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.

Mirror

[jdavidb]

http://intyos.spatula-city.org/ [spatula-city.org]

Re:It's a shame...

[Windcatcher]

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 :)

Re:8 MOBS...

[schon]

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.

Re:8 MOBS...

[SirWhoopass]

You're missing the critical component: the processor.

An Intellivision contains a General Instruments CP1610, which is a 16-bit microprocessor. More details available here [intellivisionlives.com]. 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.

Re:It's a shame...

[Tarrek]

You can still find them around eBay sometimes, and if I recall correctly, he's collecting orders for a new batch.

Re:Games

[Tarrek]

It sure was released on the INTV! A great version [intvfunhouse.com] too.

Curious about more this system has to offer? He's a Top 25 thread from Digitpress.com, one of the greatest retrogaming sites out there: Some other great INTV Games [digitpress.com].

Lots of reasons

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

They also had the 1st RTS game

[revscat]

AFAIK, Intellivision was the first system to have a RTS/SimCity-ish game: Utopia [vgmuseum.com]. You controlled a couple of islands, and had to collect resources and such. Very fun and innovative game for the day.

Re:The true test of an OS...

[Hadlock]

why yes, yes it can.

http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/intv/doom/ [spatula-city.org]

Intellivision Lives!

[gklinger]

It's slightly off-topic but I figured that if you're reading this thread and feeling nostalgic about Intellivision, you might be interested to know that the original developers have set up shop online and are selling emulators and games. You can learn more here [intellivisionlives.com].

Be forewarned though, playing those games will shatter your fond memories. You really are much better getting MAME [mame.net] and playing the arcade versions which hold up a little better.

Nope

[CausticWindow]

BOBs are Blitter OBjects. Not hardware sprites.

Re:8 MOBS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly, the "hardware mouse cursor" on modren video cards is pretty much the same thing as a sprite on old video chips, technically at least. Of course the designers had a different reason for adding the feature... and a hardware mouse cursor isn't much of an optimization on hardware that can redraw the whole screen bitmap thousands of times per second. On old home computers sprites were important because it was *fast* to just set the x and y coordinate registers, as compared to spending valuable processor time copying a back-up image to the old location of the sprite, then taking a new back-up from the new location, and finally combining the sprite image with the background on its new location.

Re:8 MOBS...

[Mr Z]

Yes. Someone at Texas Instruments apparently coined the term "sprite." I believe Karl Guttag once told me who came up with the term, but the name eludes me. They came up with it while developing the TMS9918 VDP. (The 9918A is the chip that the TI Home Computer and the Colecovision used. The 8-bit NES used a descendent of that chip. Karl was on that chip's design team.)

I'm pretty sure "MOB" was the term Commodore used in connection with its VIC chips. I don't know what term General Instruments used, other than 'objects', so I adopted the Commodore name.

--Joe

Re:Lots of reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at Contiki [dunkels.com]. It is written in highly portable C and has a bunch of abstraction layers in order to achieve portability. Contiki is multi-tasking, has a full TCP/IP stack, a web browser, web server, etc. and achieves this in less than 50 K for both the code and the data.

It is not all about writing highly optimized assembler code, it is mostly about choosing the right set of abstractions so that the abstractions map nicely onto that which is abstracted.

Re:Does that mean they finally released the keyboa

[Shadwhawk]

They keyboard was released in limited test markets. 4000 were made and sold (at $600 a pop!), but Mattel recalled them all for a full refund (and those who kept theirs actually had to sign a waiver).

http://www.intellivisionlives.com/bluesky/hardwa re /

Re:Practical? lol

[caouchouc]

Not neccessarily. Good C optimization algorithms in a compiler (GCC3 is capable of some slick stuff) will produce smaller and faster code than most assembly coders, simply because it will perform optimizations coders may miss or not think of.

A simple example: It's faster to clear a register on x86 hardware by XOR'ing it with itself than it is to MOV a zero into it... even though the MOV might seem to a coder to be the most obvious thing to do.

Obsolesence can be fun.

[Agent R]

Okay.. nostalgia time for all you techie fuddy-duddies out there. (Hmmm.. +90% of the Slashdot community? :)) http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/ [obsoleteco...museum.org]