Linux for the Sega MegaDrive | Hacker News Reader

Linux for the Sega MegaDrive

github.com

215 pointsHardwareLust72 comments

https://hackaday.com/2026/06/29/its-linux-on-a-sega-megadriv...

Still got my Mega Drive, purchased circa 1994. Recently brought it back to life with a Level Hike (I know, apparently RAD2x is better, anyway works well enough for me) HDMI adapter (otherwise sadly it doesn't work with new digital-only TVs), the main unit and all my old games (Sonic 1 and 2, Columns, Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle, Wonder Boy in Monster World, Shining Force (needed new battery in cartridge for save state), Sword of Vermilion) still functioning perfectly after all these years (just needed some vigorous dusting of bottom of cartridges). Got my kids on it, they love it: "dad, so cool, boots up instantly, no lag, no ads" (unlike the rubbish apps on their other devices!).

Awesome to hear that Linux has arrived on Mega Drive. Just need it to boot up (how Sonic 1 boots up saying "seee-gaah") and to drone out "liii-nuux", hahaha.

people go through so much trouble buying expensive converters, scalers, etc. to make their old games look good on their new tv when there's plenty of old CRTs at thrift stores for maybe like 50 bucks for an excellent one with all the fancy hookups like component and everything, I don't get it. I understand CRTs aren't gonna be around forever so we should in fact be working towards future proofing but, they are around now. You can even find small ones if transportation or space is an issue.

I still have two, a Trinitron and an RCE. For a while, you couldn't give these away.

I sadly had to part with a 52" projector TV that had s-video inputs. Classics games on that was a thing to behold.

Honestly, I think old games look best on modern TVs with an HDMI cable and no attempt to interlace / emulate the CRT.

Some games really needed the crt softness and blending.

It wasn't to make my old games look good - it was just to make them work, period. I only have a flat-screen TV with digital inputs, I don't have a CRT. The HDMI adapter (which includes the converter / scaler) was about 50 bucks, a CRT could have easily cost more than that (and would quite possibly have taken longer to find, would have a shorter remaining lifespan, would require more maintenance, etc). Space is an issue, I live in a small-ish apartment. I guess the retro experience would be more authentic with a CRT, but it's authentic enough for me on a modern TV, and it's simple and it works.

You're lucky, I search fairly often and never come across CRTs at thrift stores. The only option is to buy comically overpriced ones off marketplace, and I live in a large metro area.

I just emulate. So much easier

yah but then you get dropped frames and intermittent audio popping and when the game glitches or even crashes where it would do the same on real hardware, you're left wondering if it's the emulator that's fucked up. I don't wanna have to think about any of that during my leisure hours. The game owes me a good time.

I don't know what emulators you're using that gives you dropped frames. Megadrive emulation has been a solved problems for decades

> I understand CRTs aren't gonna be around forever

We're there dude. I don't know where you live, but from where I'm at, CRTs are gone. Everybody wants hundreds if not thousands for them because the only ones left are those in the hands of retro gamers. All the cheap ones are in the dump at this point.

Just a week ago, I called up the local games store to ask if they wanted my 19" CRT (for free) and they said they didn't have room for any more CRTs, so I'm going to take it to e-waste.

Where is that gold mine?

https://thecontrollab.com/

Note that the footprint of the store is very small, and CRTs are very large, so "no room" doesn't mean they have a lot. Presumably if they were flying off the shelves though, they would make room.

In the PNW, I'm seeing most 19" crts start around $50, depending on inputs and condition. But, they don't move so fast at those prices.

If you're willing to deal with people and local marketplaces, I bet you could get rid of it with relative ease.

Or people could buy an adapter to use the console with the large TV they already have than make drastic compromises on a large and heavy piece of single-use equipment

> CRTs at thrift stores for maybe like 50 bucks

I haven't seen a CRT in South Florida thrift stores in years. And when you find something on FB or other marketplaces, people want $200+

I haven't seen any CRTs displays for sale at thrift stores near me (Ohio, USA) for a decade or so. They certainly were common at one point, but that point seems to be rather far in the past.

Anyway, scalers and such: We've got a decent-sized end-of-era flat CRT TV sitting on a high shelf in a closet at the shop that I could take home and use but I really don't want to dedicate space in my house to it.

It's possible that there will never be a time when scalers will be able to fully emulate the qualities of NTSC/PAL/SECAM/whatever as displayed on a CRT, but a scaler is a lot smaller and easier to deal with.

Streets of Rage 2

Ghouls and Ghosts

Radical Rex

Jurassic Park

These megadrive games had great art and music and are still really enjoyable today

ToeJam & Earl - Jammin!

