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3DO 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 levelled against Amiga, making it quite advanced for the early 1990's, particularly when compared to mystifyingly 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.

Portfolio was created to ease development on the platform, but it also acted as an abstraction to the hardware so that manufacturers had more flexibility in their design and provide for compatibility with future systems (which were designed but never released to retail).

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

What is This Repo?

This repo is a copy of the Portfolio OS source code which was released by EagleSoft on 2022-01-07. While I wasn't responsible for the release of the Portfolio source code, I was in contact with the individual who did so prior to release. I also run the site 3DO Development Repo, and am the primary maintainer of the libretro 3DO emulator Opera. This repo is, at the very least, a GitHub hosted backup and reference, but may be a starting place for future development.

The initial checkin represents a snapshot of the Opera source tree from around 1995. Code revision was managed internally at NTG using RCS, but the RCS history is not present here.

Portfolio is vaguely portable, as it was successfully ported to IBM's POWER architecture (PowerPC 602) as part of the development for M2. However, that port does not appear here.