Quick Question, Does anybody know if the Original Operating System Kernel for ETC/ Strand/ Hogg and MA consoles? Was it Free BSD, or was it A Purchased DOS? I Know that The ExpressLine was DOS baised, but any extra information in this realm would be useful.
I think most people would be surprised about the early systems in consoles. Many could not support the overhead of an OS due to the expense of required hardware. Below is from a software engineer at ETC that has been here since the early 90s.
Expression No operating system - i960 processor doesn't run DOS.
Some would call this a bare board system. We designed and wrote all the code including boot loaders, drivers and device managers.
Hog 1k was a fully written kernel afaik, Hog3 is Windows CE (Embedded XP), GrandMA 1 is running VxWorks and GrandMA 2 is Linux, but some realtime optimised version thereof.
I have actually done a bit of playing with the MA 2 OS here.
Very Cool. That's about what I thought, My Boss asked me to do some digging, and I've been playing around with Linux a bit myself, so i thought it would be a good question for the Forum. I've heard that Hog was not a huge fan of Windows. Even though from what I can tell ETC is loving it right now. And I was pretty sure that MA was Linux based but I wasn't sure. Can you tell me a bit more about what you've been doing with the MA 2 OS or is is kind of Hush hush? Also does anybody else see a Bold New Future for Microsoft?
I greatly prefer linux over windows for an embedded OS. Mainly for boot times, no one wants to wait a minute plus for a console to boot up. AVO went from linux under their pearls to windows and the boot time jumped way way up.
Turns out you can grab the latest update images and unzip them, mount them on a linux machine and make a bootable image for use on a virtual machine with them. With some playing on scripts you can stop them halting boot on not detecting a dongleetc. That was about as far as I got, but its a good lesson in looking at how the systems work.
Hog 1k was a fully written kernel afaik, Hog3 is Windows CE (Embedded XP), GrandMA 1 is running VxWorks and GrandMA 2 is Linux, but some realtime optimised version thereof.
I have actually done a bit of playing with the MA 2 OS here.