Spotlight
Spotlight
One page per addition that a line on the releases page does not carry: what it is, screenshots of it running, and the video if there is one.
August 2026
Newest first.
Browser
My latest experiment
A web browser for the IBM PC XT
os8088 now fetches real web pages and lays them out as text and tables, over an Ethernet card or a parallel cable to a DOS machine standing next to it. The network is not the slow part: drawing a window full of text takes longer than fetching the page.
the browser13,889 bytes
the stackARP to TCP
machine4.77 MHz 8088
RunCPM
CP/M, in a window
CP/M was the operating system small computers ran before the IBM PC existed, on a processor the PC does not have. os8088 now emulates that processor, so CP/M software runs here: the 1979 command processor at the prompt, Microsoft BASIC, an assembler and an editor, in a window you can drag around like any other.
emulatesa Zilog Z80
written in4,679 lines of C
machine4.77 MHz 8088
Written in C
A new program
A word processor written in C
Everything in os8088 up to now was written in assembly language, one processor instruction at a time. There is now a C compiler for it, which is a far quicker way to write a program. To find out whether it could carry something real, I wrote a second word processor with it -- and it turned out too big for the memory a program gets, so it comes in two pieces.
written in8,350 lines of C
the program54,450 bytes
machine4.77 MHz 8088
Microsoft Word
A new program
Microsoft Word, on an 8086
I have added something I have wanted to see for a while: my own os8088 version of Microsoft Word 1.1a. It has the familiar 1990 menus, uses the same clever tricks to show bold and italics on a plain old PC screen, and saves Word .DOC files. The whole program fits in 47KB.
the program47,212 bytes
savesWord .DOC files
machine4.77 MHz 8088
Two monitors
A new feature
Two monitors, one desktop
A PC of this era could hold a monochrome card and a colour card at once, because their picture memory sat at different addresses. Almost nothing used both together. os8088 now spans one desktop across the pair -- 1,360 pixels wide, on a 4.77 MHz machine -- and a window that lands over the join is drawn on both screens.
monitors2
one desktop1,360 x 348
machine4.77 MHz 8088
Frotz
A new program
os8088 plays Infocom games now
A Z-machine interpreter in 23,722 bytes of 8086 assembly. The Z-machine is the pretend computer Infocom invented in 1979 so one game could be sold for every machine at once -- which is why a story file from 1982 is still a plain file that still runs. Mini-Zork, Colossal Cave Adventure, Zork: The Undiscovered Underground and Photopia all play, off a floppy of their own.
the interpreter23,722 bytes
story formatsv1 to v8
games it fetches15