mindbox77/zxdesk

A GUI operating system for the 48K ZX Spectrum, in Z80 assembly

AppsAssembly

4.4 Early signal Magnitude out of 10. Star growth looks organic. Data as of September 19, 2026.

About the project

A graphical windowed OS for the 48K ZX Spectrum written in Z80 assembly: overlapping windows, menus, a heap, an event queue, a file manager and settings — all fitting in 48K and running on real hardware.

Useful for

Run ZX Desk on a real 48K ZX Spectrum or in the Fuse emulator
Build the tape with build.sh and pasmo and load it onto the machine
Use SCRIPT=1 to replay synthetic input for reproducible window interactions

README summarized by DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Details may be inaccurate.

Why it’s trending

52 stars today.
The spike has held for 2 days in a row — not a one-off blip.
The repository is 3 days old and already has 60 stars.
Hacker News: “A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum” — 123 points, 9 h ago.

Stars per day

Bars are daily stars, the line is the usual pace. Red marks spike days.

Numbers

Total stars: 60
Stars in a day: 54
Forks: 2
Issues and pull requests: 0
Watchers: 1
Language: Assembly
License: MIT
Created: September 16, 2026
Last push: September 18, 2026

Star trust

Growth looks organic: forks and discussion are in line with active projects, and stars arrive unevenly, the way people give them.

These are heuristics, not a verdict: we judge by the repository’s behavior, not by a list of stargazers.

Hacker News discussions

A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum123 points, September 19, 2026

Spotted in

September 19, 2026Spotted on Hacker News

README badge

Paste it into your README — the badge shows the current magnitude and links to this page.

[![Seismograph](https://gitnova.dev/badge/mindbox77/zxdesk.svg?lang=en)](https://gitnova.dev/en/r/mindbox77/zxdesk)

Similar projects

8.2
robbietilton/Compositor
A free, open-source raster image editor for macOS written in Swift — a Photoshop alternative focused on compositing and post-processing.

BreakoutAppsSwift+1,324 stars in a day
5.7
joeseesun/qiaomu-download
Agent skill that downloads videos and extracts audio/subtitles from YouTube, Bilibili, X, TikTok, Vimeo, Instagram, WeChat Channels and other yt-dlp-supported links via a single phrase 'download this: URL'.

Early signalAppsPython+122 stars in a day
5.0
chaseleantj/desktop-habitats
A living aquarium on your macOS desktop: fish react to your cursor and compete for food while plants sway in a slow current. The scene renders locally with Three.js and WebGL2, fully offline.

Early signalAppsJavaScript+21 stars in a day
5.0
ankitects/anki
Anki is a spaced repetition flashcard program for memorizing information. This repo holds the source code of the desktop version, written in Rust.

BreakoutAppsRust+54 stars in a day
4.8
Mak5er/AirCard-iOS
iOS app that writes custom artwork into iOS 27 system caches over a local loopback tunnel, letting you restyle Apple Wallet cards and the lock screen passcode keypad directly on the iPhone.

Early signalAppsSwift+76 stars in a day
4.5
Mak5er/AirCard
A macOS tool that customizes Apple Wallet cards and lockscreen passcode keypad themes on iOS 18+ without jailbreak via the airlift exploit. It lets you assign custom artwork to Apple Pay cards and apply .passthm themes.

Early signalAppsSwift+35 stars in a day