Retro OS - In Game 90s Operating System

💬 DISCORD | 📖 DOCUMENTATION | 🎮 DEMO

Most retro-desktop assets give you the LOOK of a 90s computer.

RetroOS gives you the COMPUTER.

Windows that drag, snap and resize. A file system that reads real folders on disk. A browser that renders the actual HTML and CSS files you wrote. A CCTV monitor wired to live cameras in your 3D scene. Five period games. And an event for every single thing the player does inside it, so the machine can drive your story instead of just decorating it.

Drop one component into a scene, press Play, and you have a working computer.

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WHAT YOU GET

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▶ A REAL DESKTOP, NOT A MOCK-UP

• Draggable, resizable, minimizable, maximizable windows, clamped to the work area so they can never be lost off-screen

• Desktop icons that select, drag, snap to the grid and refuse to stack

• A working Start menu with hover fly-outs that scroll when there are too many programs to fit

• Taskbar with live window buttons and a system clock running on an in-fiction date

• Modal dialogs, tooltips, context menus, tab controls, tree views, list views with sortable columns, combo boxes, track bars, progress bars, check boxes, radio groups, status bars, toolbars, splitters

• A logon screen, a Log Off screen and a shut-down screen — Start > Shut Down asks, holds the era's please-wait notice, then fades the glass to a dead monitor while your game keeps running. PowerOn() boots it again

▶ A FILE SYSTEM BUILT FROM REAL FOLDERS

• A machine's drives are the folders inside its folder: C is the C: drive, A the floppy, D the CD — with users, volume labels and all

• Drop a .txt in a folder and it is in the game. No import step, no ScriptableObject, no code, no Unity restart

• An empty floppy folder is a drive with no disk in it, and says so

• Per-file properties (hidden, encrypted, password, owner, label, note, sharing) live in a .rmeta sidecar you edit in Unity's Inspector

• Lives inside your project during development, in the player's Documents folder in a build — so it is moddable, and your writers can work in Notepad instead of the Unity inspector

• Files load lazily: a machine with a thousand documents costs nothing until the player opens one

• Each user's home folder is private — sign in as one account and another account's documents are not in Explorer, not in the terminal's ls, not in the photo gallery

▶ A BROWSER THAT RENDERS YOUR REAL WEB PAGES

• Built like Navigator: menu bar, Back/Forward/Home/Reload/Images/Open/Print/Find/Stop, the Netsite field with a logo that turns while loading, directory buttons, a status bar with the padlock

• Tabbed pages each with their own history, a bookmarks window, Find in page, View Source, Document Info, Save As to the machine's disk

• A tolerant HTML parser and a CSS subset engine written for this package

• Headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, images, <font>, inline styles, linked stylesheets, class/id/descendant selectors, entities, comments

• Working inline links inside running text — not links pushed onto their own line

• Animated images by frame sequence (banner.1.png, banner.2.png, …)

• Open a .png and you get the picture, a .wav and you get a player — media files are media, not a screen of bytes

• Not supported, by design: JavaScript, flexbox, grid, absolute positioning, floats. It is 1997

• Five cross-linked sample sites ship with it. The names and marks are invented; the shapes are the ones the 1995 web had

▶ PROGRAMS ARE COMPONENTS YOU CONFIGURE IN THE SCENE

• Add one to a child of the OS object and it is installed. No asset to create, no list to maintain

• Every program exposes: id, title, icon, window size, minimum size, resizable, start maximized, single instance, show on desktop, show in Start menu, launch on boot, sort order

• Plus its own settings — the CCTV app carries its cameras, the mail app its messages, the browser its home page, Mines its board size

• UnityEvents for everything: opened, closed, focused, minimized, maximized, and a named hook for every interaction inside the program

• What ships: My Computer, Notepad, The Internet, Inbox, Control Panel, CCTV, Photo Gallery, Image Viewer, CD Player, Media Player, Terminal, Calculator, Reminders, Messenger, and the games

▶ A NETWORK MADE OF MACHINES, NOT FOLDERS

• Every computer in your game is a component with a name, an address and a folder of drives

• A share is a folder another machine publishes, declared by one line — share: ARCHIVE — in that folder's own .rmeta, beside its password and owner. Copy the folder to another machine and it arrives shared

• The player can share folders too: right-click any folder in Explorer, Sharing…, and they get the 95 sharing page

