Five new programs: a flight simulator, an Apple II Plus emulator, a second
Pac-Man, a word processor that puts pictures in documents, and a typeface
browser. The terminal program became a bulletin-board terminal, with sixteen
colours, the 80-column by 25-row screen a board draws for, and file downloads.
Everything on a floppy is compressed now, the system included: a 4.77 MHz IBM
PC/XT boots 599 milliseconds faster from a 360KB disk, and Paint fits back on
the small boot disk.
The download
One file: os8088-v1.0.20260909.zip, 8.9MB, holding 48 disk images, a
README that says which ones you need, and a SHA256SUMS covering all of them.
sha256 178ceb6b7aed0f3aebcde241893a04b81b69b12827eec8087ecc6f961c53c95e
If you want two files: os8088.img in the first floppy drive and
apps.img in the second. For a real IBM PC/XT or 86Box, use
os8088-360.img and apps360.img instead.
If you have no floppy drive, the zip also carries os8088-usb.img and
os8088.iso: the whole system and every program on one bootable image. Write
the first raw to a USB stick and boot a legacy-BIOS PC from it, or point an
emulator at either. Both were booted before this release was cut.
A checksum for an individual image is in the SHA256SUMS inside the zip, and on
https://os8088.com/download/.
What is new
Clear Skies: a flight simulator. Take off, fly, and land -- or crash, and
be put back on the runway. Nine places to fly from, among them Paris, London
City, Miami, Rio, San Francisco and a strip in Nepal, and five aeroplanes from
a Cessna 172 to a Pitts Special. The ground and the buildings are solid shapes
rather than wireframe outlines, which is the part a machine this slow cannot
usually afford: each shape is drawn by following its two edges down the screen
and filling one row at a time, the way flight simulators of the early 1980s did
it. On a 4.77 MHz IBM PC/XT with a Hercules card that is between 5.8 and 6.5
frames a second in the three views measured.
https://os8088.com/spotlight/skies/
An Apple II Plus, in a window. A 48K Apple II Plus with Applesoft BASIC
waiting at its prompt. The 6502, the Apple's four screen modes -- text, low
resolution, high resolution, and the mixed mode that puts four rows of text
under a picture -- its keyboard and its speaker are all emulated, and the Apple
ROMs are carried inside the program file rather than beside it. It is honest
about its speed: the status line prints how fast the emulated Apple is actually
running, and on a 4.77 MHz XT that is about half a per cent of a real one. A
386 runs it usefully. https://os8088.com/spotlight/apple2/
PaccMan: the arcade Pac-Man. A second Pac-Man, sharing no code with the
first. This one follows the Namco arcade original: the tall 28-by-36 field, the
arcade's own tile and colour tables, the four ghosts with their real
personalities, and the attract screen that introduces them one at a time. It is
written in C. On a 4.77 MHz XT it draws 2.18 frames a second where the assembly
Pac-Man draws 4.14, which is why both ship: the older one for that machine,
this one for a 386. https://os8088.com/spotlight/paccman/
Telnet is a bulletin-board terminal now. The terminal used to print what
arrived and quietly discard the codes that colour it. It now acts on them:
sixteen colours, the block and line characters bulletin-board art is drawn
with, and the 80-column by 25-row screen a board draws for, which Ctrl+] gives
the whole screen to. It can also download. Pick Receive File from the Session
menu, or let the board start the transfer itself, and the file lands on a disk
you choose. Sending files the other way is not implemented.
https://os8088.com/spotlight/bbs/
Scribe, and pictures in documents. Scribe is the word processor forked into
a program of its own, and it has one thing Word does not: Insert > Picture. It
reads BMP, PCX and PIX files -- the formats paint programs of the era wrote --
decodes all three into one sixteen-colour form, and places the picture in the
text. A plain save writes RTF, where the picture travels inside the document;
saving as a Word .DOC converts it to one bit per pixel, because that is what a
Word 1.1a file holds. Word still owns the .DOC double-click.
https://os8088.com/spotlight/scribe/
Everything on a floppy is compressed. Programs, drivers, typefaces and the
system itself are packed on the disk and unpacked as they are read, so no
program had to be told about it. Booting a 4.77 MHz IBM PC/XT from a 360KB disk
went from 13.9 to 13.3 seconds: the system file is 164 sectors instead of 204,
and reading 40 fewer sectors saves more time than unpacking them costs. The
360KB boot disk has room for Paint again. The file manager has a Compress item
for your own files.
Menus stop repainting the page underneath. Word and ArtfulType draw their
own menu bars, so they also have to repair the screen when a menu closes -- and
each did it by drawing the whole document again. They now save the pixels a
menu covers and put them back. On a 4.77 MHz 8088, closing a Word menu went
from 521 to 20 milliseconds, and dragging along Word's menu bar from File to
Help from about 5 seconds to about 1.
Fractal, Tank Attack and Paint are faster. The Mandelbrot viewer recognises
the two shapes at the middle of the set with a formula instead of iterating
every pixel inside them: the opening view takes 49 seconds instead of 120, and
one zoomed view 8 seconds instead of 361. Tank Attack went from 5.2 to 13.9
frames a second on a Hercules card. Paint's tool palette is drawn in 4 calls
instead of 24, which is 33 milliseconds instead of 111.
Programs can be moved in memory while they run. Memory here is one pool
that programs claim from, and a claim that could not be moved left a hole
behind it when its neighbour closed. A program's memory, a driver's code and
the sound driver's buffer can now all be shifted while they are in use, so the
free space closes up and a long session has more of it left for the next
program.
A typeface browser. Font Viewer lists every typeface installed and sets a
specimen line in the one you pick. The line is editable, so a face can be
judged on the words it is going to carry.
Six fixes that came off real machines. On a 286, every key typed a
different character than the one pressed -- one bit in the keyboard controller
means something different on an AT than on a PS/2. On a machine booted from an
installed hard disk, every menu title on the bar dropped the System menu. Note
Pad froze for a second when the up arrow was clicked at the top of a document,
and now takes 20 milliseconds. A restart parks the floppy heads, so the next
boot cannot mistake a head left mid-disk for a broken drive. Menu bar clicks
land correctly with a PS/2 mouse.
Writing the live disk from a Mac. make burn lists the USB drives
attached, asks you to confirm the one to erase by typing its name, writes the
live image and reads it back to check the bytes. It burns the CD as well when a
burner is attached.
Before you download
Clear Skies and Font Viewer are on the software disk. PaccMan, Scribe and
the Apple II Plus each have a disk of their own in the zip --
paccman.img, scribe.img and apple2.img -- or take apps-all.img, which
carries every program on one floppy.
PaccMan and the Apple II Plus want a 386. Both start on an XT and neither
is quick there. PaccMan is half the speed of the assembly Pac-Man on that
machine, and the Apple II's own status line reads 0% because it is running at
half a per cent of a real Apple.
A picture in a Scribe document is new, and the layout around it is
unfinished. Text typed after a small picture on the same line does not appear
until you press Enter, and two pictures next to each other draw only the first.
Pictures save and reopen correctly; it is where they sit in a line of text that
is not finished.
Every image in this release is a new file, the music disk included.
Everything on a floppy is compressed now, so nothing is byte for byte what it
was.
The build
The kernel occupies 112,128 bytes of memory, up 1,536 from v1.0.20260904.
KERNEL.SYS is 105,916 bytes unpacked and 85,056 on the floppy. Code and
static data are 57,145 bytes of the 65,536-byte segment they must fit in.
Download page: https://os8088.com/download/