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Intellivision Operating System Revealed
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the IntyOS site, which has released Version 0.2 Alpha of a "multitasked operating system for the Intellivision console." According to the site, IntyOS "..includes a powerful GUI which handles a mouse pointer, windows, menus, icons, etc", and was "..written from scratch in CP-1600 assembly language in order to fit exactly to the hardware specificities of the Intellivision. Its main goal is now to see how far it's possible to go with today's technologies on such a limited system from the early 80's" There's also a site mirror available, and the demo ROM is viewable in a Java applet.
http://intyos.spatula-city.org/
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Chad Schell made a run of Intellicarts that let you download just about any game to your real Intellivision. It's only too bad he stopped after around 100 or so...
:)
And yes, I have one
I was curious if someone familiar with older processors could explain the significance of independent MOBS? Are these small independent caches for storing sprites or something?
Sounds like they are sprites - hardware ones, that is (sometimes called 'BOBs').
You create a bitmap in video memory (video memory was a section of RAM that was accessible by the video chip), then point a hardware register to it - the hardware takes care of drawing the sprite on the screen.
Typically you animate the sprite by changing the pointer to point to a different image.
The sprite hardware typically had location register(s) as well, so you could move the sprite on the screen by changing the X/Y registers.. the C64 had two registers (split over 3 bytes) to control the X/Y location of a sprite, but some systems (such as Atari, IIRC) only had one location register (for horizontal location), and you had to redraw the sprite to move it in the other direction.
An Intellivision contains a General Instruments CP1610, which is a 16-bit microprocessor. More details available here. The Intellivision contained a rather powerful processor for it's day, which is probably why this is possible. You could buy a keyboard for it (which contained additional RAM) that allowed you to program it in BASIC.
A big one is hardware abstraction. Sure, you can produce a 100% optimised 100% assembly program for a given system configuration. However I for one value the ability to have different hardware. For that you need abstraction. The Os needs to present a unified API for a given function (like OpenGL for graphics) and then handle the abstraction to the driver layer.
Another bigge is features. So great, they got a multi taking OS that runs a clock and such on an old system. Show me one that does the same things Linux or Windows does (like have a full featured web browser, 3d graphics, sound, etc) and then I'll jump on the bloat train.
Then there are others like maintainability, expandibility, portability and so on. Go ahead and write a major application, like something on the order of Office or Mozilla in pure assembly. Supposing you can even tackle that task, then try and maintain it. For even more fun, try porting it. You'll quickly see why C++ is a plus.
Yes, modern stuff does tned to suffer form some bloat since hardware allows it, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to use the extra power available.
why yes, yes it can.
http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/intv/doom/
moox. for a new generation.