# Remember Nintendo Atari et al...



## ronaldlees (May 22, 2014)

This is way off topic, but in keeping with my fetish for new OS stuff, I managed to find an allegedly  open sourced, former Nintendo company research OS project called "ES".   Link:

http://code.google.com/p/es-operating-system/

Does anyone have additional info on this?


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## SirDice (May 22, 2014)

There's a bit of information on the project homepage:


> ES operating system is a new pure component operating system currently being developed mainly at Esrille. ES operating system project was originally started by Shiki Okasaka and Kyu Ueno at Nintendo largely affected by Rob Pike's "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" talk in 2000. ES operating system was released under an open source license from Nintendo at SourceForge.JP in 2006. The source code repository of the ES operating system was moved from SourceForge.JP to Google Code in 2008 under the copyright of both Nintendo and Google in hope we can reach more people worldwide.


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## ronaldlees (May 23, 2014)

SirDice said:
			
		

> There's a bit of information on the project homepage:
> 
> 
> > ES operating system is a new pure component operating system currently being developed mainly at Esrille...



Thanks for the information.  I wonder if there's a link on Nintendo.com for this...


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## Atarian (Jul 4, 2014)

No, I don't remember Atari, what was that?


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## fonz (Jul 4, 2014)

Atarian said:
			
		

> No, I don't remember Atari, what was that?


Ataris were special editions of the Commodore Amiga line of computers, if I remember correctly   P


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## kpa (Jul 4, 2014)

fonz said:
			
		

> Atarian said:
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 x( 

Atari produced many different computers and game consoles while they were still in business. For example one of the first ever game consoles was the Atari 2600:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600

Then there was the Atari ST line of computers that competed with the Commodore Amiga from 1985 to around 1990, while technically superior in many respects it never took off properly because the Amiga had more and better games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST


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## fonz (Jul 4, 2014)

kpa said:
			
		

> while technically superior in many respects it never took off properly because the Amiga had more and better games


Didn't the Jaguar suffer a similar fate? IIRC it was technologically superior, but lacked titles and had a much-criticised controller.


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## worldi (Jul 4, 2014)

Atarian said:
			
		

> No, I don't remember Atari, what was that?


*giggles*


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## ChalkBored (Jul 4, 2014)

fonz said:
			
		

> kpa said:
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It was the first of the 5th generation consoles. So it was superior to the 32X and 3DO which were available when it was released, but matched by the Saturn and beaten by the N64 and PlayStation.


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## TiberiusDuval (Jul 7, 2014)

kpa said:
			
		

> Then there was the Atari ST line of computers that competed with the Commodore Amiga from 1985 to around 1990, while technically superior in many respects it never took off properly because the Amiga had more and better games:
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST



In what way was Atari technically superior to Amiga? As far as I remember it had a worse sound system, and way more conservative overall construction. Also the original OS was non-multitasking, while Amiga certainly had multitasking capabilities, which for example enabled various nasty viruses.


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## Crivens (Jul 7, 2014)

You don't need multitasking for a virus, as any DOS lov..^h user can testify to.

The Amiga was simply more sexy while the ST tried to be more "business" like. This ultimately led to the doom of both systems, as both had an inbalance between sexy and serious.


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## TiberiusDuval (Jul 7, 2014)

Yes, I remember getting some DOS-viruses too. But those on the Amiga were quite nasty sometimes, much more like modern viruses. Some could contaminate some OS services running in the background and then have a little multiplication fest every time the user inserted a new non-write protected disk. I still need to scan some of my older Amiga disks to prevent those nasty oldies from contaminating others, when for example using an old machine for a little retro gaming. Some of those viruses did a great job in destroying my Pirates! saves  :OOO 

I remember that Commodore in fact had some trouble identifying and marketing the Amiga as a serious gaming machine. They really tried to market it as a business machine. Good luck with that though. As Amiga software and OS had serious stability issues quite many people wouldn't use the Amiga in any serious business, except in those areas where it performed well, like in graphics and video editing.


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## kpa (Jul 7, 2014)

The Amiga was most successful as a lower end gaming machine that just about anyone could afford to buy and play games on it, the Amiga 500 was hugely popular at the time. It failed when Commodore tried to continue the development of the Amiga architecture with their own proprietary hardware that they didn't want to open in any way. The result was that it wasn't really possible to produce third party hardware for the Amiga line of computers that everyone takes now for granted, graphics cards, sound cards, etc.


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## TiberiusDuval (Jul 7, 2014)

You are quite right. Though the Amiga (and all old home computers in that regard) was quite different when compared to the PC of that time, being much more a gaming-console-like machine. The graphics system was deeply integrated into the main system, and third-party adapters worked at best with only select software. The same is true regarding the audio system. The PC of that day was a comparably bare-boned machine incapable of doing anything useful without additional hardware. PC systems nowadays are much more like old home computers as more and more capabilities are integrated into the motherboard.


