Linux for Nintendo 64 (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Linux for Nintendo 64 (1997)

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65 pointsflykespice23 comments

In case anyone can't tell from the poorly photoshopped image and the "text input via analog stick rotation" input method, this is an old April Fool's article. See https://groups.google.com/g/fr.comp.os.linux/c/4xO1IcKhRnc/m... for confirmation.

> each character is represented by a 3 degree angle of the analog stick

This humor is golden. Now I have even more reason to keep my stock sticks in working order.

They had me until the analog stick bit NGL

The Netscape thing isn't that far-fetched, though. Sega Saturn had PlanetWeb in 1996: https://segaretro.org/NetLink_Custom_Web_Browser

And I 'member the LinksBoks web browser on XBOX in the 2000s that had workable input via analog stick. Point the stick at one of the clusters of letters and press one of four colored face buttons: https://web.archive.org/web/20050903121908/http://ysbox.onli...

The PSP had a web browser, as well, with d-pad input.

The Sega Dreamcast, from a similar era, had a modem for Internet access and web browser.

The N64 had the 64DD/Randnet in Japan which included a modem and web browser.

The modern version, that's for real:

https://github.com/clbr/n64bootloader/tree/master/n64linux

It's got busybox, we're in!

I found a video of a n64 port in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjG6_UY0ou4

I seem to remember that "runderwo" was working on porting Linux to the N64 back in the "Dextrose" days, when the N64 scene was still active. I can't find much information on his port, but I did find a reference to it here: http://n64.icequake.net/#projects

Reminds me of the Slashdot days -- "Linux on [insert device]" articles seemed to pop up every other week. Classic stuff!

Immediately answered with a "what if you made a beowulf cluster of those!?" comment

Interestingly every Famicom and Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980's shipped with modem capability. Hiroshi Yamauchi the CEO thought the Nintendo Network could be a big play. It never panned out but it was a proprietary pre-internet dial up system.

I read about this in "Game Over" by David Sheff, but here's another source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System

The modem was an external add-on, there wasn't any special support for it built into the consoles. I think one reason why it wasn't a big success was that a lot of its appeal was being able to easily do stock trades and check your brokerage account from home, and the Japanese stock market started its decline in the early 90s. I don't think many people were excited to subscribe to a service whose main purpose was showing them how much money they were losing.

Interestingly, the JRA (Japanese horse racing association) continued accepting remote bets from Famicom modem users until 2015. Here's a video of someone placing a bet in 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks0JeyhZsR4

I was skeptical about this claim, as the NES and Famicom are pretty simple at the end of the day, and apparently the NESWiki[1] says that there's a second CPU handling modem capabilies with UART communication to a modem controller. Usually networking gear before VLSI has a second off the shelf CPU on the board.

[1] https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/Family_Computer_Network_System

I was skeptical about this claim

If the Atari 2600 could do it, pretty much anything can.

IIRC, the 2600 had one service that would do it over a dialup modem, and another that got the data from your local cable TV company.

Do you mean the Intellivision PlayCable?

Yeah, there's no way the Famicom/NES could do audio modulation/demodulation through phone lines to directly be a modem itself. It doesn't have a real audio input, and doesn't have an audio output separate from what's going to the TV.

There is a YouTube video out there of what I believe is a Russian dude copying a Dendy or Famicom cartridge through sound, though. The system is powered up with the copier cart. The copier cart copies its code to the system's 2K of RAM, and runs from there. You then remove the copier cart and insert the game you want to copy. This makes the screen garbled as you are removing the graphics data from reach of the PPU, but the code continues to run as the CPU is not reset. The copier cart will then iterate through each byte of the cart and emit FSK tones through the system's audio out which you can record and then convert to an .nes file with a utility. I suppose it has to know the mapper involved and such.

But there's no way for the NES to shove that modulation through a separate audio out (and definitely no real audio input).

Now the Famicom/NES does have a few GPIO-like lines through the expansion connector, so bit-banging a UART I guess would be possible (if appropriate converters for the voltage are present), but it couldn't be very fast as the CPU has to service the PPU every frame with OAM DMA writes if sprites are enabled.

The Commodore 64 RS-232 built-in capability was driven entirely with software and it didn't go faster than 2400 baud.

What was once a prank...

https://hackaday.com/2021/01/01/a-fresh-linux-for-the-most-u...

So what happened to it?

I don't know what ever happened to Netscape's version, but various homebrew attempts have been made.

One Linux on N64 project was discussed here a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539319

There was a version of Mosaic in the SharkWire Online device, recently there have been some efforts to make that more usable without the SharkWire, though I don't think much is public yet, some discussion about the ROM here https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1i2odym/update_f...

1997 will be the year of Linux on the console.

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