Over recent years there have been a range of classic 16-bit consoles coaxed into running familiar operating systems, with -nommu Linux being a favourite. But the 16-bit era had its own operating systems of note, and [1d4r3k] has brought one of them to a console that fit very much into a different 16-bit camp. It’s Atari’s TOS, on a Sega Mega CD.

We should in all fairness start by saying it’s not “real” TOS, but EmuTOS, an open-source drop-in replacement. So far it supports a serial keyboard device, a printer, and sound, and it mounts the CD or cartridge it booted from, a RAMdisk, internal backup RAM, and cartridge save RAM. We’re told in the tip email that there’s also been some work porting GEOS to the platform, and thus the GEOS software suite may be ported to it.

Sadly there are no images, so we can’t see it working, but trying it looks to be as straightforward as burning aan ISO or flashing a cartridge if you have the original hardware. We have no idea as to whether it would be any use given the specs of the Sega, but given that TOS ran on Ataris without a lot of RAM we suspect it might be. Meanwhile, here’s a Megadrive/Genesis running Linux.

Header: 軍事用懐中電灯, CC BY-SA 4.0.