The Wire

A window with two lines of text in it. Hello does nothing else. It ships as the smallest working example for anyone writing a program of their own, and as the one package with no icon of its own -- which is why the Disk window draws it with the generic application icon while every other program shows its own.

639 byte package · 639 bytes with files · Load Program

HELLO.O88

Minesweeper, on a 9x9 board with ten mines. Click a cell to open it, F for flag mode, N for a new game. Empty regions open in one click, the numbers use the traditional colors, and the first click is always safe -- the mines are laid after you have chosen where to start. It was the first program the loader ever ran.

1,405 byte package · 1,405 bytes with files · Load Program

MINES.O88

The four-function calculator accepts mouse clicks or keys and keeps a fold-away list of the last eight sums.

3,872 byte package · 3,872 bytes with files · Load Program

CALC.O88

A plain text editor. Type into it, and it wraps at the window edge. Open, Save and Save As go through the system's file dialog and write ordinary files onto the FAT12 floppy, so a note written here opens on a modern computer and one written there opens here. Open as many at once as memory allows.

14,892 byte package · 14,892 bytes with files · Load Program

NOTEPAD.O88

A bitmap editor. Pencil, eraser, fill, rectangle, ellipse, selection, eyedropper and text tools down the left edge, a resizable canvas, undo, a clipboard, and sixteen colors along the bottom. It reads and writes BMP and GIF. On a machine with less memory it starts smaller and drops features rather than refusing to open, and on a monochrome display the palette becomes black, white and a dither.

21,620 byte package · 21,620 bytes with files · Load Program

PAINT.O88

An image viewer and editor. PiXEL opens JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, PCX, TIFF, Targa, PNM, Windows icons, Amiga IFF, MacPaint and PIX files and dithers each one to the screen it is on: sixteen colours on a VGA, two on a CGA or Hercules card. F shows the picture full screen, in 256 colours on a VGA. It crops, turns, flips, resizes, adjusts brightness, contrast and colour, runs effects such as blur and pixelate, and saves as PNG, GIF, BMP, PCX or PIX.

The Wire installs it into a PIXEL folder with three sample pictures in PICTURES: a JPEG, a PNG and an animated GIF. PIXEL.O88 is 112KB, too large for a RAM disk, so it comes by Add to Disk and not Load Program. It needs the version of The Wire that ships after v1.0.20261010; an older one says the archive is not understood and writes nothing.

172,500 byte archive · 4 files, 172,695 bytes unpacked · Load Program or Add to Disk

PIXEL.WPK Read the Spotlight →

A web browser. It fetches pages over an Ethernet card or a parallel cable and lays them out as text and tables, following links and keeping a history. Encrypted sites go through a helper program on another computer; the arithmetic is minutes of work at 4.77 MHz. There is a page about it.

15,397 byte package · 15,397 bytes with files · Load Program

BROWSER.O88 Read the Spotlight →

A terminal for bulletin boards. It logs in to another machine over the network and acts on the codes a board sends: sixteen colours, the line-drawing and block characters its art is made of, and the 80-column by 25-row screen it draws for. Ctrl+] gives the session the whole screen, at the size the board intended.

It downloads as well. Pick Receive File from the Session menu, or let the board start the transfer itself -- the terminal notices, reads the file's name off the wire and asks which disk to write it to. Sending files up is not implemented.

10,598 byte package · 10,598 bytes with files · Load Program

TELNET.O88 Read the Spotlight →

Chat rooms for os8088. Choose a nick and you land in the lobby, one of four public rooms. Click a room to read and write there, or click a name to send that person a private message. Typing @ and someone's nick gets their attention in any room, and Tab completes the nick. Each message shows when it was sent, with a line at each new day. A right press on a member adds a friend, and the list on the left shows which friends are online.

It needs an Ethernet card, an NE1000 or NE2000, with the Ethernet driver ticked in the Control Panel. It talks to the chat server at os8088.com over plain HTTP, so messages are not encrypted. Messages are short lines of plain ASCII, up to 200 characters. On VGA and EGA it has a colour face, and on CGA and Hercules a black and white one. It needs v1.0.20261020 of os8088 or later. WireChat has a page of its own.

17,092 byte package · 17,092 bytes with files · Load Program

WIRECHAT.O88 Read the Spotlight →

The FTP Server is the first program here that answers an incoming connection instead of making one, so a laptop on the same network can drop a file onto the machine while it is running. There is a page about that one.

