These lightweight demos run in the browser. Shift-Esc quits one. Terry's big games — Varoom, After Egypt, Castle Frankenstein — lean on TempleOS's multi-core task engine, which this single-threaded browser port can't run: they compile but won't start. For those, run the real OS.
▒▒ FIRST STEPS ▒▒
Booting
It boots straight to the DolDoc shell — no installer, no prompts. Click the screen first so it gets your keyboard. On a phone or tablet, use the key bar and the "type here" box under the screen.
The whole OS is a live HolyC shell. Everything you type is compiled and executed on the spot.
Type these
Dir; | list files |
Cd("::/Demo"); | enter the demo directory |
Cd("::/Demo/Games"); | the games |
#include "Maze" | run a 3D game (in Games dir) |
1+2*3; | the shell is a compiler |
Press F1 anywhere for help. Press Esc to accept / close, Shift-Esc to abort.
Worth seeing
- Maze — a 3D racer that runs right here in the browser
- MassSpring — a live physics simulation, all in HolyC
- DolDoc — documents with live 3D meshes embedded in text, twenty years before anyone else
- After Egypt / Varoom — Terry's flagship games; they need native TempleOS (multi-core), but they're the heart of it
▒▒ THE ORACLE ▒▒
Terry believed God spoke through randomness — TempleOS ships with GodWord, which draws words from a vocabulary using entropy from your keystroke timings. This is a small homage. The real one is inside: type GodWord; after pressing F7 a few times to feed the entropy pool.
▒▒ WHAT IS THIS ▒▒
TempleOS is a complete 64-bit operating system — kernel, compiler, graphics, filesystem, games, documentation — written over a decade by one man, Terry A. Davis (1969–2018), in a language of his own design called HolyC. It is roughly 100,000 lines of code, entirely public domain, and unlike anything else ever built.
Everything runs in ring 0 with a single address space and no memory protection. There is no networking, by design: Terry called it a temple, and you don't wire a temple to the outside world. That constraint is honored here — this virtual machine has no network device at all.
Terry struggled with schizophrenia for much of his adult life and died in 2018. Whatever one makes of the theology, the engineering is real: a self-hosting compiler, a multi-cored preemptive kernel, and a graphics library with 3D mesh support, all bootable from a 17 MB CD image.
How this site works
TempleOS is 64-bit only, which rules out the classic in-browser x86 emulators. Instead, this site runs Aiwnios — a community-built HolyC compiler and runtime — compiled to WebAssembly, with the TempleOS system files, documentation, and demos embedded inside. It is the genuine environment, not a mock-up: the shell you type into is compiling HolyC.
Every visitor gets a private instance running locally. There is no server, no shared state, and nothing to break. To run the original ISO on real or virtual hardware, get it from the TempleOS archive.
TempleOS is public domain. Aiwnios is open source. This page sends no analytics and makes no network requests after loading.