Press kit
Three projects, one studio. Each repository carries its own press kit with fact sheet, feature list, technical notes, roadmap and story; this page collects the essentials and the assets. Text, logos and screenshots are cleared for editorial use. Credit is lovely: “Tombatossals Softworks”.
One line. Castalia DOS is a serious, game-focused, FreeDOS-based operating environment for real 386-class hardware.
Status. 1.0-alpha5 “Tombatossals”, pre-release, 15 August 2026. Hardware validation on the reference 386SX pending.
Style. “CASTALIA DOS” in banners, “Castalia DOS” in prose. Never “Castalia OS” or “CastaliaDOS”.
Licence. MIT for Castalia code; docs and press text CC BY 4.0; FreeDOS parts GPLv2 with source.
One line. A graphical operating environment for DOS-compatible 386 systems: the nineties desktop your 386 was promised, three years early and 120 KB small.
Status. Version 0.56, 23 August 2026. Real-hardware certification is the one item left before 1.0.
Style. “Castalia 92” or “CastaliaOS 92”. It is a shell that runs on top of DOS, not an operating system.
Licence. MIT. Everything in the kit may be reproduced freely in articles, reviews, podcasts and videos.
One line. An original, Win9x-inspired desktop operating system that boots on DOS-class PCs and fits in a few megabytes, hand-written in C with no Microsoft code, art or branding.
Status. v0.1.0-preview1, 19 August 2026. Booted in QEMU; not yet on real hardware.
Style. “CastaliaOS 98 PE”, PE for Powerful Edition. Never “Windows 98 clone”.
Licence. MIT. DOS/4GW, Tango and Spleen under their own terms.
Marks
Keep the colours and proportions. Do not recolour the keep, stretch a wordmark or place a mark on a busy photograph.
Boilerplate
Tombatossals Softworks is a small studio that builds new software for old machines, named after a legendary giant of the Valencian coast because the work is small but the shoulders are not. Its Castalia projects, Castalia DOS, CastaliaOS 92 and CastaliaOS 98 PE, are free, open-source operating environments written from scratch for the PCs of 1988 to 1999, released on GitHub under the MIT licence. The studio is Dave Abellan and Claudio di Castello.
CastaliaOS is a retro suite of three independent systems that take the DOS, early-desktop and late-nineties eras seriously enough to rebuild them by hand, legally clean, for the hardware that was there.
| Castalia DOS | 1.44 MB boot floppy; eight boot profiles; about twenty original tools; 386SX and ~640 KB minimum |
|---|---|
| CastaliaOS 92 | 404 KB executable, ~120 KB resident; 65 modules, ~33,000 lines of C89; 30+ apps, 13 games, 18 themes, 16 effects; 386SX with 1 MB |
| CastaliaOS 98 PE | 3.7 MB idle against a 4 MB ceiling; 7,609 unit checks, 74 demo scenes; 800×600 at 16 bpp over VESA |
Press and general enquiries. [email protected]. Replies usually within a day or two. Review builds, interviews, extra assets and fact-checking are all on offer.
Bugs and questions. The issue tracker of each repository on GitHub.
Please do not present any Castalia system as your own, or as an official Microsoft, IBM or FreeDOS product. Describing compatibility is fine; claiming origin is not.
These are debut press kits. There are no awards or articles to list yet. If you publish one, tell us and it will go here.
