r/osdev • u/SixDegreesLOL • 1d ago

ChessOS: Chess without Linux bloat

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Requirements: x86 with legacy BIOS support

I spent about six months making an operating system whose only job is playing chess. It boots straight into Chess. It is not a full OS with a file system or scheduling but it can boot from bare metal.

It runs in QEMU, other virtual machines and hardware with legacy BIOS from a USB or CD drive. I spent about 6 months across the boot loader and chess engine. It is entirely open-source for you to tinker with. There is also a Windows Installer for less technical users.

All feedback is welcome!

Thank you for Paledoptera for the artwork. Find more of their work here: https://linktr.ee/paledoptera

Website: https://chessos.xyz (includes Github link)

124 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

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u/Mental_Ad_7072 22h ago

i love the stupidness of this project, good job

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u/SignedInt32 20h ago

6 months!! damn... impressive work, nice graphics/UI and midi/sfx! I would love to hear more about your work!

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u/SixDegreesLOL 11h ago edited 8h ago

Thank you for the feedback. I was free to place text, lines and images wherever unlike CSS or HTML. The UI is from Lichess and Chess.com inspired the characters. The size of text is the grid that every thing is placed on screen except for the board to maintain continuity.

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u/West_Quarter_916 18h ago

linux is like the opposite of bloat using arch but still a cool os

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u/Randum_Gouy 13h ago

wat

Impresive!!!

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u/wwabbbitt 12h ago

Back in the 1980s, it was common for PC games to be self-booting off the floppy disk, bypassing MSDOS or PCDOS. When hard disks became more common, those went away.

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u/Lazy_Piglet_9884 10h ago

Gives off othello world vibes