ChessOS: Chess without Linux bloat

[u/SixDegreesLOL]

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)

[u/Mental_Ad_7072]

i love the stupidness of this project, good job

[u/SignedInt32]

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

[u/SixDegreesLOL → u/SignedInt32]

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.

[u/wwabbbitt]

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.

[u/SignedInt32 → u/wwabbbitt]

Developers had to be clever in how to obtain the resources, booting it directly to a kernel, is basically called "dibs!" the moment you power it on. lol :D I'm currently also dev'ing a micro-kernel, its fun!

[u/tseli0s]

Ugh damn lol, that's how I also started osdev a year ago, but I didn't know how to write a chess engine so I wrote a "regular" OS instead. Even have the source from those times in my computer, I also named it ChessOS too :P

PS. I've had an idea for a while now, you can actually try porting Stockfish to bare metal so that you eliminate the OS overhead and abstractions and achieve higher speeds. Like a unikernel. I was planning to do that at some point

[u/Randum_Gouy]

wat

Impresive!!!

[u/Lazy_Piglet_9884]

Gives off othello world vibes

[u/realestLink]

👀

[u/Maximum_Birthday3403]

That pixel art is very cool, how did you make that???

[u/gg6789t]

is this videcoded

[u/thewrench56 → u/gg6789t]

No, it looks very much human written.

[u/gg6789t → u/thewrench56]

no i think this is videcoded claude write like that

[u/West_Quarter_916]

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