RetroOS
Windows 95-style in-game operating system for Unity.
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 HTML and CSS files you actually wrote, a LAN of machines that stop serving when you switch them off, CCTV wired to live scene cameras, five period games, and an event for everything the player does. Programs are components you add under the machine; there is no profile asset to maintain.
Features
A Desktop, Not a Mock-up
Draggable, resizable 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 to build your own programs from. It logs on, logs off and shuts down like a machine, fading the glass to a dead monitor while your game keeps running.
Drives Are 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 in and it is in the game: no import step, no asset, no restart. Hidden, encrypted, password, owner and sharing live in a .rmeta sidecar you edit in the Inspector or in Notepad.
A Browser That Renders Your Own 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 is a component with a name, an address and a folder of drives. A share is one line in a folder’s own sidecar, so a folder copied to another machine arrives shared — and players can share folders themselves from Explorer. Switch a machine off and its shares vanish from Explorer mid-game.
CCTV, Games and the Glass of a 3D Monitor
Point a channel at a scene Camera and it renders live, with pan and zoom that move the real camera, plus a DVR buffer any channel can be scrubbed back through. Five period games on public-domain rules. The whole OS is drawn once into a RenderTexture you hang on a CRT model, with an on-screen cursor walked across the glass by the mouse, a gamepad stick or touch.
Every Click Is a Game Event
39 event IDs and 18 rule actions, answered three ways so each person on the team can use the one that suits them: no-code rules in the inspector, UnityEvents on the component, or C#. Nine UI sounds synthesized at runtime and 71 icons painted from code — nothing to import, nothing to license.
Frequently asked
Are the UI elements sprites or PSDs, or drawn from code?
The entire interface is drawn at runtime in C# on Unity UI (uGUI) — window chrome, the 71 icons, scroll bars and dithers are all painted procedurally. There is no texture atlas or PSD for the interface. One RetroTheme asset controls every colour, metric and font, and full C# source is included. It renders on URP, HDRP and the Built-in pipeline unchanged, with no custom shaders and no TextMeshPro dependency.
Is there a real file system you can use at runtime?
Yes. A machine's drives are real folders on disk (C, A floppy, D CD, plus network drives). A File Explorer app does New Folder, New Text Document, rename, delete, cut/copy/paste and a Sharing dialog, and a terminal runs the usual shell commands over the same file system. Per-user privacy is enforced. In a build the content is copied into the player's Documents folder on first run, so it stays writable and moddable.
Is this a framework to build on, or a preconfigured UI system?
A functional framework. A program is a component you drop under the OS object; your own app is about fifteen lines. There is an OS-wide event bus with no-code rules, an HTML/CSS browser engine that renders the files you drop into internet/, a LAN of real machines where powering one off drops its share from the others live, plus mail, CCTV with a DVR wired to live scene cameras, a terminal and five period games. It ships with a demo machine so it runs on import, but it is built to be extended.
Which Unity versions and render pipelines are supported?
Unity 2022.3 LTS and newer, including Unity 6. The OS is uGUI and draws nothing pipeline-specific, so it works on URP, HDRP and the Built-in pipeline with nothing to convert. The only caveat is the 3D demo scene, whose own materials are URP and need their shaders re-assigned in a Built-in or HDRP project.