xinOS is a operating system to bring back the days of the NES. Utilizing 16 bit color graphics and the PC beep speaker for audion, it emulates the way NES games were played. You can load images, draw geometric shapes, and all sorts of complex features are available for xinOS. By default, there are 2 applications loaded on it (xinSnake and xinMusic), but you can write your own games in C and play them!
First off, download the xinOS image from the "releases" tab on GitHub. This is the actual image that the operating system is on
xinOS, being an operating system, can be burned onto a USB or Floppy drive and booted from (it works on ancient hardware, including the Commodore 64). Alternatively, if you'd like to emulate it, you can use the emulater "QEMU" (this is similar to VirtualBox or VMWare) or "Bochs". QEMU is the preferred emulator. To emulate it, run the following command:
qemu-system-i386 -fda <file path of the xinOS image here> -s -machine q35 -soundhw pcspk
If you've installed qemu but that qemu-system-i386 isn't found, you can run it with the generic QEMU command
qemu -fda ./build/xinos.img -s -machine q35 -soundhw pcspk
If you are running Bochs, a config is premade for you.
Awesome! xinOS provides a friendly interface for drawing pixels, squares, triangles, circles, and other geometric shapes (as well as text) onto the screen, as well as an interface for IO tasks, keyboards, and other tasks. You don't need to know a single thing about operating systems to write a game for xinOS. Though, you should know C.
As of now, there is no official documentation for making games. Right now, you should go look at the snake game as a reference, which is heavily commented. If you'd like to see fully fledged documentation, please star this project! I don't want to make documentation no one will use, so starring lets me know people want documentation to make games.
After some attention from the OSDev subreddit, I've decided to start working on the Wiki page for this operating system! It's currently under development, but given some time it will finish. You can find a link to the wiki here.
https://youtu.be/VK65QSgnX_A Of course it does! Just take a look at one of the contributors computers :D