RetroOS — Introduction

RetroOS is a Windows 95-style computer you drop into a Unity scene. Not a picture of one: windows that drag and resize, drives that are real folders on your disk, a browser that renders the actual HTML and CSS files you wrote, a LAN of machines that stop serving when you switch them off, and an event for every single thing the player does inside it.

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

One thing in the game is one component

A computer, the system installed on it and the screen its picture comes out on are the same object. Programs are components you add underneath it — there is no profile asset to maintain, and two scenes can install different software without either of them owning a list.

What ships in the package

Unity	2022.3 or newer, including Unity 6
Dependencies	None. uGUI only — no TextMeshPro, no custom shaders
Render pipelines	URP, HDRP and the Built-in pipeline — it draws nothing pipeline-specific, so there is nothing to convert now or when Built-in is retired
Built-in programs	19, plus a host component for a program you build yourself
Games	5 — Mines, Solitaire, FreeCell, Reversi, Snake
Terminal commands	8 — help, ls, cd, cat, open, pwd, clear, decrypt — plus your own, written in the inspector
Game-event IDs	39
Rule action kinds	18 — flags, revealing and unlocking files, mail, launching a program, alerts, sounds, the blue screen, log off, shut down, taking a site off the air…
Colour schemes	14 of the originals, switchable at runtime from the Control Panel
UI sounds	9, all synthesized at runtime — zero audio assets
Icons	71, painted from code at 32, 48 or 64 px — zero image assets

Highlights

• A desktop, not a mock-up — draggable, resizable, minimizable windows clamped to the work area, a taskbar with live window buttons, a Start menu with hover fly-outs, and 25+ reusable Windows 95 controls you can build your own programs out of.

• A file system made of real folders — a machine's drives are the folders inside its folder: C is the C: drive, A the floppy, D the CD. Drop a .txt into one and it is in the game. No import step, no asset, no Unity restart. Per-file properties — hidden, encrypted, password, owner, note — live in a .rmeta sidecar you can edit in Unity's Inspector or in Notepad.

• A browser that renders your real pages — write a site in any editor, check it in Chrome, drop the folder into internet/, and the address the player types is the folder name. Real HTML and CSS, working inline links, images, and the era's torn-page placeholder when a picture is missing.

• A LAN of machines, not a folder called lan — every computer in your game is a component with a name, an address and a folder of drives. A share is one line in a folder's own .rmeta — share: ARCHIVE — so a folder copied to another machine arrives shared. Switch that machine off and the share vanishes from Explorer mid-game, because that is what pulling the plug on a file server does. The player can share folders too, from Explorer's right-click Sharing… dialog.

• A machine that starts and stops like one — a logon screen, and Start ▸ Log Off and Start ▸ Shut Down that ask first, tear the desktop down, hold the please-wait notice and either come back to the logon box or fade the glass to a dead monitor. Your game keeps running the whole time; PowerOn() boots the machine again.

• CCTV with an in-engine DVR — point a channel at a Camera in your 3D level and it renders live, with pan and zoom that actually move that camera. Or play a recorded clip. Or rewind the live feed on a ring buffer, so any channel can be scrubbed back in time with no pre-authored footage.

• Every click is a game event — os.boot, os.login, os.shutdown, file.opened, node.unlocked, terminal.command, web.visited, mail.read, disc.inserted and the rest. React to them three ways, whichever suits the person doing the work: no-code rules in the inspector, UnityEvents on the component, or C#.

• Runs on the glass of a 3D monitor — the whole OS is drawn once into a RenderTexture you hang on a CRT model, lit by your own emissive glass material. An on-screen cursor mode walks a drawn pointer across the tube with the mouse, a gamepad stick or a dragging finger; sitting down flips to a pixel-exact fullscreen overlay.

• Nothing to import — every UI sound is synthesized and every icon is painted from code, so the package ships with no audio or image assets to license. The same painter gives each component its own pixel-art icon in the Inspector.

Where to go next

• Tools overview — see RetroOS alongside Deepwave's other Unity packages
• The package's own README.md (included with the .unitypackage / Package Manager install) covers the full walkthrough and every program in detail.