alt.hn

6/23/2026 at 9:35:26 AM

A game where you're an OS and have to manage processes, memory and I/O events

https://github.com/plbrault/youre-the-os

by exploraz

6/26/2026 at 7:02:47 AM

This would be huge if it was « rogue like », where you could buy new more performant components that allow you to reach further into the game. The game makes you naturally lose, and there are milestones that you can reach (bosses, or loot that stays throughout sessions). For instance you could unlock GPUs, docker containers, another SSD, antiviruses…

by GL26

6/26/2026 at 9:23:09 AM

Also consider RTS elements, like assigning certain schedulers to handle workloads which are swappable and tuneable, maybe with some skill tree unlocks.

by sudoshred

6/26/2026 at 11:28:04 AM

unlimited possibilities to expand the game scope through a tech tree: - Hyperthreading - interrupts - compressed main memory - L3 caches - TLB caches - CFS - cgroups - TSO/GSO - performance / efficiency cores - dynamic clock speed - thermals - PCI bandwidth / lanes - ...

Game could start with a single CPU and 2-3 processes and then all this comes on top step by step and you can automate it away through tech tree.

by nielsole

6/26/2026 at 2:23:23 PM

[dead]

by heroku

6/26/2026 at 1:22:07 PM

Or a bitburner-like game, where scripting the solution is required.

by peddling-brink

6/26/2026 at 8:28:08 PM

Obviously needs to be Turing Complete as well.

by conception

6/23/2026 at 11:11:47 AM

Rebooting could be a mini-game where you dodge the user's BIOS keystrokes a few times before they give up

by petee

6/26/2026 at 12:32:06 AM

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what is happening in real life. I pressed F12 damnit! Go into the bios already!!

by lofties

6/26/2026 at 3:13:09 AM

Some friendly tips from post-silicon validation:

sudo systemctl reboot --firmware

shutdown /r /t 0 /fw

These reboot directly into BIOS.

For Windows CMD+R menu, run it by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+Enter (elevates to admin). You may have to do it twice for some unknown reasons after reinstalling the OS.

by gcoakes

6/26/2026 at 3:38:39 PM

Had to learn this recently when my wife’s computer refused to register requests to boot into bios despite spamming F12 / Del many different times across many different USB ports. Such a pain in the ass.

by Xiexe

6/26/2026 at 3:08:16 PM

You are a life saver. I never knew about --firmware!

by nullpoint420

6/26/2026 at 12:33:01 AM

The absolute bane of my existence, I had a time a week ago repairing my bootloader after I (stupidly) did 3 months of windows updates after running a bunch of disk repairs and other recovery based things after I (again, stupidly) fell for a fake repo for deepseek tui and infected myself

by AgentMasterRace

6/26/2026 at 6:00:38 PM

Oh man, you've had a week from hell my friend. Uploading virtual platonic data-free hugs

by freedomben

6/26/2026 at 2:07:33 AM

This was fun to play...for about 2 minutes before all the manual work of moving processes around got very tedious, which may be the point of the game. What I would like is a little code edit window where i could code simple routines to handle the scheduling, then be able to watch the result.

by donpdonp

6/26/2026 at 12:52:33 PM

This is why we must daily thank the elves inside our machines. It's tough work!

by lelandfe

6/26/2026 at 3:22:48 PM

As an OS, I wish the user would launch fewer programs. What a chore.

by fredley

6/26/2026 at 12:57:09 AM

Fun fact: operating systems were originally programs intended to replace most of the work of a human job description, that of computer operator.

by monocasa

6/26/2026 at 3:26:45 PM

Computers were first marketed into replacing the work of humans that had a job called "computer" (what spreadsheets finally did)... Operating systems were create to replace computer operators (what they didn't)... For a while some people called compilers "automatic programmers".

The marketing and management of IT always had this fixation with replacing people. It always has been the wrong answer and the real value always came from making people better.

by marcosdumay

6/26/2026 at 8:30:19 PM

I think we’re near the end of this trajectory, and the inevitable disruptive business model will be a young entrepreneur who “invents” the concept of the Human-Centric Firm.

by crmd

6/25/2026 at 10:44:30 PM

Fabulous concept, but personally I did not find very fun actually playing.

by advisedwang

6/25/2026 at 11:27:45 PM

A lot of these puzzle/micromanagement games are very similar to stuff folks do for work. I stopped playing an entire category of puzzle games once I realized it was basically programming, which I do all day for a living anyway. Gamified programming is still programming.

by loloquwowndueo

6/26/2026 at 1:29:18 AM

I have a problematic relationship with Zachtronics games for this reason.

