Nintendo ES Operating System

A while back I remember reading about the Nintendo ES OS. Its a reference OS based on ECMAScript (ES) aka Javascript. Every once in a while I get a wild hair up my arse to go and check out the status of this project; because I one day hope to see what the dealio is. And when I get the hankering to go and see whats going on, it is ALWAYS a pain to find information. Mostly because you can't quickly find it using the google terms "nintendo javascript engine" or the likes... I found it this time by searching google for: "nintendo ecmascript". What I found was a link to gamasutra.com about the nintendo es os which lead me to nes.nintendo.jp which lead me to Google Code.

GamaSutra -> Japanese SourceForge -> Google Code

FYI, Those tardhammers over at gamasutra borked the link to nes.sourceforge.jp and it gives a 404. Its on account that they added a space (%20) at the end of their href.

SO to not have to go searching very far, I'm documenting this...

Nintendo ES Operating System @ code.google.com

Here's an excerpt from the google code page:

ES is an ECMAScript friendly, pure component operating system. Additional components include an ECMAScript interpreter and an IDL compiler.

The project goals include but not limited to:

• a pure component operating system kernel design and development
• a component object binding runtime implementation for ECMAScript
• an HTML5 rendering engine integration
• a TCP/IP stack implementation based on design pattern

Jonny Lee TED 2008 Wii-mote presentation

This is nothing new, but I wanted to track this great video of Jonny Lee's wii-mote presentation at the 2008 TED convention. Along with a couple of other links that reference this type of work.

Managed Library for Nintendo's Wiimote
Wii headtracking Creates 3D Window Display
Incredible Wiimote Hack Creates Multitouch Display

Steamworks

For those of you who know me in real life, I have aspirations and dreams. One of those is to transform some of the stories swimming around my gray matter into video games. I am very busy so usually I write them down (50% of the time) and I move on... However, after talking with BDog (he is a game developer working on a game for Dark Omen Studios) today, we discussed Valve's Steamworks. GREAT IDEA!

Steamworks opens Steam up to any developer. This is awesome, however, I see where this could go bad very quickly. This promises to get flooded with a crap-ton (on US Metric System) of horrible games. Is this asking for the good to get lost in the sea of mediocrity? Or will good games really shine through?

Valve Source on Linux

So todays big nerd proggy news is that Valve is porting their Source engine to Linux. Wow. This is great. I'm a *nix fan stuck in a Windows world by 2 traps: my dev suites and games. With Id Software and Valve putting out Linux clients, I don't see how this isn't a win. Lets just hope that Epic doesn't get purchases by M$ or we'll never see that UT3 linux client.