Project Nu-Day: Okay, Y'all, Let's Actually Build Something

Mike·September 6, 2026·Work documented: February 13, 2026·17 views

All that research had to turn into something eventually. Project Nu-Day was the first real attempt: a modern media workstation, built for x86-64, inspired by the Toaster and DigiPaint but not trying to be either.

At some point, research has to turn into a project, or it's just a very well-organized way of reading old documentation forever. So: Project Nu-Day. That was the name for the first real attempt to build something out of everything I'd been chewing on — the Amiga's good ideas, the Video Toaster's approach to real-time media, DigiPaint's painting engine — aimed at modern, ordinary, commodity x86-64 hardware.

What Nu-Day was actually trying to be

The goal was a media workstation. Not an operating system for its own sake — a machine built around the idea that graphics, video, and painting-style tools deserved to be first-class citizens of the platform, the same way they were on the Amiga, but running on hardware you could actually buy in 2026 instead of hardware you'd have to find on an auction site.

I was explicit with myself from the start that this was not an emulator project. I wasn't trying to run Amiga binaries. I was trying to build a new thing that took the same philosophy — specialized hardware doing specialized work, multimedia as identity, responsiveness that a person can feel — and applied it fresh, on hardware nobody in 1985 had any reason to design for.

Virtual first, on purpose

From day one I decided this was going to be developed virtual-first — inside QEMU, not on bare metal. I'll spend the entire next entry on why that decision mattered as much as it did, because it's not just "easier for development," it's a real architectural strategy. For now: I wanted a laboratory before I wanted a machine.

Early hardware abstraction thinking

Even at this early stage, I knew I didn't want the media/graphics ambitions hard-wired to one specific piece of hardware. The whole point of "specialized hardware doing specialized work" only holds up if the software layer knows how to talk to specialized hardware in general, not just one card I happened to own. That idea was still pretty vague at this point — more of a discipline I was trying to hold myself to than an actual abstraction layer with real boundaries — but it's the seed that eventually turns into a much more serious conversation once GPU work enters the picture.

Nu-Day was ambitious for what it was, and I want to be honest that at this point I did not yet see the shape of the problem I was actually walking into. That comes later, and it comes from a direction I did not expect: not from the media ambitions failing, but from the media ambitions succeeding just enough to reveal how much operating system I was quietly agreeing to build underneath them.

Next up: why the very first real infrastructure decision was to build the computer inside QEMU before building anything resembling the computer itself.