I love TIS-100, but at some point I realized I was studying the user manual for a fictional computer, trying to learn it's fictional assembly language, to optimize some multicore data flows.... and decided I should probably get paid for doing that in real life instead.

by glaslong

6/26/2026 at 12:00:20 AM

Many programmers program for fun outside of work.

by jonahx

6/26/2026 at 12:29:32 PM

When I play games scratching programming itch I always think if I'd be better of working on pet projects instead.

by ivanjermakov

6/26/2026 at 10:33:55 AM

I’m one of those people. And what we do is write actual software for fun rather than pretend software in a computer game.

If I wanted logic flow embedded in a game then I’d want it in an environment that’s far removed from traditional programming. Such as building contraptions in Minecraft.

by hnlmorg

6/26/2026 at 3:17:36 PM

I do like some of them, like pico 8 is a constrained game programming environment, and it takes me back to the days of the power of qbasic, being able to do dang near anything without burying yourself in a massive layer of abstraction and complexity.

by wing-_-nuts

6/26/2026 at 1:20:01 AM

That's what bugged me about the old MS Flight Sim games. It felt like the actual job.

by jasonfarnon

6/26/2026 at 9:08:03 AM

Yes, but many dream about actual flying for real, but cannot so enjoy this substitute.

(I enjoy more arcade style)

by lukan

6/26/2026 at 4:47:03 PM

That's why you can speed up the simulation. Certain portions of flight are dramatically more entertaining than others. So take an hour to boot up the 777 from cold and dark, setup all the computers and management, do all the preflight, manage taxi and takeoff, then run the actual 7 hour flight at 10x speed so you can do the fun landing.

But even games that seem like just a job can be fun. Euro Truck simulator is fun because you are entirely self directed. Each job produces tangible results and you feel yourself progressing in a clear way that you often do not feel in a real job.

by mrguyorama

6/26/2026 at 11:52:15 PM

I probably wasnt raised right, but none of that matters if you can't shoot down other planes, buildings, something, anything. And if you can shoot down planes the bells an whistles don't matter. 1942 was perfect.

by jasonfarnon

6/26/2026 at 1:57:05 PM

After you switch to managing LLM agents all day, programming at home will be fun again. Just don't use an LLM to play the game...

by axus

6/26/2026 at 2:54:00 AM

But just think of the great training this will provide for your enslaved upload in the future!

by GolfPopper

6/26/2026 at 10:37:19 AM

Tell me you play Zachtronics without saying Zachtronics

by ChrisRR

6/26/2026 at 11:51:02 AM

What’s Zachtronics. Never heard of it.

by loloquwowndueo

6/26/2026 at 12:28:30 PM

A game company (https://www.zachtronics.com/) that have made a series of games where you either build machines or write instructions to solve a task. An example is Opus Magnum where you convert input elements to output elements.

The games track things like cycles taken to complete the task, size/area of the machine, and cost. Those scores are shown on separate leaderboards and optimizing for one can come at the cost of another (e.g. faster machines may be bigger and/or more expensive).

by rhdunn

6/26/2026 at 8:08:32 AM

OTOH I now have a lot more sympathy for my cpu's, I should give them some slack

by internet_points

6/26/2026 at 12:59:54 PM

I love this idea! I totally see it in the classroom or being played by someone who's trying to learn how to make an OS (which is on my personal bucket list)

What I didn't like, is the tutorial is separate from the game. It would be awesome imo, if there's a tutorial stage where the game is explained hands-on (maybe pausing the game with explainers, until I start to get how to play) Otherwise I have to memorise the instructions before trying the game.

Regardless, amazing little game.

by phaser

6/25/2026 at 11:21:57 PM

Does this game make me MCP? Can I battle Jeff Bridges with discs?

by SomeHacker44

6/25/2026 at 11:55:28 PM

Get Tron to Sark so he can communicate!

by edoceo

6/26/2026 at 7:20:09 PM

Education is the space that I'm hoping AI with unearth, and games like this could become a common part of the education. I totally see kids playing something similar for hours, learning core CS concepts and benefiting. Perhaps making a shooter would be awesome too: reclaiming memory, collecting cycles and energy and resources to train the model.

Another hope I have that we could learn math/physics that way. Having a better more visual and intuitive understanding of some math concepts would be great. Perhaps having a truck go through the plot of a function and learning about limits and maxima and minima would be great etc. Same story: playing something like this for several hours could burn in kid's/adult's mind a pattern of undersatnding calculus that would last a lifetime.

by wkoszek

6/26/2026 at 10:07:16 AM

Tangentially reminds me of https://deadlockempire.github.io/ where you play the role of the scheduler, but your job is to make vulnerable programs misbehave.

by Retr0id

6/26/2026 at 6:45:54 PM

So while we're trying to make computers do what humans do, we play pretend being computers.

by seu

6/25/2026 at 10:40:07 PM

Maybe that's what the Linux scheduler is actually - humans' consciousness stuck inside the computer managing the processes.

