Applications

os8088 ships two floppies. The first one boots; the second one is the software disk, and everything on this page comes off it. It is a FAT12 volume any modern machine can also mount and write, and the programs on it are sorted into folders. The eleven below are the ones with screenshots; the download page lists the full contents of the disk.

None of them are built into the kernel. Each one loads from the floppy when you double-click it and then behaves like any other window: it gets a title bar, a dock tile, a row in the Task Manager and its own menus. Several can be open at once, including several copies of the same program, and closing one gives its memory back. How that works is on the packages page.

Every image below is a screendump of the system running in an emulator, captured by a script that double-clicks the program out of the Disk window, closes the Disk window behind it and then drives the program itself -- typing, clicking keys, drawing, dealing and serving. The interface is black and white; where you see color, the program is using it.

The APPS folder

The applications, from the largest program in the tree down to the smallest.

A full screen of white with a black menu bar across the top carrying File, Edit, Style, View and Help in white text. Below it a heading, Writing on an 8086, is drawn at double size in bold; under that a line of body text reads The editor styles bold and italic as you type, with the word bold in bold and the word italic slanted. A text caret sits on the empty line beneath. — **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.

A full-screen FastTracker II style display. Top left, a blue TRACKER banner with BPM 125 and Spd 007; below it the module name Beverly Hills Cop and four channel meters showing green level bars. Top right, a list of twelve sample names and a row of buttons: About, Play, Pattern, Stop, Load and Fullscreen. The lower two thirds is a black pattern grid of blue note names in four columns, with one row highlighted in gray as the playing position. — **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.

A near full-screen window titled Paint. A narrow tool palette down the left edge holds pencil, eraser, fill, rectangle, ellipse, selection, eyedropper and text tools above width and height boxes reading 448 and 280 and an Apply button. A large white canvas fills the rest, carrying a green zigzag stroke and a magenta rectangle drawn freehand. A row of sixteen color swatches runs along the bottom. — **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.

A window titled Fractal with a status line reading Mandelbrot, Zoom 0, 100 percent, Spectrum. Inside it the Mandelbrot set is rendered in full color: a black body surrounded by concentric bands of magenta, yellow, green and cyan against a blue field. — **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.

A small window titled Recorder holding a black-on-white waveform display of a dense audio signal, a status line reading DEMO STAGED, 400 to 800 Hz, 08000 of 16000 bytes, IN colon SB, and a row of four buttons: REC, STOP, PLAY and DEMO. — **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.

A window titled Piano. The upper half is a five-line musical staff with a few colored note marks on it; below that a REPLAY and CLEAR button pair beside the word READY, a SONGS row offering TWINKLE, ODE and MARY, and a two-octave keyboard of black and white keys with the computer keys a, s, d, f, g, h, j, k, l and the row above lettered onto them. — **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.

A window titled Note Pad on the desktop containing two typed lines: Note Pad is a package now, not a built-in, and It runs in its own segment, with a text caret after the last character. A single tile sits in the dock at the bottom left. — **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.

An almost empty desktop with one small window titled Hello, containing two centered lines of text: Hello from a dot o88 package. One tile sits in the dock at the bottom left. — **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.

The GAMES folder

Three games, all played with the mouse and the keyboard.

A large window titled Solitaire filled with green baize. Top left, a face-down stock with a blue lattice back; top right, four empty foundation piles marked with spade, heart, diamond and club outlines. Seven tableau columns below, each ending in a face-up card, the rest face down. — **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.

A tall window titled Arkanoid with a score of 10 at the left and LV1 at the right. Six rows of colored bricks in red, cyan, green, white and magenta fill the top, with one brick already missing, above a large black playfield and a white paddle near the bottom. — **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.

A window titled Minesweeper showing a nine by nine grid of raised gray cells. A large region has been revealed as flat white squares carrying blue and green digit counts, and two red flags are planted at the top left and bottom right. A status strip above the board reads 8 and F equals FLAG. — **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.

Running them yourself

Download both images: boot the machine from os8088.img and give it apps.img as its second floppy. Double-click the Disk B icon on the desktop, open APPS or GAMES, and double-click a program. It will be on screen in about a second on an emulator, and rather more slowly on a real XT.

The software disk is an ordinary FAT12 volume, so you can also mount it on any modern machine and copy programs on and off it. Since os8088 writes FAT12 as well as reads it, files you save from Paint or Note Pad come back off the same disk on your own computer. Writing a program of your own is covered on the packages page.