11,742 byte package · 11,742 bytes with files · Load Program

FTPD.O88 Read the Spotlight →

A Mandelbrot explorer. Zoom into the set, choose a color scheme, and watch the picture sharpen through three passes. It draws in the background, so the desktop stays usable the whole time, and you can move or cover the window mid-render without losing the work already done.

2,724 byte package · 2,724 bytes with files · Load Program

FRACTAL.O88

A sound recorder. Record, stop and play, with a waveform display of whatever is in the buffer and a built-in demo tone to try it with. It records through a Sound Blaster where the machine has one and plays through the PC speaker where it does not; the status line says which it got.

2,725 byte package · 2,725 bytes with files · Load Program

RECORDER.O88

A two-octave keyboard. Play it with the mouse or with the computer keys lettered onto the keys themselves. Every note you play is written onto the staff above, and the staff plays back. Three built-in songs come with it. On a machine with a sound card the notes come out of the card's FM chip instead of the PC speaker.

3,046 byte package · 3,046 bytes with files · Load Program

PIANO.O88

A Markdown writer, ported from the Macintosh. ArtfulType is ActionRetro's writing app for classic 68k Macs, rebuilt for the 8086. Writer mode takes the whole screen and gives the program its own menu bar. It styles as you type: bold, italic, headings at three sizes and underlined links, with the Markdown markup hidden until you put the caret back in that paragraph. Documents are plain Markdown files, so they open anywhere else.

13,296 byte package · 13,296 bytes with files · Load Program

ARTFUL.O88

The system's typeface browser. Every .F88 face the machine has installed is listed down the left; pick one and the panel beside it sets a specimen in that face. The specimen is editable -- type over it and the line is reset as you go -- so a face can be judged on the words it is actually going to carry rather than on a pangram somebody else chose.

It is a small program on purpose. It does nothing the proportional-type engine does not already do for every other package, and it exists so that what that engine can do is visible in one window.

3,434 byte package · 3,434 bytes with files · Load Program

FONTVIEW.O88

How fast is this machine, measured the same way on every machine? REDLINE times 25 fixed jobs: arithmetic, shifts, multiplies and divides; copying and filling memory; then drawing through the system's own calls, from rectangles, lines and text up to a Mandelbrot set, spinning wireframe and shaded cubes, scrolling, and a window resized and repainted. Every machine does exactly the same work, and each score is how many times faster that job ran than on an IBM PC with a 4.77 MHz 8088, which scores 1.00x.

The reference PC was measured, not estimated: three trials of three complete runs each on MartyPC, an emulator that reproduces the original PC's timing cycle by cycle, with a separate graphics reference for CGA, Hercules and VGA. A benchmark here averages three runs. The drawing happens in a second window, the Graphics Lab, so you can watch each job while it is timed.

Summary shows the combined processor and memory score, separate averages for the processor, the memory and the drawing, a snapshot of the machine (processor, clock, memory, video) and a bar for every job. Compare gives the bars the whole window, and Detailed is the full report, with every sample and how each one was timed. Save writes that report to REDLINE.TXT. REDLINE has a page of its own.

27,933 byte package · 27,933 bytes with files · Load Program

REDLINE.O88 Read the Spotlight →

A player for MIDI files, the format most PC game music and a great deal of other music was written in. A MIDI file holds no recorded sound. It is a list of notes and instruments, so it is small, and how it sounds depends on what plays it. MIDIRack plays one through whatever this machine has: the FM chip on an AdLib or a Sound Blaster, a synthesizer that runs on the computer and plays through a Sound Blaster, a MIDI port for an external sound module, or the PC speaker. Automatic picks the FM chip first, because it costs the computer almost nothing while it plays.

The window is a rack: the playlist, a Now Playing display with the song's length, its position in measures and its tempo, and a row for each of the sixteen MIDI channels with its instrument and a level meter. MIDI Info lists a file's format, its length, how many notes it plays and the title stored inside it. Settings shows every output and greys the ones the machine does not have. On the PC speaker, Play in Background plays just the melody and leaves the desktop free.

It comes with ten songs: four written for it and six public-domain classics, from Joplin's The Entertainer to Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King. On a Sound Blaster it can also play recorded instrument sounds from a 210KB sound bank. The bank is 210KB, so it is a second download below, MIDIRack Sound Bank, which lands beside the player; without it, that one output is greyed. MIDIRack has a page of its own.

