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software:operating_systems

M1 Opera Portfolio OS

The 3DO Opera platform ran an OS called Portfolio. Developed internally at NTG/3DO by several of the same people who developed the operating system for the Amiga computer, Portfolio takes many of its design cues from Amiga. Indeed, Amiga programmers will find Portfolio quite familiar. However, Portfolio addresses many of the shortcomings leveled against Amiga, making it quite advanced for the early 1990's, particularly when compared to more popular operating systems such as MS-DOS.

Among other features, Portfolio provides:

  • Preemptive threading/multitasking
  • User/supervisor separation
  • Memory protection (MMU/fences) and process separation
  • Resource tracking – memory and I/O resources are released when a process dies
  • Asynchronous, high-level I/O system
  • Shared libraries
  • Dynamically loaded libraries and device drivers
  • Message-based IPC
  • Custom filesystem
  • Extensible global error codes
  • Input handling for joypads, joysticks, mice, and light gun

On 2022-01-07 a snapshot of the M1 Opera's Portfolio OS from 1995-02-10 was uploaded to Archive.org by user EagleSoft. The content is mirrored here.

Find development documents here: development_documents

Things that this source could be used for:

  • Create a new version of the system for new development (fix bugs, add features, remove limitations, allow hardware access, etc.)
  • Port to run on top of modern operating systems
  • Use the details found in the drivers to improve open source emulation

M2 Portfolio OS v3.0

Portfolio was ported to the M2. If you look at the 1995-02-10 dump of Portfolio you can see early work to get it to work on PowerPC.

On 2022-01-10 a snapshot of Portfolio OS v3.0 from approximately 1996-12-14 was shared by YouTuber and M2 collector Video Game Esoterica. He had acquired a collection of archives from a former M2 engineer some time ago and thought he had shared them all with other members of the 3DO community. He hadn't. After doing so it was quickly realized he had been sitting on the source code to the M2 operating system as well as numerous tools.

On 2022-01-20 EagleSoft released a slightly earlier version of the source from 1996-11-26.

software/operating_systems.txt · Last modified: 2022/01/20 19:32 (external edit)