Sounds like that black mirror multi-part episode "White Christmas".

by mephage

6/25/2026 at 11:17:49 PM

So that's why the Matrix needed humans to power their systems!

by fragmede

6/26/2026 at 2:56:40 PM

The original idea of the Matrix was for the humans to be processors, but they changed it because they thought people wouldn’t understand that.

by cortesoft

6/26/2026 at 3:15:08 PM

That would have honestly made far more sense than as a battery.

by wing-_-nuts

6/25/2026 at 11:20:40 PM

Master Control Program

by mrkstu

6/26/2026 at 1:33:37 PM

Great concept but I did not have a ton of fun playing after the novelty wore off after a few minutes. It would've been more fun if time stood still and I had the opportunity to plan what I do at each cpu cycle. I was looking forward to managing cpu cache hits and ram usage.

by QuantumNoodle

6/26/2026 at 6:32:56 PM

I never get to the point where I had to manage memory. Am I doing something wrong? I just move processes to the CPU in order of highest-starved first, then move them off when they're green.

by uses

6/26/2026 at 5:28:18 AM

Need OOM Killer button to kill nasty process

by degurechaff

6/26/2026 at 11:59:21 AM

14 minutes and 533,000 pts. I unlocked the auto sort option which helped immensely

by triangleman83

6/26/2026 at 3:50:37 PM

Oh gosh this reminds me of a college project where we had to build the heap allocator in C. This is giving me nightmares

by ant-kinesthetic

6/26/2026 at 6:53:20 PM

Anybody remember corewar, where each player wrote an adversarial programs in redcode?

by deftio

6/26/2026 at 2:49:40 PM

Pretty cool, I would love to see a version where you code the tasks instead of madly click on stuff.

by gabrielhidasy

6/26/2026 at 4:40:00 PM

It's possible. Look for "Run with an automated script" in the README.

by drfreckles

6/26/2026 at 7:26:15 AM

I can think of very few things that I'd rather not do then to be an OS. Talk about a thankless "game"...and I'm glad this came up.

Since when have games become more about just completing boring tasks and not about using your mind and dexterity to kill evildoers? Hell, the original Space Invaders was 100x more fun then this, and all we had to do was press a button to kill advancing aliens.

by cubano

6/26/2026 at 7:50:50 AM

Games are just something someone finds enjoyable to do.

You have all kind of games, some that are actual programming, some that are purely reflexes and dexterity, some that are in between.

> Since when have games become more about just completing boring tasks and not about using your mind and dexterity to kill evildoers

I encourage you to browse Steam a bit if you are asking this.

by LelouBil

6/26/2026 at 10:15:30 AM

My wife plays a game where you use a pressure washer to clean areas up. Also plays a lawn mowing simulator. Oh, and a game where you run a supermarket, where you maintain inventory, stock shelves, and operate the checkout. Some people just like these types of things.

by Hugsbox

6/26/2026 at 12:33:25 PM

I have a pressure washer and a mower. I am happy to let her come to my house and use them on my house. I’ll even let her pick up my groceries!

by theflyingelvis

6/26/2026 at 8:07:22 AM

I kind of agree, but on the other hand many boring, meaningless things are gamified with the addition of points.

Is Monopoly about skill? Chance? Or just scratching that itch of getting more tokens than the other person?

by benj111

6/26/2026 at 2:53:03 AM

This is cool! I may introduce it to the undergrad OS course I teach at UCSD. Does it have memory hierarchy?

by yiyingzhang

6/26/2026 at 2:46:49 AM

Cool stuff! Would love to see this recommended in introductory OS classes to give an intuition

by armdave

6/26/2026 at 7:42:22 PM

The non-food version of Overcooked!

by geophph

6/26/2026 at 8:32:35 PM

you are onto something here.. except that instead of a single "scheduler" (the player) each core should need to grab and release its stuff. so its multiplayer and you have to coordinate who us doign what. or maybe each person is a sub sysyem, scheduler memory management etc

by dgently7

6/25/2026 at 10:24:24 PM

Played this originally, glad to see scripting included

by Affric

6/26/2026 at 3:30:23 PM

This looks like a lot of fun

by rizsyed1

6/26/2026 at 6:14:11 AM

Easy, just give all RAM to Chrome.

by butz

6/25/2026 at 11:55:01 PM

got rebooted at 332k @ normal. maybe being an OS wasn't my calling :)

by aranelsurion

6/25/2026 at 11:20:20 PM

This didn't get a lot of traction the other time I saw it, but one easily imagines this as part of a a game to teach operating systems, starting from no MMU all the way to how we manage distributed supercomputers like a DGX GB300, or Google's borg.

by fragmede

6/23/2026 at 11:43:55 AM

sounds a lot like a tweet from the parody account @PeterMolydeux !

by drfunk

6/26/2026 at 12:30:39 AM

What's he doing these days?

by keyle

6/26/2026 at 6:03:14 PM

Now we just need to write an OS that will play this game and we'll be golden.