53,275 byte archive · 11 files, 53,228 bytes unpacked · Load Program or Add to Disk

MIDIRACK.WPK Read the Spotlight →

The sound bank for MIDIRack's wavetable output: one recorded sample for each instrument, made from S. Christian Collins's GeneralUser GS sound bank, which a Sound Blaster plays at the pitch of each note. Without it MIDIRack still plays every song on the FM chip, the PC speaker or a MIDI port, and only the wavetable output is greyed. It is a second record rather than part of MIDIRack because it is 210KB, four times the player and its songs together: it carries no program of its own, so fetch MIDIRack first and this afterwards, and it lands in the same MIDIRACK folder. A file this size goes to a disk with Add to Disk, and it needs the system disk from v1.0.20261012 or later.

210,481 byte archive · 1 files, 210,385 bytes unpacked · Add to Disk, or Load Program to unpack it

MIDIBANK.WPK Read the Spotlight →

TeXPad is a two-pane editor for a paper-oriented subset of TeX, with source on the left and the typeset page on the right. File > Export writes PDF 1.4 or PostScript Level 1. It handles text, sections, quotes, lists and ruled tables; it has no math engine, figures or color.

15,239 byte package · 15,239 bytes with files · Load Program

TEXPAD.O88

Klondike solitaire. Deal from the stock, drag cards and runs between the seven columns with the mouse, and build the four foundations up from the aces. Dragging shows an outline and drops the cards when you let go, the same way windows move. On a monochrome machine the red suits are drawn hollow instead of red, so they stay tellable apart.

3,738 byte package · 3,738 bytes with files · Load Program

SOLITAIR.O88

A brick-breaker. Move the paddle with the arrow keys, clear six rows of colored bricks, and keep the score across levels. The ball runs on its own timer rather than on your keystrokes, so it keeps a steady speed whatever else the machine is doing.

5,031 byte package · 5,031 bytes with files · Load Program

ARKANOID.O88

Defend six cities from descending missiles. Each battery carries a finite count, and one blast can set off another before the trails reach the ground.

8,932 byte package · 8,932 bytes with files · Load Program

MISSILE.O88

Guide Smiles through three boards while four ghosts chase him by sight. Eat the dots, eat the ghosts after a power pellet, and save your high score with three initials. Dot Delirium was written from scratch for os8088 and runs on an 8088, including a 128KB machine with CGA or Hercules graphics.

Arrows or WASD steer, Enter or Space starts, P pauses and F switches full screen. Esc leaves full screen or ends the game. Dot Delirium has a page of its own.

14,136 byte package · 14,136 bytes with files · Load Program

DOTDEL.O88 Read the Spotlight →

A first-person shooter in the style of Wolfenstein 3D. You walk a castle of grey and blue stone, wood and brick, open doors, pick up keys, ammunition and treasure, and fight helmeted guards and dogs across eight floors. The walls are drawn by casting one ray per column of the view, the way the 1992 game drew them. All of the art is new -- nothing of Wolfenstein's own is used.

It runs in a window or full screen. On a 4.77 MHz IBM PC with CGA graphics it draws 8.5 frames a second full screen, with textured walls at the default low resolution. In a window on a VGA desktop it can use 16 colours on a 286 or faster. Full screen it uses Mode X on VGA (320x240, up to 256 colours), CGA's 320x200 four-colour mode, or Hercules. The Detail menu trades picture for speed: Textured, Flat or Wire walls, full or low resolution, or Auto to choose from the frame rate.

Arrows move and turn, Space opens doors, Ctrl fires, Tab shows the map of what you have seen, F switches full screen and V changes the view size there. The textured game needs about 262KB free; a 256KB machine plays it with flat walls and plain boxes for sprites. Pixelstein 3D has a page of its own.

46,778 byte package · 46,778 bytes with files · Load Program

PXSTEIN.O88 Read the Spotlight →

A falling-capsule puzzle after Nintendo's Dr. Mario. A bottle holds red, yellow and blue viruses. Capsules with two coloured halves fall into it one at a time; move and turn each one as it drops. Four or more of one colour in a row or a column, capsule halves and viruses together, disappear. Halves left hanging fall, and can set off another clear. Clear every virus to finish the level. Levels run from 0 to 20, with 4 viruses at level 0 and 84 at level 20, at three speeds.

