nintendo nes was one of the most important gaming consoles throughout history and one of the key pillars of the growth of today’s Japanese giant during the 1980s. It was also a great success in Spain and I am absolutely sure that many of our readers, especially the oldest ones, will remember it fondly.

As this is an 8-bit system with very limited resources (it used a CPU Ricoh 2A07 @ 1.66MHz in Europe and had 2 KB of RAM) didn’t have an operating system itself, which meant the console didn’t show anything unless a cartridge was inserted, unless it had games in memory, in which case it ran them directly or displayed a menu to choose one of them. .

A lot has happened since the Nintendo NES hit the market, and today it’s just a thing for collectors and retro enthusiasts, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some untapped potential even with all the years it’s had. NES-OS is a clear example of this, it is about an operating system tuned and tweaked enough to run on a Nintendo NESand no, it’s not just limited to command lines, but has a very distinctive graphical interface, almost typical of what we might expect from a game for that console.

The fact that it managed to develop an operating system for the Nintendo NES is already an achievement in itself, but the fact that it works with an easy-to-use graphical interface is already worth mentioning. We must not forget that when this console hit the market, computers equipped with operating systems based on a graphical user interface they were rare and prohibitively expensive. The real democratization of the user interface in the PC world came in the mid-1990s with Windows 95.

On the other hand, creating an operating system for the Nintendo NES is a huge challenge because it ends up being a system with only 2 KB of RAM and a CPU that barely reaches 1.66 MHz. Nintendo NES and is also compatible with the keyboard that was released in Japan for the Famicom.

Interestingly, although this operating system only allows us to do two things, access to an application called “Settings” and a word processor. Yes, you can turn a Nintendo NES into a word processor, and if you have a keyboard, you can enjoy a truly unique retro experience. However, keep in mind that you will only be able to create files with max 832 characters (Each of these characters takes up one byte.) In total, we will be able to create nine text files with the specified number of characters, which corresponds to the 8 KB of NVRAM that the Nintendo NES cartridge has.