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Comment by Zaak | Hacker News Reader

I expect that there will be some kind of default OS released with the game, and that many alternatives will pop up very quickly.

It will not run Linux, because Linux requires a 32-bit CPU with megabytes of RAM. Someone might write a Linux-like system for it though.

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Most likely it won't need anything other than some very basic firmware which would be part of the emulator.

It is unlikely to need any mechanism for managing drivers for example (unless you can build custom hardware). You might need some form of scheduler if you are running different programs to do different stuff (weapons , engines , navigation) but this could be something very simple and again baked into the emulator.

Some form of shell might be nice, but again not necessarily required.

You could run your spaceship computer like that, but you could also install a multitasking system that allows you to download files from your favorite space BBS while playing a game of solitaire and plotting the course to your next mining asteroid.

Notch suggested on twitter that there would be more than 1 CPU for each ship , so I imagine multitasking would work that way.

Not to mention a MMU. Of course that didn't stop someone from implementing an ARM emulator on an AVR and running Linux on it... http://hackaday.com/2012/03/28/building-the-worst-linux-pc-e...

The project website: http://dmitry.co/index.php?p=./04.Thoughts/07.%20Linux%20on%...

Actually, uClinux doesn't require an MMU, and it's been merged into the main line of kernel development.

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