Inkbox
You may not even think about the red and white machine as a productive machine, but some smart and creative developers can’t agree with this idea. According to reports from Hackaday and Ars Technica, Inkbox Software recently released the NESOS operating system for red and white machines. Due to the technical limitations of the 1980s, NESOS is only equipped with a word processing app besides “settings”, and can only store 8 832-bytes files. Although there are not many functions, you can use a real cursor in the red and white machine, which can not only move the icon, but also change the color of the interface.
The main obstacle of Inkbox comes from the very limited capacity and memory of the red and white machine. NESOS is only just 48K in size, and all files must be placed in only 2K of NVRAM when it is turned off. Interface drawing is also another difficulty. Nintendo’s original system only has two Sprite memory grids for foreground and background, and they can only display 64 Sprites at the same time, which is why many red and white machines keep appearing when they display too much content. flashing.However, Inkbox also had to combine multiple Sprites into larger graphics to form a complete interface, making the restrictions more stringent
NESOS comes out as a ROM, so unless you can save it to a cassette, you’ll need an emulator to open it up to experience what an OSS operating system is all about. It’s just limited by the hardware, it’s impossible to save a long novel on it, not to mention that typing requires a red and white machine controller to slowly input one by one from the looping character column, which is probably annoying. . Therefore, NESOS appeared more to challenge the limit. What is more worthy of appreciation is that Inkbox can do this without modifying the red and white machine, which is an amazing achievement.