Comix Zone holds up well too I think.

Nothing beats NHL '94

Honestly, it's worth trying the Sega app on Switch / Switch 2. The games look and play great, you can save at any time, and you can "rewind" if a game gets a little too hard. The wireless controllers are also great too. (Granted, it only has Sonic 2.)

I've been slowly working through games I never got around to playing when I was a kid.

I haven't tried Sega games on Switch (and I believe some were available on Wii before that?). But I have also played some of my old games on PC emulators. "Save state" / "load state" is indeed very handy. Keyboard mappings is an inferior experience to a real controller, but meh, you get used to it.

If it's important to you, you can get authentic reproduction controllers that work with the Switch or an emulator:

https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/sega-genesis-cont...

https://shop.8bitdo.com/products/8bitdo-m30-wireless-gamepad...

and everybody clapped

Sword of Vermilion, that's not a common one.

I rented it from my local Blockbuster-type store back in the 90s ("Civic Video", was one of the bigger chains here in Australia back then), they had maybe 50+ Mega Drive titles at the time, was just random chance that they had that one. Not the best ever adventure RPG, but I enjoyed it as a kid and I still enjoy it now. I managed to buy it recently from a retro gaming store without too much difficulty, and there appear to be several original copies available for sale online.

It was made by Yu Suzuki, which I find interesting also.

Genesis does what Nintendon't.

> The lowly 68000 in the Sega doesn’t have a memory management unit required for the full Linux experience, so what’s really running here is a kernel compiled with the -nommu option.

Huh... I thought Linux actually required MMUs. I was under the impression it'd never run on these old consoles because of that. Learned something new today.

> A QEMU fork that emulates enough of the MegaDrive and the EverDrive to play with this without the real hardware is included.

That's seriously impressive.

>Huh... I thought Linux actually required MMUs. I was under the impression it'd never run on these old consoles because of that. Learned something new today.

There have been variants of the kernel around for some time that can run on microcontrollers without an MMU (mainly uCLinux).

m68knommu was merged into the mainline kernel in version 2.5.46: https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.5/ChangeLog-2.5.4...

Of course the 2.5 line was the unstable pre-release for the 2.6 kernel. That means that stable mainline linux has had nommu since 2.6.0, which was released 17 December 2003.

So yes, some time indeed.

There was no MMU in the Macintosh Classic/SE lineup which used the 68k as a CPU, but they still support the microcontroller targeted distros like uClinux. Unfortunately the tight integration with the ToolBox ROM makes it a fairly Herculean task. Microsoft bizarrely enough released Xenix for the Apple LISA as well, but that's more of a historic oddity.

Similarly, Basilisk II is a very worthy emulator for Mac 68k emulation so there's a lot to draw on for QEMU and the like.

I plan to get this working on nommu mac at some point but I don't have one yet. I have a pile of 030/040 macs. Its not mentioned but this mc68000 kernel actually uses devicetree (like arm..) so its fairly portable.

In my QEMU fork there is support for a 68000 virt machine so you can have a multi-ghz emulated 68000 with 128MB RAM (maybe more, haven't tested) if you really want that.

Much respect for your endeavours.

N.B. The Author of Chip4Mac68000 has been planning a port of uClinux in the future with his SDK which explicitly avoids using the Macintosh ROM at all, running bare metal directly on the hardware. Might be worth taking a look at if you're unfamiliar.

Interesting.. I have some experience with the macintosh ROM from trying to fix up the EMILE bootloader for Linux (its boots like grub instead of being a macos app). Getting a recent GCC etc not to mess up calling stuff in the ROM was painful but QEMU emulates enough of the Quadra 800 that I could at least debug when registers were getting trashed etc with GDB. Alas, it still has some weird issues on real machines and randomly refuses to boot.

I'm going to do a u-boot port for the Mac at some point. It'll use the ROM to get loaded and then get rid of it. That'll work on nommu and mmu Macs and make the modern linux on Mac experience a bit nicer.

Fascinating to think about the logistics with avoiding ROM – model compatiblity must've been a PITA! I'm even thinking about how to identify models – I know there's a pre-Gestalt Toolbox routine that doesn't need any Toolboxes, I guess?

there was another unix on the lisa as well

I have such fond memories of my time back in the day owning a MegaDrive. It wasn't my first or last games console, but it was my formative one. It was a time in my life when I was into video games (Sonic 2 being the only game I ever played to completion). It pleases me to realise there's still a community around the MegaDrive and - as others has said - this is so crazy but wonderful to see!

Ya same here. Sonic and on the PC, Jazz Jackrabbit. I loved that hare.

