http://gonintendo.com/?p=30933
I heard about this OS a few days back, but I honestly didn’t think much of it. Now Gamasutra has an article up about it, and they’ve pieced together some interesting information.
Nintendo has put out an open-source OS called the ES. The ES “runs natively on x86 (and qemu of course), kernel is written in C++, uses an ECMAScript interpreter for all of the userland, uses Cairo for graphics, and even has a port of [programming language] Squeak.” All of that means absolutely nothing to me! The interesting bit comes from the discussion of what the purpose of the ES is.
It may mean absolutely nothing, or it might be the beginning framework for an XNA-like service on the Wii. For those that don’t know, XNA is a game dev tool that allows users to create their own games…with some knowledge of programming languages of course. Could the Wii be heading in that direction? No one knows right now, but Nintendo obviously has something in mind for this project.
