Mostly right, but Nintendo actually had a licensed developer program in Japan, too, where you'd get console documentation and such, and access to Nintendo's mapper chips. But they had no way to force third parties to use their licensing program there, since the famicom had no lockout chip (10NES). The Super Famicom "corrected" this.

I don't think this is a duplicate question, since this is about trying to use a laptop display for displaying an external video source (which is non-trivial). BTW, your best bet is a capture card, but beware of latency.

@supercat not only that, but the 2600 also has less that can be offloaded onto the TIA (graphics chip), so more CPU cycles were likely being used for drawing the game objects as well.

eh, I've programmed on the NES. It's quite hard to wrap my mind around writing a program in assembly and juggle the audio and video work simultaneously in a sane manner.

Wouldn't having a separate CPU for audio simplify the creation of an engine, though? Just write to the shared memory from the 68k when you want the Z80 to play a sound, and let the Z80's program handle it from there. Versus trying to manage graphics without letting the audio hang on a single CPU (lots of juggling).

@Wilson yeah Ranger was the name of a chipset that was being designed as the successor for the original chipset, but which was apparently cancelled in favor of ECS due to cost.

@dirkt oh, and I did find a fix the Open Watcom C compiler's installer (which was tripping up on xterm and similar terminals) using it :) github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/issues/225

@dirkt nothing particularly custom. I mostly use it for fun and because I like the font. I play some ncurses games, and also test some of my programs to make sure they aren't assuming a VT100 or xterm is being used. Also, I've hunted down a couple nano/emacs/joe bugs.

@dirkt my IBM 3161 uses RS232 and offers both block and character oriented modes. I use it with my linux systems. But for most of them, this is definitely true.

Don't get me wrong, I have an amiga and love it, but this sounds more like an answer to the question "What is the best home computer? (+1 per HHGttG reference)" than an answer to the question that was asked. I also have OS/2 Warp Connect on CD-ROM's, but it still not really pertinent since that's software rather than hardware.