That's my experience as well - my family had a 2600, but the Genesis was our first modern (for the time) game console.

I remember fondly all the trips to the video rental store and flea market hoping to find games we could afford.

Absolutely nuts and squirrels.

Then again, I did know that the Mega Drive's CPU loadout (68000 and Z80) is the same as the first Unix machine I ever used (a TRS-80 Model 16), so running some form of Unix on it was therefore, theoretically, possible...

Very cool to see, so pointless it just had to be done.

I was wondering how it was squeezed into 64KB of RAM but it uses the 4MB on the Everdrive cart. With that it makes sense, considering Linux can run on an N64 with 4MB of RAM.

RAM is hardly the only difference between the N64 and megadrive. The N64 has an MMU for one thing

in terms of running linux, yeah it kinda is. Both archs are supported by the kernel, and the kernel doesn't need an MMU if you compile it for a system without one

No, OP is correct, you are wrong. N64 hardware is much more powerful, and the MMU makes a big difference.

I'm not denying it makes things easier. But if the question is a binary "Can it run linux?", the flowchart is pretty much "what kind of cpu does it have" and "how much ram can it use"

What a Wow, this brings back memories from my own Sega Mega Drive hacking days. About 35 years ago I built my own hardware development kit from scratch as a way to learn more about the hardware.

I documented the project here if anyone is curious: https://nestenius.se/hardware/how-i-built-my-own-sega-mega-d...

It's really fun to see Linux running on the Mega Drive. I never would have expected that back then.

That's really cool!

For my American friends who may not know this: The Sega MegaDrive console from the late 80's early 90's is what we call the Sega Genesis. When I saw this post, I assumed it was some kind of optical drive or the later released Sega CD (which the rest of the world called Mega-CD). We had a lot of good times playing Street Fighter II and Sonic on this system back in the day.

I had to look it up.

I misremembered and thought it might be what we call the Master System (SG-1000 Mk III).

Yeah I had originally titled this as "Linux on the Sega Genesis" because I thought more people would be familiar with the Genesis name as I was, but of course I was chastised for changing it and dang changed it back lol.

It runs Doom, now it runs Linux

My oscilloscope does both!

There's a future front page post waiting for whoever uses one to host their blog. I believe modem attachments existed.

Bonus points if they also developed the blog on a MegaDrive.

I was wondering what instruction set architecture the megadrive was using and came across this great article on the Motorolla 68000 and megadrive: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis...

If this inspires anyone to bust out an MD/ Genesis emu, I recommend "Subterrainia." I found it too hard in my youth, but I see now it has a near perfect learning curve. The more you play, the better you get. The controls seem impossible at first, but then you SLOWLY get comfortable with it. (Kind of like learning how to Rollerblade at age 50).

If this runs on a megadrive (Genesis), would this also boot on a Sega Nomad, the portable version of a genesis?

It should. There are some small differences between the Nomad and a normal Gen/MD, but nothing that should impact something like this

Why is the Genesis so slow? I've used Linux on other m68k "workstations" and it seemed ok.

The 68000 isn't very fast to start with and: To get the code to fit into memory the kernel is compiled with -Os and GCC makes some poor inlining choices (keeping a call to a function that writes a value to an address in a register instead of just writing to the register, ~5 instructions vs 1), the Mega Drive only has vblank for interrupts, and so on.

Original title: It’s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive

Really odd decision for it to be changed away from this original title.

And if I'm being pedantic (and I am) it's Sega Mega Drive.

Repo, which says Sega MegaDrive, is at: https://github.com/LinuxMD/linuxmd

(Disclaimer: I'm partial to "Mega Drive" myself.)

Wikipedia has this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mega_Drive_vs_Genesis.gif

blue = Mega Drive, red = Genesis

Linked here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Vid...

(didn't find the sales numbers, for those wondering. Sorry!)

I guess parent is pedantic about Megadrive instead of Mega Drive

Love that chart! It could also apply almost exactly to the "Buster Bros." artocle (everybody else other than North America knows it as "Pang"). This sort of rewriting of history is rife on Wikipedia.

We Japanese importers also knew it as Pang.

Unless you imported the PC Engine version, which was Pomping World :) but, yeah, it's called Pang. Except on Wikipedia or Moby Games.

And it really is on a MegaDrive as I only tested this stuff on a Japanese MegaDrive.

> nommuenjoyer

Apt name

It's a cool project! but best to use the original title and original source - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I've changed the title and URL to match https://github.com/LinuxMD/linuxmd and put the other URL in the toptext so people can look at it too.

Thanks Dan! Will do. I would have fixed it, but by the time I noticed the complaints, it was already too late.

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