I've got something for us all to speculate on. It's something some of us have mentioned that Nintendo needs in the next system to bring them up to date feature-wise with the competition.
A background operating system that allows uniformity of function between different features and software. Such as Wii speak being independent from the game you are playing so that you can have a conversation with a friend while surfing the net, paying a game (same or different) or while browsing the WiiShop, background downloading (self explanatory), user accounts, etc. etc.
First we'll start with the Nintendo ES Operating System (NES OS?)that they were working on since way back before the release of the Wii
Inside Nintendo's ES Open-Source Operating System[...]an open-source operating system from Nintendo, titled ES[...]was made public on August 30, 2006.
[...]
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."
The OS is a 'research system,' meaning that there is no specific application for it at present, and is being used for experimentation. However, a story commenter on Gamedev.net theorizes: that it could be the framework for something like Microsoft's XNA, and is certainly expandable to platforms other than PC with a little work.
The commenter, 'ravyne2001' postulates: "Officially, it's simply a "research operating system." Something Nintendo is toying with and which may or may not lead to an eventual release in much the same way that Nintendo has always been in constant hardware development..."
"The working theory" he continues, "seems to be that this OS might be the early stages of something similar to Microsoft's XNA -- basically a sandbox environment which offers hardware acceleration and a userland based on some form of VM execution, ECMAscript in this instance. Although the current build is against X86, it could be ported over to PPC to run on the Wii, for instance."
For now, the operating system is laid bare to the public, which OSNews commentors seem to think is designed with broad adoption and simplicity in mind.
We know the next Wii needs a central OS to avoid the incompatible short sighted mess that is the current IOS we use now (older games can't use SDHC cards because it wasn't programmed for them, can't use WiiSpeak in multiplayer games because they weren't programmed for it, can't use whatever control scheme I want since it wasn't programmed for it, etc. etc.).
But the lead programmer for this ES Operating system left Nintendo for Google Japan....
http://jp.linkedin.com/pub/shiki-okasaka/7/876/5b3Shiki Okasaka’s Experience
*
Software Engineer
Google Japan Inc.
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; GOOG; Internet industry)
January 2008 — Present (2 years 4 months)
*
Group Manager
Nintendo Co., Ltd.
(Entertainment industry)
August 1998 — December 2007 (9 years 5 months)
Designed and developed the operating system for GameCube
But he is still working on the ES Operating system which just so happens to be under copyright by Nintendo & Google.
http://code.google.com/p/es-operating-system/We are creating a new pure component operating system named ES. This project was started by Shiki Okasaka and Kyu Ueno at Nintendo largely affected by Rob Pike's "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" talk in 2000. Since 2008, this project has been hosted in Google Code under the copyright of both Google and Nintendo in hope we can reach more people worldwide.
But what does all this mean? Is this something that Nintendo is hoping to make standard and use in the next home console?
Google just recently came out with their own browser and have an Operating System that soon to follow, could this code research have some overlap?
Is it possible that for the next generation Nintendo & Google team up to provide the software tools & enironment needed to build games and online infrastructure for future Nintendo systems?
"We propose an extensible component operating system architecture in which an operating system kernel uses reflection to process C++ pure virtual function based system calls and upcalls to provide a unified programming environment for application, server, and kernel development. We found that we could even develop file subsystems and a TCP/IP protocol stack on an existing operating system based on this architecture."
What does everyone think of a NintenGoogle team-up?
They do have common rivals in Apple & MS
and if the OS is any good, you can count on Sony licensing it
* just to stick it to MS... and make things harder for Apple.