It is a new program in 8086 assembly, not an emulated NES. Its rules, capsule order and speeds follow a disassembly of the NES game, and so do the capsule and virus pictures and the music. The doctor, the laboratory and the title screen are new artwork. Full screen it uses VGA at 320x240 or CGA's four colours; Hercules shows the title and help pages, but the game itself needs VGA or CGA. Music plays on an AdLib or Sound Blaster, or the tune alone on the PC speaker.

Left and Right move, Z and X turn, Down drops faster, P pauses and M changes the music. DrMarco has a page of its own.

48,156 byte package · 48,156 bytes with files · Load Program

DRMARCO.O88 Read the Spotlight →

The banana-throwing game from QBasic, rewritten for this machine. Two gorillas stand on the roofs of a random city. Each turn you type an angle and a speed, and the banana flies under gravity and the wind, which an arrow under the city shows. Hit the other gorilla to score; miss and the banana blasts a hole in a building. Play against a friend at the same keyboard or against the computer, which the original did not offer. You choose the winning score, from 1 to 99, and the gravity.

It is written in 8086 assembly rather than run through BASIC, and keeps the original's rules, tunes and victory dance. It plays in a window or full screen, on VGA, CGA and Hercules; full screen on VGA uses the original's colours. The tunes and effects play on the PC speaker. With an AdLib or Sound Blaster card, three short tunes of its own play during a match, one per skyline, and M turns them off. Gorillas has a page of its own.

11,947 byte package · 11,947 bytes with files · Load Program

GORILLAS.O88 Read the Spotlight →

A light-wall duel in three dimensions. You and the computer ride across a raised slab, each leaving a wall behind. Run into any wall or off the slab's edge and the round is lost. Win two rounds in a row and the next arena is stacked one slab higher, with one more computer rider to beat, up to a tower of four. Three losses in a row end the game. There are three skill levels: Rookie, Veteran and Lunatic.

It is a new program in 8086 assembly, written from the rules seen in Novatron, a 1982 IBM PC game, with no code from it; every picture is drawn by the program. It plays in a window on VGA, EGA, CGA and Hercules, and F or Alt+Enter switches to full screen in colour where the card has colour: the original's four CGA colours, or 16 on EGA and VGA. It keeps the original's pace on any PC. On a 4.77 MHz IBM PC a step of the game costs about half a millisecond, because each wall grows by one column of the picture and nothing already drawn is drawn again.

Left and Right turn, Up goes faster, P pauses and M turns the PC speaker sounds off. It needs about 118KB free, which a 256KB machine has. isoTron has a page of its own.

16,920 byte package · 16,920 bytes with files · Load Program

ISOTRON.O88 Read the Spotlight →

One Pong court stretched across two computers. Join two PCs with a null modem cable, a serial cable with its send and receive wires crossed, open WireBall on both and choose Serial Match. The games find each other on COM1 or COM2, decide who plays left and who plays right, and the ball leaves one screen and comes in on the other. Each player has a paddle at the outside edge of their own screen, and the first to 11 wins. Pull the cable out and play stops; plug it back in and a fresh match starts by itself. Practice plays against the computer on one PC.

It is written in 8086 assembly and draws the court in pixels on VGA, EGA, CGA and Hercules. On an emulated 4.77 MHz IBM PC it shows 46 to 59 frames a second, with the ball and paddles moving 73 times a second. Where a hit lands on the paddle sets the angle, and moving the paddle as it hits adds spin. Sound comes from the PC speaker or a sound card.

Up and Down or W and S move the paddle, P pauses, N starts a new match and Esc returns to the desktop. Both PCs need the same WireBall, from the v1.0.20261014 release or later. WIREBALL.TXT explains the cable. WireBall has a page of its own.

11,451 byte package · 15,177 bytes with files · Add to Disk

WIREBALL.O88 WIREBALL.TXT Read the Spotlight →

Two PCs, two fleets, one winner. Join two PCs with a null modem cable, a serial cable with its send and receive wires crossed, and open WireFleet on both. Each PC looks for the other on COM1 and COM2 by itself, so a serial mouse can stay on the other port. Place five ships on a 10 by 10 grid, or press A to place them for you, then press Y when you are ready. The captains take turns firing one shot at the other's waters. A hit is a red cross, a miss is a dot, and the first to sink all five ships wins.

