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.

747 byte package · 747 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.

1,779 byte package · 1,779 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.

5,289 byte package · 5,289 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.

15,292 byte package · 15,292 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.

21,977 byte package · 21,977 bytes with files · Load Program

PAINT.O88

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.

13,053 byte package · 13,053 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.

12,440 byte package · 12,440 bytes with files · Load Program

TELNET.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.

12,744 byte package · 12,744 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.

3,392 byte package · 3,392 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.

3,107 byte package · 3,107 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.

3,366 byte package · 3,366 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.

15,726 byte package · 15,726 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.

3,277 byte package · 3,277 bytes with files · Load Program

FONTVIEW.O88

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.

19,142 byte package · 19,142 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.

5,233 byte package · 5,233 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.

5,705 byte package · 5,705 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.

10,448 byte package · 10,448 bytes with files · Load Program

MISSILE.O88

A native 8086 adaptation of Roklan's 1982 Atari computer disk version, with its original maze and character graphics. Eat 256 dots and four power pellets, turn the tables on frightened ghosts, and collect fruit as you clear each maze.

Use the arrow keys or WASD to steer, P or Space to pause, N for a new game, and F for full screen. Esc returns to the desktop window. Three lives, an extra life at 10,000 points, and layouts for VGA, Hercules and CGA.

5,437 byte package · 5,437 bytes with files · Load Program

PACMAN.O88

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 ships two Pac-Men. PACMAN is the Roklan/Atari disk version, hand-written in 8086 assembly, on a wide 40x22 field; PACCMAN is this one, written in C. They share no file, no name, no image and no target -- and the assembly one is the faster of the two on a 4.77 MHz XT by roughly two to one, which is why this one asks for a 386.

42,098 byte package · 42,098 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.

4,198 byte package · 4,198 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.

11,186 byte package · 11,186 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.

13,724 byte package · 13,724 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.

36,658 byte package · 36,658 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.

10,101 byte package · 10,101 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.

36,801 byte package · 36,801 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.

24,965 byte package · 24,965 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.

51,407 byte package · 54,618 bytes with files · Add to Disk

WORD.O88 WORD.OVL 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 SCRIBE.OVL, a second segment fetched beside the package, which is why the two files arrive together.

43,897 byte package · 54,018 bytes with files · Add to Disk

SCRIBE.O88 SCRIBE.OVL 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.

36,388 byte package · 57,070 bytes with files · Add to Disk

CWORD.O88 CWORD.OVL 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.

51,782 byte package · 80,678 bytes with files · Add to Disk

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

A four-channel Amiga MOD player. A FastTracker II-style display: the pattern scrolls under the playing row, four channel meters move with the music, and the sample list sits down the right-hand side. Load a .MOD off the floppy, play it, and go on using the desktop while it plays. The module shown here is 116KB, comfortably larger than the machine's 64KB segment limit.

13,968 byte package · 13,968 bytes with files · Load Program

TRACKER.O88

ModPlug Player reads Amiga MOD files, mixes four channels in a background task and keeps transport controls and song facts in one compact window.

14,804 byte package · 14,804 bytes with files · Load Program

MODPLUG.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.

7,468 byte package · 7,468 bytes with files · Load Program

AUDIO.O88

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.

55,044 byte package · 193,136 bytes with files · Add to Disk

LOOM.O88 LOOM.OVL LOOM.WPV WEAVE.O88 WEAVE.OVL WEAVE.WSM 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.

90,353 byte archive · 39 files, 131,837 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.

59,346 byte package · 83,326 bytes with files · Add to Disk

C64.O88 C64.OVL 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.

54,272 byte package · 90,507 bytes with files · Add to Disk

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