DOSBox from the source directory and run the following commands:

Z:\>MOUNT C .
Z:\>C:
C:\>ENV
C:\>AUTOGEN
C:\>WMAKE

Development notes

• The official compiler is OpenWatcom 1.9, because it can be freely distributed, but Turbo C 2.01 is also supported and it's much faster. You can install it to C:\TMP\TC and use with WMAKE TC=1

• For faster compilation, you can try setting cycles=fixed 99999 in the [cpu] section of your DOSBox config file

• For a quick turnaround, GentleOS can be started as a COM file with BUILD\GENTLEOS.COM. Pressing Shift-Q returns back to DOS.

Attributions

• All images in vendor/icons8 have been sourced from Icons8 using the free license and modified

• All images in vendor/mona have been extracted from the Mona Font and modified (LICENSE)

• All fonts in vendor/int10h have been extracted from the The Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack and modified (LICENSE)

• The Atari Small font by Tom Fine has been obtained from https://hea-www.harvard.edu/~fine/Tech/x11fonts.html (LICENSE)

• Font 4x6 by Luiz Bills has been sourced from https://github.com/luizbills/font4x6 (LICENSE)

Contributors

• Alexander Rau (l00nix) - Tested and made a release for HP 200LX

License

Except where otherwise noted, GentleOS/16 is licensed under GPLv2.