Your fleet never crosses the cable: each PC judges the shots fired at it, so neither screen can see the other's ships. Press T to type a short message to your opponent. If the cable comes out, the game pauses and carries on when it is plugged back in. S saves the match on each PC and O loads it, so a battle can be finished another day.

It is written in 8086 assembly and runs at 2400 baud, slow enough for an original IBM PC's serial chip. It draws in colour on VGA and EGA, in four colours full screen on CGA, and in black and white on CGA and Hercules desktops. Sound comes from the PC speaker or a sound card. Both PCs need this release of os8088 or later. WIREFLET.TXT explains the cable and the keys. WireFleet has a page of its own.

26,553 byte package · 28,952 bytes with files · Add to Disk

WIREFLET.O88 WIREFLET.TXT Read the Spotlight →

An air-combat game after the 1942 arcade game. You fly a twin-engined fighter up a scrolling sea of islands and reefs, and fighters, bombers and formations come at you from every side. Shoot down a whole orange formation to earn a power-up: stronger guns, two wingmen, a screen clear, an extra roll or an extra life. A roll makes you untouchable for a moment, three per stage. Clear 32 stages to finish. Two players can take turns.

It is a new program in 8086 assembly, with artwork made for it, and it scrolls the screen with the graphics card's own hardware so that a 4.77 MHz IBM PC keeps up. Full screen it uses VGA at 320x240 or CGA's four colours; Hercules shows the title and controls, but the game itself needs VGA or CGA. Music plays on an AdLib or Sound Blaster, or as tones on the PC speaker.

Arrows move, Space or Z fires, X rolls, P pauses and M turns the sound off. The pictures and the recorded gunfire and explosions a Sound Blaster plays are all inside 1942.O88, which makes it 233KB: too large for a RAM disk, so it comes by Add to Disk and not Load Program, into a 1942 folder with its README. 1942 has a page of its own.

237,174 byte archive · 2 files, 239,176 bytes unpacked · Load Program or Add to Disk

1942.WPK Read the Spotlight →

A second Pac-Man, and it shares nothing with the first. This one is a port of Andre Weissflog's arcade-faithful pacman.c and follows the Namco original: the tall 28x36 field, the arcade ROM's own tile, sprite and colour tables, the four ghosts with their real personalities, the attract screen that reveals SHADOW / SPEEDY / BASHFUL / POKEY one at a time, and three voices reduced to the PC speaker.

os8088 once shipped two Pac-Men. PACMAN was the Roklan/Atari disk version, hand-written in 8086 assembly, on a wide 40x22 field. It has since been retired and is no longer available. PACCMAN is this one, written in C. The assembly version ran roughly twice as fast on a 4.77 MHz XT. This one's lower frame rate is why it asks for a 386.

18,866 byte package · 18,866 bytes with files · Load Program

PACCMAN.O88 Read the Spotlight →

TameGram gives you seven geometric pieces and a target silhouette. Move and rotate every piece until the outline is filled.

2,864 byte package · 2,864 bytes with files · Load Program

TAMEGRAM.O88

Cyclone 88 is a Tempest clone: you sit on the rim of a tube and shoot things climbing up it.

9,655 byte package · 9,655 bytes with files · Load Program

CYCLONE.O88

Tank Attack is a first-person wireframe tank duel that takes over the whole screen rather than running in a window, and has a page of its own. Drive across a flat plain, dodge cubes and pyramids, and shoot enemy tanks. The same package draws VGA, Hercules and CGA.

11,942 byte package · 11,942 bytes with files · Load Program

TANK.O88 Read the Spotlight →

A three-dimensional flight simulator. Take off from Paris-Issy, the city's first aerodrome, fly over Paris with the Eiffel Tower on the horizon, and land -- or crash, and be put back on the runway. The view is filled polygons rather than wireframe: each one is drawn by walking its edges into a left and a right bound and filling each row as a single masked run, which is how every flight simulator of the period did it, and why an 8088 can fill a building face in the time it takes to walk one of its edges.

It is built against one number: twelve frames a second on a 4.77 MHz 8088 with a Hercules card, the machine in the tree that can least afford a filled picture. The view is sized to that budget rather than to the screen, and the instrument panel below it costs nothing while it holds still. The aeroplane and the airport are each a record in a table, so a second of either is a row and not a rewrite.

44,611 byte package · 44,611 bytes with files · Load Program

SKIES.O88 Read the Spotlight →

Chart draws the numbers in a Sheet file. It is a program in its own right, with column, bar, line, area, pie and scatter views rendered into an offscreen picture before they reach the window.

