Enlarge / You're constricted to 8 files and a connection processor, but you tin enactment them anyplace you privation successful NESOS' affluent (for 1985) desktop environment.

When you played the Nintendo Entertainment System, you were adjacent to the hardware. It's wherefore you tin propulsion disconnected singular glitch hacks, similar playing Tennis to hot-boot into breached Super Mario Bros. worlds. The chips, the memory, the board—everything was designed to work the small committee wrong your cartridge (that and prevent unauthorized games). There wasn't overmuch country for thing other successful the early- to mid-1980s.

Room enough, however, for a custom-built operating strategy built successful 2022, if conscionable barely. NESOS 1.0 from Inkbox Software, a 48K OS, features "two halfway applications, the connection processor, and the settings," according to Inkbox. The settings app gives you 7 cursors, 53 inheritance colors, and the quality to delete the 8 files that tin acceptable wrong a maximum 2K of NVRAM (i.e., onboard representation that doesn't suffer information erstwhile the strategy loses power). That's 832 bytes each, oregon astir 1 afloat screen's worthy of memory. You tin resistance those 8 files anyplace you privation connected the desktop, however.

NESOS (pronounced "nee-sohs," according to its creator) is wholly graphical. Inbox notes that there's already a command-line system, Family Basic, for the NES and its Japanese progenitor, the Family Computer/Famicom. "I privation NESOS to consciousness similar an existent operating strategy that Nintendo mightiness person made backmost successful the time for the NES. What would it person looked and felt like?" the creator says successful his video overview.

Inkbox is nary alien to NES programming, nor quirky codification projects that contiguous arsenic fantastic art. They antecedently built a fruit-based MMO successful little than 40 hours (seemingly nary longer active), a Super Mario ROM Hack that refashioned the crippled successful the benignant of the Ming Dynasty communicative Journey to the West, and a Chinese connection processor for the Apple II, made natively connected the Apple II.

Enlarge / The settings app successful NESOS, which besides works arsenic a record manager. You tin prime customized colors and a cursor, including Kirby.

The NES gave Inkbox 2 256-slot grids of sprite representation to enactment with, 1 for foreground and 1 for background, though the strategy tin lone amusement 64 sprites astatine a time. You tin harvester the 8×8 sprites into larger shapes, however, for the OS and UI. As for input, a keyboard was bundled with immoderate versions of Family Basic, the HVC-007. Inkbox imported the characters utilized successful Super Mario Bros., gave the keyboard immoderate further shortcuts, and helium had a tiny typing app going. If you're utilizing a modular NES controller, you're holding A to rhythm done characters, tapping B arsenic your abstraction bar, and holding Select with either of those keys to reverse them.

Inkbox's video goes connected to explicate however this each works successful NES memory, involving manipulation of the Picture Processing Unit (PPU), giving his virtual NES cartridge the aforesaid benignant of retention that battery-backed games had, and shuttling each file, byte by byte, betwixt them.

You tin download an emulator-friendly ROM of NESOS astatine Inkbox's site oregon astatine ROMHacking. A two-frame, eight-pixel hat-tip to Hackaday for pointing america toward this marvel.