• Switch a machine off and its shares vanish from Explorer mid-game

• Static or automatic addressing, workgroups, per-share passwords

• Web sites are hosts you can take off the air and bring back mid-story

▶ EVERY CLICK IS A GAME EVENT

• 39 event IDs: os.boot, os.login, app.opened, file.opened, file.saved, node.unlocked, terminal.command, web.visited, cctv.selected, mail.read, disc.inserted, reminder.due, mines.won … and your own

• Three ways to react, pick one per team member: no-code rules on the bootstrap, UnityEvents in the inspector, or C# — RetroOs.Current.Events.Subscribe("file.opened", …)

• 18 rule action kinds: SetFlag, RevealNode, UnlockNode, DeliverMail, OpenApp, ShowAlert, Notify, PlaySound, Bsod, LogOff, Shutdown, HostOnline/HostOffline …

• Story flags shared between the OS and your game logic

• The terminal answers words you invent, authored in the inspector: a word, what it prints, a flag it sets, an event it raises, a UnityEvent that gets whatever was typed after it

▶ CCTV WIRED TO YOUR SCENE

• Point a channel at a Camera in your 3D level and it renders live — pan and zoom actually move that camera, and it only renders while watched

• Or play a recorded tape, or a still

• Or rewind the live feed on the built-in DVR ring buffer — any channel scrubbed back in time with no pre-authored footage

• Scanlines, an in-fiction timestamp, a blinking REC light, a noise burst on channel switch

▶ RUNS ON THE GLASS OF A 3D MONITOR

• The whole interface is drawn once, flat, into a RenderTexture and projected onto its screen — so it hangs on a CRT model in a 3D room, lit and bent by your own glass material, and stays pixel-exact the moment the player sits down

• On-screen cursor mode keeps the OS on the tube and walks a drawn pointer across it with the mouse, a gamepad stick or a dragging finger; every click, drag and keystroke routes through without the game losing its own input

• A full-screen overlay is the other option

• Nothing is asked of the surface — no collider, no camera, no 0-1 UV — so the picture can be on a curved tube, a RawImage or a wall of six screens

▶ 71 BUILT-IN ICONS, PAINTED AT RUNTIME

• No texture atlas to import or scale. Icons are drawn from code at 32, 48 or 64 pixels

• Browse and export them all as PNG from the built-in Icon Browser

• The same painter gives every component its own pixel-art icon in the Inspector and the Hierarchy

▶ SOUND WITH ZERO ASSETS

• Every interaction sound is synthesized if you do not supply a clip — the OS beeps, chimes and clunks out of the box

• Supply clips to override any of them

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IS THIS FOR YOU?

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BUY IT IF you are building a first-person / narrative / horror / puzzle / sim game where the player sits at a 90s computer to read files, browse an in-fiction web, watch CCTV or trip story events — and you want that computer to work, not just look the part. It is plug-and-play (a demo machine runs on import) and equally a framework: writers add content by dropping text files in a folder, designers wire outcomes with no-code rules, programmers get full C# source. No prior asset knowledge needed for the quick start.

SKIP IT IF you only need a static desktop image or an animated UI skin (a UI pack costs less and is more polished visually), if you need a real modern web browser in-game (use an embedded-browser asset), or if you are on a Unity version older than 2022.3 LTS.

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TECHNICAL

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• Unity 2022.3 LTS and newer, including Unity 6

• uGUI only — no TextMeshPro dependency, no custom shaders. Works on URP, HDRP and the Built-in pipeline unchanged, because it draws nothing pipeline-specific — so nothing to convert, now or when the Built-in pipeline is retired

• New Input System for input

• Full C# source included, commented, no DLLs

• Assembly definitions for runtime and editor; nothing leaks into your build

• No third-party dependencies

• Platforms: anywhere System.IO can write a folder — Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, WebGL, consoles with a writable user folder. WebGL and Android bake the content into Resources and unpack it on first run — handled for you

WHAT IS INCLUDED

• Runtime source (~180 scripts)

• Editor tooling: setup window, inspectors, drawers, icon browser, self-test, smoke run

• A 3D demo scene: a first-person room with two CRTs, an OS live on each

• Sample content: two machines with their own drives and accounts, a LAN share with a locked archive, and five cross-linked sample web sites with CSS and images

• README with a two-step quick start

SUPPORT

• Documentation in the package and online

• Email support, typically answered within one working day

• Discord for the community