7,483 byte package · 7,483 bytes with files · Load Program

CHART.O88 Read the Spotlight →

Sheet is a spreadsheet of four worksheets with formulas, formats, sorting and a macro language, and Chart draws the numbers in it -- both built to look and behave like Microsoft Excel 2.1, and they share a page. Cells use software decimal arithmetic and the workbook reads and writes SYLK, DIF and BIFF.

33,577 byte package · 33,577 bytes with files · Load Program

SHEET.O88 Read the Spotlight →

Frotz plays Infocom text adventures and needs story files as well, so it too has a page of its own. It is an independent implementation of Z-Machine Standard 1.1 in 8086 assembly, with v1-v8 stories, scrollback, sound and pictures. No story file is included.

19,778 byte package · 19,778 bytes with files · Load Program

FROTZ.O88 Read the Spotlight →

Microsoft Word 1.1a is a word processor that reads and writes genuine Word .DOC files -- there is a page about it in Spotlight, and its disk is in every release. Draft and Page views, the 2-row ruler, RTF import and export, Search, Sort, Renumber and Table of Contents are present. This is a native os8088 program, not Windows or the original Word binary.

44,817 byte package · 48,010 bytes with files · Add to Disk

WORD.O88 WELCOME.DOC Read the Spotlight →

A word processor that takes pictures. Scribe is a fork of the Microsoft Word package with one behavioural difference: Insert ▸ Picture. Choose a .PIX, .BMP or .PCX file and it is decoded to sixteen colours, placed in the text as a character of its own, and drawn in the document with a single blit.

A picture survives a save, which is the harder half. Scribe writes RTF by default, where a picture is carried losslessly as a \pict group at four bits per pixel; saving as a native Word .DOC instead converts it down to a real one-bit PICF record, because every embedded picture in a Word 1.1a file that has been measured is one bit deep. Either file opens again with the picture in it.

It does not claim the .DOC double-click -- an extension has one owner, and that owner is Word. Scribe opens and saves the same bytes from File ▸ Open and Save As. Its file formats live in a second segment carried inside SCRIBE.O88 itself, so the program is one file.

43,816 byte package · 43,816 bytes with files · Load Program

SCRIBE.O88 Read the Spotlight →

CWORD is a second version of the same program written in C rather than assembly, which saves RTF instead, and has a page too. It carries the 1990 menus, the 2-row ruler and Draft and Page views in a native package.

32,494 byte package · 34,773 bytes with files · Add to Disk

CWORD.O88 WELCOME.RTF Read the Spotlight →

Weave and Loom are the newest: Weave runs a program written as markup, script and formulas, and Loom is the editor that builds one on the machine itself, so they share a disk and a page. The markup lists the window controls, the script holds event handlers and the optional formula file fills a grid. The three examples are Form, Sheet and Pong; Pong is 1,008 bytes.

42,621 byte package · 45,213 bytes with files · Add to Disk

WEAVE.O88 FORM.WAB SHEET.WAB PONG.WAB Read the Spotlight →

A four-channel Amiga MOD player. In a window it has a green LCD display with the song's name and time, Play, Pause and Stop buttons, a volume slider, a position slider you can drag, and a visualiser that shows levels, a spectrum or a waveform. A playlist window holds the songs to play next. Press F and it switches to the full-screen pattern view shown here, in the style of FastTracker II: the pattern scrolls under the playing row and four channel meters move with the music.

It needs a Sound Blaster. An IBM PC/XT plays at 11 kHz with the desktop still usable. It replaces ModPlug Player, which was a second MOD player and is no longer shipped.

26,435 byte package · 26,435 bytes with files · Load Program

TRACKER.O88

Audio Player reads WAV files into a 16KB look-ahead buffer while a Sound Blaster consumes the preceding block. Its playlist can keep playing while other windows run.

9,173 byte package · 9,173 bytes with files · Load Program

AUDIO.O88

Full-motion video on an 8088. The Video Player plays .V88 files: videos turned, on a modern computer, into a list of the screen bytes that change from one frame to the next, laid out for the one display card they will be shown on. The machine only copies those bytes into place, so a 4.77 MHz IBM PC can keep up with 30 frames a second. Sound plays on a Sound Blaster, which also keeps the time, or on the PC speaker.

