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When you played the Nintendo Entertainment System, you were close to the hardware. That’s why you can pull off remarkable glitch cheats, like Playing Tennis to hot start in broken Super Mario Bros. worlds. The chips, the memory, the board – it was all designed to service the little board inside your cartridge (that and prevent unauthorized games). There wasn’t much room for anything else in the early and mid-1980s.
Yet enough space for a custom OS built in 2022, albeit just barely. NESOS 1.0 of ink box software, a 48K operating system, features “two main applications, the word processor and settings,” according to Inkbox. The Settings app gives you seven cursors, 53 background colors, and the ability to delete all eight files that can fit within a maximum of 2K of NVRAM (that is, onboard memory that doesn’t lose data when the system loses power). That’s 832 bytes each, or about a full screen’s worth of memory. However, you can drag those eight files anywhere on the desktop.
The creator of NESOS details how he built it and why.
NESOS (pronounced “nee-sohs”, according to its creator) is completely graphic. Inbox points out that there is already a command line system, Basic Family, for the NES and its Japanese parent, the Family Computer/Famicom. “I want NESOS to feel like a real operating system that Nintendo might have made back in the day for the NES. What would it have looked and felt like?” the creator says in your video summary.
Inkbox is no stranger to NES programming, or wacky code projects that are presented as wonderful art. They previously built a fruit-based MMO in less than 40 hours (apparently no longer active), a Super Mario Hack ROMs who remodeled the game in the style of the Ming dynasty tale Journey to the Westand a Chinese word processor for the Apple II, done natively on the Apple II.
The NES gave Inkbox two 256-slot sprite memory grids to work with, one for the foreground and one for the background, even though the system can only display 64 sprites at a time. However, you can combine the 8×8 sprites into larger forms for the OS and UI. As for input, a keyboard was included with some versions of Family Basic, the HVC-007. Inkbox imported the characters used in Super Mario Bros., gave the keyboard some extra shortcuts, and had a little typing app up and running. If you’re using a standard NES controller, you’re holding down A to cycle through the characters, tapping B as your space bar, and pressing Select with either of those keys to invert them.
Inkbox’s video goes on to explain how this all works in NES memory, involving manipulation of the Image Processing Unit (PPU), giving your virtual NES cartridge the same type of storage that battery-backed games had, and transferring each file, byte by byte. , among them.
You can download a NESOS emulator compatible ROM at ink box site or in Hack ROMs. A two-frame, eight-pixel hat-tip for Hackaday for pointing out this wonder.
Ozva Admin
