HamsterOS

Window Manager

Full z-order stacking with resizable and draggable windows. Bounded damage redraws on focus changes. Active windows show a navy title bar; inactive windows show dark gray.

Launcher Toolbar

Ten visible slots per page with pagination. 16-colour palette-indexed pixel-art icons with hover raise and pressed-state offset. Slots for FILES, FIND, NOTE, CLOCK, PREFS, CALC, CAL, PAINT, GAMES, APPS, TOOLS, USER, PIANO, and CD Player.

File Browser

Up to 5 spatial windows at once. Icon view (52x40) and list view, sorted by Name, Type, Size, or Date. Per-type icons for folders, documents, images, executables, and scripts. Copy/paste, rename, delete, new folder, mouse-wheel scrolling, and progress toasts on reads and writes.

Menu Bar

Classic File/Edit/View/Special menu bar always visible. Hover switches open menus; stale pixels cleared on close. Alt+F/E/V/S keyboard access.

Find Files

Recursive filename search with a dynamic drive selector showing only mounted drives. Click a result to jump the file manager. Light-dismiss on outside click.

Desktop

Dynamic drive icons for mounted floppies, hard disks, optical media, and the RAM disk, with 3D bevel selection. Desktop file positions save to DESKTOP.CFG, and removable icons appear automatically when drives mount.

Trash

Delete operations move files and folders into boot-volume /TRASH/ with restore metadata. The desktop Trash icon opens the folder, restores items, or empties hard-deleted contents.

Screen Savers

Stars (parallax), Flying Hamsters (16-colour animated sprites with bobbing and wing-flap), and Text Bounce. Configurable idle timeout; any input wakes.

System Recovery

CMOS crash counter forces VGA 640x480x16 safe mode after 3 consecutive crashes. I/O stall detection surfaces a nonfatal dialog if the main loop heartbeat stalls over 8 seconds.

Cooperative Multitasking

One lean foreground event loop dispatches queued input, bounded redraws, app update ticks, and kernel_service() yield points so slow disks stay responsive without RAM-heavy preemptive stacks.

Notepad

Load, Save, Save As with FAT file dialog. 4-step undo, Find and Replace (case-insensitive, with highlight), line numbers, word and character count, Go-to-line (Ctrl+G). Dirty tracking with confirm-before-close.

HamsterPaint

Full-screen 16-colour BMP editor. Pencil, fill bucket, line, rectangle, ellipse, eraser, selectable regions, cut/copy/paste, Ctrl+Z undo, Ctrl+S save, and 1x/2x zoom.

Image Viewer

Standalone IMGVIEW.APP opens BMP and GIF files from the toolbar, launcher, file dialog, or file associations. Images are quantized into the VGA/EGA 16-colour palette.

HamsterPiano

On-screen keyboard. When SoundBlaster 16 is detected, plays OPL3 FM notes and shows a DEMO button for The Entertainer. Falls back to PC speaker square-wave tones otherwise.

CD Audio Player

Red Book audio via Matsushita/MKE ISA CD-ROM or ATAPI. Track listing, elapsed time, play, pause, stop, and skip.

Clock, Calendar, Calculator

RTC-driven analog clock with second hand. Monthly calendar with highlighted current date. Four-function calculator.

Preferences

Control Panel tabs for Desktop, Theme, Mouse, Sound, Display, screen savers, RAM disk, font choice, and direct CMOS time/date editing.

FAT Driver

FAT12/16/32 read/write; ISO-9660 read-only. Safe overwrite writes new data before freeing old clusters. Read-back verify on all writes.

Disk Copier

Sector-exact floppy copy (A→B, B→A, or A→A single-drive). Single-drive mode auto-calculates passes from available RAM. Progress bar per pass.

Format Tool

Quick FAT12 format of A: or B: with a custom volume label.

Partition Tool

View all 4 MBR partition entries. Blank the first ATA hard disk (full-sector wipe with confirmation). Create one active full-size FAT16 LBA primary partition.

Format Hard Disk

FAT16-formats the first partition on the ATA hard disk. Writes boot sector, FAT tables, and root directory. Remounts on completion.

HD Install Tool

Full hard-disk install from the boot floppy. Auto-partitions and formats a blank disk, copies the full OS tree, and queues the FreeDOS FDISK/SYS steps so C: can boot back into HamsterOS.

Storage Registry

FAT sector I/O now routes through a storage registry, so future devices such as SCSI disks can mount without rewriting the FAT layer.

SCSI Diagnostics

SCSIDIAG.APP and a probe-only NCR400.DRV target NEC T130B / NCR 53C400 ISA cards, scanning memory windows and I/O bases for real-hardware bring-up.

SoundBlaster 16

Auto-detected at boot (probes 0x220/0x240/0x260/0x280). 8-bit unsigned mono PCM via ISA DMA channel 1, IRQ5-driven streaming in 48 KB chunks, plus OPL3 FM synthesis for HamsterPiano.

Startup Chime

Retro ascending-bell chime (/STARTUP.WAV, about 22 KB, 11025 Hz, 8-bit mono). Loaded before the desktop draws, played non-blocking, then heap-freed automatically.

Notification Doot

Small soft-bell WAV (/DOOT.WAV, about 4.8 KB, 8 kHz). Used for confirm and notification sounds and kept resident only when Wave Doot mode is active.

Volume Slider

Yellow speaker icon in the header when SB16 is detected. Eight-step slider adjusts SB16 master volume and CD audio input together. Moving the slider plays the doot as audible feedback.

Sound Picker

Preferences lets users choose Startup, Confirm, and Error event WAV files from /SOUNDS/*.WAV while preserving tiny defaults for the floppy budget.

PC Speaker

PIT channel 2 + port 0x61 gate. Beep, Tone, Wave Doot, and None modes cover both fallback hardware and quiet setups.