Creator and programmer, credited on all three systems. “Everyone who owned a 386 remembers the day Windows 95 arrived and their machine could not run it. Castalia 92 is for that machine.”
The studio
New software for old machines
Tombatossals Softworks is a small studio named after a legendary giant of the Valencian coast, because the work is small but the shoulders are not. It writes operating environments for computers that were told they were obsolete, and it ships them with their source.
Castalia is the spring of the Muses at Delphi, a source of inspiration. The castle on every splash screen is a stone fortress from the coast of Valencia and Castellón, the kind that has held for centuries and expects to keep doing so.
People
Two names on every About box
Systems, tools and design, as the credits of Castalia DOS and CastaliaOS 98 PE put it. The second name on the About box and the credits roll.
How the work is done
Rules that ship with the code
- ruleCompatibility beats elegance.When a prettier design and a game that runs disagree, the game wins.
- ruleIf a 1992 machine cannot run it, it does not ship.CI drives the real binaries at 386SX speed and fails builds that grow past their memory watermarks.
- ruleNothing above the platform layer touches the hardware.So the same code is tested on a modern machine and shipped to DOS.
- ruleA gap that is written down is a known gap; a gap that is not is a claim.Every project publishes the acceptance lap it still has to run on real hardware.
- ruleLegally clean, or not at all.Original code, original art, original names; borrowed parts are free ones with their licences beside them.
The family
Three public, two resting
Castalia DOS, CastaliaOS 92 and CastaliaOS 98 PE are public and active. Two more members of the family, a gaming-focused Linux distribution called Castalia GOS and a desktop called CastaliaOS XP, exist but are paused and their repositories are private. They are not part of this site until they wake up.
Each public project has its own repository, issue tracker, licence and press kit at github.com/Tombatossals-Softworks-LLC.
Licences
All original Castalia code is released under the MIT licence. Castalia DOS additionally ships the FreeDOS kernel and FreeCOM (GPLv2 or later) with their source, and drivers under their own free licences. CastaliaOS 98 PE bundles the DOS/4GW extender under a distribution licence held by Tombatossals Softworks LLC, the Tango icons (public domain) and the Spleen font (BSD-2-Clause). Documentation and press text for Castalia DOS are CC BY 4.0; the CastaliaOS 92 press kit may be reproduced freely; CastaliaOS 98 press materials are cleared for editorial use.
Trademarks and affiliation
Castalia DOS, CastaliaOS 92 and CastaliaOS 98 PE contain no Microsoft or IBM code, text, fonts, icons, sounds or branding. They are not MS-DOS, not Windows, not clones of either, and not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Microsoft or IBM. Castalia DOS is not an official FreeDOS product and does not imply the FreeDOS Project's endorsement. “MS-DOS”, “Windows”, “Windows 95”, “Windows 98”, “FreeDOS” and every other product name on this site belong to their owners and appear only to describe compatibility or the era a design is inspired by.
This website
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Questions, corrections and takedown requests: [email protected].