Greetings,

I'm relatively new to the Picotron and even though it is a "fantasy workstation" I was wondering if there was a way to use it as an actual OS specifically for the Raspberry Pi. If anyone knows if there is a way to use it as an ISO for a Raspberry Pi I would love to get some info as to learning how to make it it's own OS.

I doubt it's possible without a host OS but it probably could be run with a very basic Linux (a bit like Pimiga 4 works).
I'd guess someone is working on something!

this is not possible

you need a base OS on the raspi to handle hardware and boot, then picotron is a regular program that shows a pretend desktop and window manager (when we get a raspi build)

what we can do is configure the base OS to boot as fast and discreetly as possible to create the illusion of the machine booting to picotron :)

I am figuring out how to setup NixOS as some kind of bare-metal basis for Picotron. It's kinda hard right now since there's no AArch64 (ARM64) Linux version of Picotron and I am using Macbook. (Currently using Box64 but it's not going well 😭)

I've got Picotron running as the operating system on a Windows 10 machine by replacing the default shell, Explorer.exe, with my Picotron path in the registry. Now, when I boot the computer and sign in, I'm greeted directly by the Picotron desktop. It's awesome!

To achieve this, I modified the following registry key:

Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell
Value: Replace the value with the path to Picotron or any other software you prefer. When I need to launch an application, I simply right-click the desktop and open the host folder. Alternatively, I use Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager and start whatever I need from there.

I'm currently working on making my Picotron desktop Fully stand alone. Right now, I occasionally have to exit the OS to access the Lexaloffle site, but I'm hoping someone develops a BBS app soon so I won't have to do that. My ultimate goal is to create apps that manage all necessary system resources, transforming this into a Picotron-only PC.

I might even hack it into an old mid-1990s laptop case someday, but for now, my sleeper PC build is working just fine.