A video plays in its window or full screen, and one short enough to hold in memory can play straight on the desktop while other programs keep running. There is a scrub bar, keyframe skipping, Repeat and Mute. The os8088 logo animation is in the MEDIA folder of the software disk; to make your own .V88 files you need the encoder, which runs on a modern computer. The Video Player has a page of its own.

43,952 byte package · 43,952 bytes with files · Load Program

VIDEO.O88 Read the Spotlight →

Loom is the editor that builds a Weave program on the machine itself. Open any project file, edit the markup, script, formulas or sprites, then pack the result into one WAB bundle. The Wire adds the Weave runtime beside it so a packed program can run from the same disk.

52,846 byte package · 95,467 bytes with files · Add to Disk

LOOM.O88 WEAVE.O88 Read the Spotlight →

RunCPM is a CP/M 2.2 machine in a window -- it emulates a Z80 processor and comes with a disk of CP/M software, and there is a page on it. CP/M drives are folder trees rather than single files, so this one is published as an archive: the whole tree in one compressed stream, which the Wire unpacks into a RAM disk and runs, or adds to a disk as a folder. Drive A arrives with the command processor, the editor, the assembler, the debugger, MBASIC and the submit files, which is what leaves a 640KB machine the memory to run any of them. The rest of the master disk is a second archive below.

90,925 byte archive · 37 files, 109,124 bytes unpacked · Load Program or Add to Disk

RUNCPM.WPK Read the Spotlight →

The rest of RunCPM's master disk, as a second archive that lands in the same RUNCPM folder and the same CP/M drive A. It carries no program of its own, so fetch RunCPM first and this afterwards: the Z80 assemblers, a full-screen editor, the Microsoft utilities, the squeeze and archive tools and the two processor test suites. Splitting it in two is a memory decision rather than a tidiness one -- the whole master disk in a RAM disk leaves a 640KB machine too little heap to start the emulator that reads it.

141,166 byte archive · 19 files, 190,812 bytes unpacked · Add to Disk, or Load Program to unpack it

CPMTOOLS.WPK Read the Spotlight →

VICE 3.10 puts Commodore BASIC and VIC-II graphics in an IBM PC window. The package runs the Commodore ROMs as embedded parts, one 6510 instruction at a time, and the SID produces three-voice sound. A 486+ is recommended; an XT or 286 can start it but does not run it at a useful speed.

40,397 byte package · 62,099 bytes with files · Add to Disk

C64.O88 README.TXT COPYING Read the Spotlight →

A windowed Apple II Plus: a 6502 in a 64K address space with 48K of RAM, Applesoft BASIC and the Autostart Monitor running out of the real Apple ROMs, and the machine's 280x192 screen composed into the window seven pixels to the character cell. The text page with inverse and flashing text, lo-res, hi-res, MIXED and PAGE2 all draw; the keyboard is the II Plus's own; and the speaker plays what a program toggles.

The window is monochrome, which is what an Apple II on a composite monitor looked like. Machine > Color NTSC takes the whole screen instead and puts the sixteen lo-res colours and hi-res's artifact colours back -- that is a VGA feature, and the menu row greys itself on CGA and Hercules with the measurement that cut the monochrome full-screen writers.

The speed is measured rather than claimed, and the status row prints it every second. On a 4.77 MHz XT the emulated Apple runs at 0.54% of its own 1.02 MHz at the prompt and 0.64% inside a BASIC loop, so the row reads 0%: the prompt answers, a keystroke arrives, and that is a machine to look at rather than to use. WELCOME.BAS's lo-res and hi-res screens each take well over a minute to draw there -- measured on the machine, and the program says so in its own README. A 386 runs it usefully and a 486 comfortably, which is why this is a 486+ listing.

There is no Disk II yet, so no .DSK images: a program gets in through File > Load Program, through Edit > Paste, or by double-clicking a .BAS file. WELCOME.BAS ships beside the package and opens that way -- type RUN. The Apple II+ ROMs are Apple Computer's, fetched at pinned checksums when the package is built and carried inside APPLE2.O88 as an embedded part rather than as a file anyone can lose; the port is GPL-2-or-later by way of VICE's 6502 core, and COPYING travels with the binary.

37,684 byte package · 69,443 bytes with files · Add to Disk

APPLE2.O88 WELCOME.BAS APPLE2.TXT COPYING.A2 Read the Spotlight →