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## Crivens (Jul 8, 2014)

kpa said:
			
		

> The Amiga was most successful as a lower end gaming machine that just about anyone could afford to buy and play games on it, the Amiga 500 was hugely popular at the time. It failed when Commodore tried to continue the development of the Amiga architecture with their own proprietary hardware that they didn't want to open in any way. The result was that it wasn't really possible to produce third party hardware for the Amiga line of computers that everyone takes now for granted, graphics cards, sound cards, etc.


I turn around and look into my bookcase for the RKRMs. Now I have to wipe a happy tear of nostalgia from my eyes and I think I can say that the system was openly specified and good to extend. The problem with that was that there (as today) were a lot of sloppy coders. It was written time and again that _thou shall not depend on the timing lest your code crashes when new CPUs come to town_! Guess what? Many people would not read such things in that days, almost as today. When you were adding a component to replace parts of the system, like a graphics board, you had to supply the software for it, patch the system. But that was possible, I still have the Picasso64 around here. You now only had to face those who thought that no one would do this, who jumped directly into ROM space to be extra cool. And now as then you want to get the LART out of the locker and go around to their places. Well-written software from the 1.0 series still worked seamlessly in 3.1 on a graphics board, with font scaling and all. Try that with some software from other platforms, you will have a hard time finding that. Ah well, that were the times. Doing software on it payed for some of my university time.  :stud 

There were many C.F. pulled by Commodore, no doubt. One of them was when Sun came around asking if they may re-sell the A3000 line as terminals for their machines. They were declined...


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## SirDice (Jul 8, 2014)

kpa said:
			
		

> The Amiga was most successful as a lower end gaming machine that just about anyone could afford to buy and play games on it, the Amiga 500 was hugely popular at the time. It failed when Commodore tried to continue the development of the Amiga architecture with their own proprietary hardware that they didn't want to open in any way. The result was that it wasn't really possible to produce third party hardware for the Amiga line of computers that everyone takes now for granted, graphics cards, sound cards, etc.


Don't forget the massive amount of wares that were available. A lot of software companies just stopped producing software because it was copied so much. Besides that Commodore sat on their collective arses for far too long, they just didn't innovate fast enough.

I was quite happy using my A4000 to connect to the Internet. It worked just fine at first but the machine quickly became too slow and a processor upgrade for my A4000 was about the same price as a brand new PC (with much improved graphics, processor, memory etc.). Although I loved my Amiga very much, choosing which way to go wasn't difficult. 

(I still have two C-64s, an A500 with 20 MB harddisk, an A1200 with 60 MB HD and an A4000/EC030 with Merlin graphics card, 8 MB fast and 1 GB HD, all in working order  :h )


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## Crivens (Jul 8, 2014)

I also still have my old A3oooT in working order, I still love to work with it when I get the chance. One problem I would have now is to get a new mouse (should the old one go the way of all rodents). The reasons to buy something else for an upgrade were the prices for network boards and memory size. I had to switch when I had to build big software systems over and over again for my thesis, so I reached the limits of my patience. Wanting to buy some SGI hardware (as I wanted at that time, and still want today) was on the other side of the limit imposed by wallet contents.

Commodore let the ball slip and sucked its thumb when the graphics system needed some major reworking (to 8 bits, or 24/32 bits), which would need to re-factor some of the core systems. Well, given the state of affairs in the source code, which relied on some 'tricks' of the green hills compiler used to build the ROM system. Memory protection was not there, and also not possible. At least not without breaking about all code in existence. The good point about the system was that it was specialized and integrated, the bad thing then turned out to be that it was specialized and integrated.

It would be fun to re-create something like the old Amiga spirit again, not do some evolution but a revolution in the computer architecture. Fast, efficient and exciting. I'd like it, but sadly, this would not be possible these days. There would be too many patent landsharks around.

But well, this was a nice way and good topic to do my post #800.  :beer


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## sossego (Jul 9, 2014)

Odd, I just signed in and had the new user agreement page come up.

Anyway... I have used the old Atari 400/800 for vector-line graphics, sound, and animation. The screen could be set up with five or so lines for a "terminal" type of environment while the remainder of the screen was dedicated to graphics/animation. This allowed a user to see the results of an _intetsctive [did you mean interactive? -- mod.]_ program.

I also owned a used Wang, a Timex Sinclair, a Radio Shack handheld, and a 166 with the f00f bug over the years. Atari definitely had a good setup for beginners' graphics programming.


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## Atarian (Aug 5, 2014)

I still own an Atari STe, an STFM, and a Falcon. I use the Falcon daily. Fantastic machines. 

I think that when discussing the ST/Amiga war,  a lot of people forget that the ST and Amiga were both great machines, and they both got royally trounced by the 386.


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