A new bug fix release of the Virtual OS Museum is available

 

I have released an updated version of the Virtual OS Museum with various bug fixes. The new release doesn't include any new OS installations, but it does fix most of the major issues people were reporting. It turns out that VirtualBox is less than ideal for this kind of thing, and other people were having major issues related to configuration file handling and mouse input that didn't show up on my machines for whatever reason. The new release uses QEMU instead of VirtualBox by default on Linux and Windows on both x86 and ARM, which should hopefully be more reliable. I've also fixed the issues inside the VM with things like missing files on the lite edition that people were reporting, although I still haven't fully tested all installations and testing is still ongoing. If you've already downloaded the previous version, you should download the external update zip file from the site, extract it over the folder from the previous version, boot the VM, and if you don't have automatic updates enabled, you should check for updates from the File menu of the launcher.

In addition to testing the installations that are already there, I'll start installing new VMs right away as well. These will become available in the launcher as I finish installing them, and I will also be posting at least a few screenshots of each new VM on social media. I'll also be starting on my first major emulator development project within the next few days, so stay tuned for updates on that as well; it is almost certainly going to be a series of a few videos and blog posts.

And if anyone had seen my video from a few years back or the few posts I've made about it, I still haven't forgotten about my own OS. UX/RT is likely just one commit away from running actual user programs. After that, it should only be a few more commits until I have it running a shell. As soon as I have a version that runs a shell that you can actually interact with, I will be adding it to the OS museum of course in addition to uploading images to the UX/RT GitLab project.

Before I end this video, I just want to thank everyone who's commented, joined my Discord, and supported me on Patreon and Ko-fi. Before I released this, I wasn't sure how much interest I'd actually get. I've got a pretty significant tendency to withdraw and stay quiet, and I've known little more than isolation and invisibility for most of my life. I wasn't sure if there was anything I could do to change this, but I'm very thankful to have been proven wrong. I certainly have no shortage of OS- and emulation-related projects to work on and content to make about them, and hopefully a decent number of people continue to be interested in my work.

I've released a virtual museum with nearly every OS you can think of...

 

 

Today I am (finally) releasing the Virtual OS Museum, which is the world's first multi-platform interactive virtual museum of operating systems and standalone applications, implemented as a Linux VM.

Nearly all well-known OSes and platforms (and many obscure ones) are included in some form, spanning the entire history of stored-program computing from the 1948 Manchester Baby to the present day. This is the result of over 20 years of collecting emulators and VM images; over 1700 VM installations are included, across over 250 platforms, representing nearly 600 distinct OSes.

I have put a lot of effort into making this readily accessible; all OSes and emulators are pre-installed, and a cross-emulator graphical launcher with a snapshot feature to revert VM installations to a working state is included. Shortcuts to run the OS museum VM on Windows, macOS, and Linux are included (and it is possible to run it on pretty much anything that runs QEMU or VirtualBox).

The main window of the launcher

Unix PC SVR2 and XVM/RSX with the launcher in the background

Even though the state of software preservation has definitely improved over the past two decades, with many different archive sites being put up and emulators of obscure platforms being written, many of these projects are not particularly accessible, with emulators and OSes often requiring complex setup, and regressions in emulators breaking certain OSes in later versions. This project is an attempt to make readily accessible as much of the history that's been preserved in various places as possible.

Softlanding Linux System 1.0

For people who don't want to download the full version (which is around 170G) there is a much smaller lite version (around 20G) that includes only the base Linux system with the installer, emulators, and launcher, downloading guest VMs the first time they are run rather than having everything included.

Currently, while I have tried to test at least one guest installation for each emulator within the OS museum VM, and all guests have been confirmed to work at some point in the past on my machine, testing of all guest installations within the OS museum VM is still an ongoing process (a little under half have been tested so far).

AFROS with XaAES and TeraDesk

I will be continuing to add VMs to this project; I still have enough install images sitting around that I can easily reach well over 2000 VMs. This also includes some OSes that don't currently run in emulation because the emulator is incomplete or broken.

I also have a YouTube channel where I will be posting about my efforts to fix OSes currently broken in emulation, as well as reviews/tours of OSes I've already installed. I also have a Discord/Fluxer community where you can discuss retrocomputing and OS development, suggest stuff to add, or report issues. If you wish to support me monetarily, you can subscribe to me on Patreon or send me a tip on https://ko-fi.com/andreww591.

Sharp Personal CP/M for MZ-2500

I had thought I would be releasing this a lot sooner. I had been focusing almost exclusively on UX/RT for a while because I had some people from a major conglomerate interested in using it as replacement for QNX to the point where they paid me to fly out to meet them, but a couple months after I met them they cancelled/suspended their project, and I started focusing more on getting the OS museum ready for release, and getting it to a point where it's actually half-decent took way more work than I thought (at one point I was thinking of possibly just doing a quick-and-dirty release without a graphical launcher but then decided I was going to make something more approachable). 

LisaOS 3.1

 

In addition to adding new OSes and emulators to the OS museum, I'm going to be working on UX/RT again soon and am probably one commit away from getting simple user-level test programs working on it, with a shell soon to follow. I haven't really done much with it at all for a while because I was focusing almost entirely on the OS museum, but now I will try to split my time between both projects about equally. I hope that I get commercial interest in UX/RT again once it's actually running user programs, but I'm not sure if that will ever happen again because of my severely crippling tendency to stay quiet that makes it extremely difficult to make connections with people. I will of course be posting regular updates about both UX/RT and the OS museum here and on YouTube. I am going to try as hard as I can to try to push past my tendency to stay quiet; I will probably never be able to talk about random crap all the time like just about everybody else does, but I will try to post about my projects as much as I can going forwards.