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New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

lore.kernel.org

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Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#61

Post by weare138 »

laoganmaplz wrote: post #32
weare138 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.

Fascinatingly, quite the opposite! For example, the original Macintosh had only a small fraction of that to work with, at 128 Kilobytes![1] Certainly a modern GUI a la KDE, Gnome and friends would be well outside of its abilities, but a functional GUI is possible on a shockingly small amount of memory! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

Ok I should have clarified that, I meant available Linux GUI's in reference to OP and IRIX. You'd have to create something from scratch. I don't think you could cram a GUI on par with IRIX in 4mb.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#62

Post by kibwen »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #54
rvz wrote: post #5

> "But why", I hear from the back. Having Linux available makes it easier to port emulators and fb or console games. > Most importantly, because I can. Good. All I can say is at least it is something different to what I keep seeing on HN. (React, Rust, Kubernetes, JAMstack, JavaScript, etc.) Probably present this somewhere in a conference (CCC, FOSDEM, etc). Who knows who could be looking at this.

> and fb or console games. Btw., what are "fb games"?

Possibly a typo of "hb" for "homebrew"?

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#63

Post by dietrichepp »

This is, of course, cool. No doubt. I have an EverDrive 64 and I’ll probably test this out later today or tomorrow.

I am skeptical that this would be the preferred way to port emulators or graphical games. You’re not getting a budget SGI workstation out of this, because the OS kernel itself is only a small part.

The N64 is built around a chip called the Reality Control Processor, or RCP. This contains the RSP, stripped-down MIPS CPU core with a fixed-point SIMD vector unit, and the RDP, a rasterization engine that does simple trilinear texture interpolation and color blending. This is the hard part of programming the N64, and it’s not something that’s addressed by swapping out the OS kernel.

There are… a number of major challenges you will still have to face if you want to make homebrew software for the N64, unless you are okay with just having something on the CPU and writing to the framebuffer.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#64

Post by tbrock »

eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote: post #54
rvz wrote: post #5

> "But why", I hear from the back. Having Linux available makes it easier to port emulators and fb or console games. > Most importantly, because I can. Good. All I can say is at least it is something different to what I keep seeing on HN. (React, Rust, Kubernetes, JAMstack, JavaScript, etc.) Probably present this somewhere in a conference (CCC, FOSDEM, etc). Who knows who could be looking at this.

> and fb or console games. Btw., what are "fb games"?

Frame buffer

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#65

Post by badsectoracula »

laoganmaplz wrote: post #32
weare138 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the N64 only has 4MB of ram, I think a GUI would be beyond it's capabilities. Still a cool project though.

Fascinatingly, quite the opposite! For example, the original Macintosh had only a small fraction of that to work with, at 128 Kilobytes![1] Certainly a modern GUI a la KDE, Gnome and friends would be well outside of its abilities, but a functional GUI is possible on a shockingly small amount of memory! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

IIRC from a talk a few years ago, Xorg can be stripped down to around 600KB, so you could probably have a minimal X environment.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#67

Post by octotoad »

nine_k wrote: post #26
Causality1 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the many ways in which Machine Learning will revolutionize X.

Could it finally revolutionize porting Linux to new architectures?

We'll surely need to pivot to a blockchain solution first.

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#69

Post by boogies »

badsectoracula wrote: post #65
laoganmaplz wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinatingly, quite the opposite! For example, the original Macintosh had only a small fraction of that to work with, at 128 Kilobytes![1] Certainly a modern GUI a la KDE, Gnome and friends would be well outside of its abilities, but a functional GUI is possible on a shockingly small amount of memory! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K

IIRC from a talk a few years ago, Xorg can be stripped down to around 600KB, so you could probably have a minimal X environment.

TinyCore (on the frontpage a while ago) fits an OS with a FLTK/FLWM desktop in 16 MB of storage⁰, but it requires a bare minimum of 46 MB of RAM to boot (regardless of swap space, which it recommends along with 128 MB of RAM).¹

OTOH KnightOS² (not Linux) has a rudimentary (obviously not Xorg) GUI that IIUC runs on TI-73 series graphing calculators with 25 KB of RAM.

⁰http://tinycorelinux.net/welcome.html ¹http://tinycorelinux.net/faq.html#req ²https://knightos.org/

Re: New Linux port for the Nintendo 64

#70

Post by naikrovek »

dietrichepp wrote: post #63

This is, of course, cool. No doubt. I have an EverDrive 64 and I’ll probably test this out later today or tomorrow. I am skeptical that this would be the preferred way to port emulators or graphical games. You’re not getting a budget SGI workstation out of this, because the OS kernel itself is only a small part. The N64 is built around a chip called the Reality Control Processor, or RCP. This contains the RSP, stripp…

I don't think anyone is claiming that the N64 is finally unleashed with this, or anything.

It will knock down an entry barrier for some people, though, and there's no harm in that at all.

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