Nice work! I have a kid trying to learn about OSes right now and I think this can be helpful for him

by freedomben

6/26/2026 at 4:54:27 PM

The game got too tedious to play by hand, so I wrote a script to play it automatically. It handles CPU, I/O, and processes quite well - but doesn't recognize a crown on a process and doesn't handle memory management at all.

I found that even on the easy level, the number of processes keeps growing slowly, and there isn't enough CPU time to keep all processes satisfied. I feel like the game is inherently setting you up for failure. Here is the script if anyone wants to play with it:

  // ==UserScript==
  // @name     Auto-play "You're the OS!" game
  // @include  https://plbrault.github.io/youre-the-os/
  // ==/UserScript==

  (async function() {
      const IO_EVENTS = {x: 160, y: 25};
      const CPUS = 4;
      const CPU1 = {x: 50+46, y: 50+42};
      const SQUARE = {w: 64+5, h: 64+5};
      const PROCESS = {x: 50+46, y: 155+42};
      const PROCESS_ROWS = 6;
      const PROCESS_COLS = 7;
      
      let cnv = document.querySelector("body > canvas");
      while (cnv.width != 1280 || cnv.height != 720)
          await new Promise(res => setTimeout(res, 100));
      
      while (true) {
          const pixels = new Uint32Array(cnv.getContext("2d").getImageData(0, 0, cnv.width, cnv.height).data.buffer);
          function getPixel(x, y) { return pixels[y * cnv.width + x]; }
          
          if (getPixel(IO_EVENTS.x, IO_EVENTS.y) == 0xFF808000);
              await pressKey("Space");
          let cpuStatuses = [];
          for (let i = 0; i < CPUS; i++) {
              const p = getPixel(CPU1.x + SQUARE.w * i, CPU1.y);
              cpuStatuses.push(
                  p == 0xFF000000 ? 1 :
                  p == 0xFF9A9B9B ? 2 :
                  p == 0xFF00FF00 ? 3 :
                  p == 0xFFE6D8B0 ? 4 :
                  0);
          }
          let processStatuses = [];
          for (let r = 0; r < PROCESS_ROWS; r++) {
              for (let c = 0; c < PROCESS_COLS; c++) {
                  const p = getPixel(PROCESS.x + SQUARE.w * c, PROCESS.y + SQUARE.h * r);
                  let s =
                      p == 0xFF000000 ? 1 :
                      p == 0xFF9A9B9B ? 2 :
                      p == 0xFF00FF00 ? 3 :
                      p == 0xFF00FFFF ? 4 :
                      p == 0xFF00A5FF ? 5 :
                      p == 0xFF0000FF ? 6 :
                      p == 0xFF00008B ? 7 :
                      p == 0xFF000050 ? 8 :
                      0;
                  if (s >= 3)
                      processStatuses.push({r, c, status: s});
              }
          }
          
          processStatuses.sort((a, b) => a.status - b.status);
          for (let i = 0; i < cpuStatuses.length; i++) {
              if (cpuStatuses[i] < 1)
                  continue;
              if (cpuStatuses[i] >= 2)
                  await pressKey("Digit" + "1234567890".charAt(i));
              const p = processStatuses.pop();
              if (p !== undefined)
                  await clickMouse(PROCESS.x + SQUARE.w * p.c, PROCESS.y + SQUARE.h * p.r);
          }
          
          await new Promise(res => setTimeout(res, 300));
      }
      
      async function clickMouse(x, y) {
          const rect = cnv.getBoundingClientRect();
          const opts = {
              bubbles: true,
              clientX: rect.left + x * rect.width / 1280,
              clientY: rect.top + y * rect.height / 720,
          };
          cnv.dispatchEvent(new MouseEvent("mousemove", {...opts, buttons: 0}));
          cnv.dispatchEvent(new MouseEvent("mousedown", {...opts, buttons: 1}));
          cnv.dispatchEvent(new MouseEvent("mouseup", {...opts, buttons: 0}));
          await new Promise(res => requestAnimationFrame(res));
      }
      
      async function pressKey(code) {
          cnv.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent("keydown", {code, bubbles: true}));
          cnv.dispatchEvent(new KeyboardEvent("keyup", {code, bubbles: true}));
          await new Promise(res => requestAnimationFrame(res));
      }
  })();

by nayuki

6/26/2026 at 11:39:26 AM

What a fun idea for a game!

by NietTim

6/26/2026 at 8:12:08 AM

Have any useful algorithms emerged from these kinds of games?

Like has someone invented a novel scheduler or sorting algorithm?

by benj111

6/23/2026 at 9:46:17 AM

Great idea!

by dmaginas

6/26/2026 at 2:14:29 PM

[flagged]

by rnio