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GameBoy Web Server
Huma79 writes "Adrian O'Grady has successfully gotten TCP/IP and PPP working on his handheld Gameboy Advance for a web server. Pictures of the server running and a telnet session to it can be found at fivemouse.com."
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maybe he intends to build a beowulf clu*WHACKWHACKWHACK* OW DAMNIT! I didn't say it! I *SWEAR!*
Because you can.
The motto of all true engineers.
Carousel is a lie!
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
I'd like to see a program written for the Gamecube and/or PC(this includes macs, etc.) that allows you to connect your gameboy advance (for the gamecube there is already the GCN-GBA link) and play with other GBA players over the internet (when the NIC for the Gamebue is available) as if GBA's were directly linked.
Right now, I'm mainly thinking about playing Golden Sun against other people.
I can see now: Access Denied. You are not allowed to view /personalrecords.pl until you have successfully found all 6 Diamond Crystals and converted them to Gaia Armor or until you have beaten stage 4 in the Darm Realm, "Ville of the Damned."
add more excitement to that dull intarnet!
Does anyone else hear the rumble of Nintendo closing in on this poor chap? I think it's sad when I read something like this and I first think "Oh cool. That's really smart, useless but cool." and then I cringe thinking about people like him getting squashed in litigation. I got five bucks that says he gets a cease and desist letter...
/. pessimism. You decide.
Heh, that or I've been successfully turned to
--I hate big sigs.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
It's amazingly easy to write programs for the Gameboy Advance. Since it has an ARM processor, gcc is readily available, and there is a strong developer community. Even a programming novice could probably write a few decent demos or games. For anyone who is interested in game programming, check out gbadev.org.
Don't be intimidated; the webserver looks like it took a lot more work than it would take to create a game. The hardest part for his project was probably establishing a PPP link.
I haven't heard of Nintendo exactly "closing in" on other projects for the GBA, such as an NES emulator or the Afterburner front-light mod....
:)
By the way, the NES emulator alone is worth getting a GBA for - not some dumb old webserver that nobody (especially not the Big N) is going to care about
AC
If you're just going to sit there doing only "useful" stuff that's completely original, you aren't going to get much done.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
PPP on a gameboy? What's next? I know I, for one, will not be happy until somebody TCP/IP-izes my old Atari 2600...
the Spud Server!!
-raph
Yeah, echo server is all and good, but I'd like to see them get Apache 2.0 on there.
Oh.. that's right... no mod_pearl. Oh well.
Quite true that this is useless to you/the world, but to him, the person that did this, he has learned a great deal. I mean, what have you done? what "valuable" asset have you produced? [I'm not saying this to say that you are worthless, but to point out that big things tend to start out small. Look at Napster for example, I don't think Shawn Fanning sat down one day and decided to make an P2P app to turn the record industry on its head...]
In addition, it just shows that the same thing that all these bloated programs/os's that we have out there can be done on a rather small device with limited hardware. I remember back in the days when the ultimate thing was to be able to design a graphic intense demo using only 640K. I keep seeing it all the time and it's just getting worse. Lazy coders and uneducated programmers don't bother writing code that can be done with 25% less lines or 25% less resources just because right now there's no need. The hardware is far ahead of the software demands. This typically leads to bloat.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
If he didn't have a super mushroom he'd never survive all those SYN packets...
sorry, he ment " because you can, the motto of a true hacker (in the classical sence of thew term)"
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Basically, porting linux would be fairly difficult. Since the GBA doesn't have an MMC, you can only port embedded versions, like ucLinux, without serious work. The hardware is also totally foreign, so in the end, it's pretty damn hard to do.
Not impossible, but still really hard.
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
If all you can see is he learned about writing web servers for GBA, and you think this is not a very marketable skill, then you are very myopic.
I prefer to look at it this way: the guy probably learned a fair bit about embedded programming (on a very constrained system no less), along with networking.
The Next Big Thing for console games (disclaimer: I work for EA) is going to be to get them online and networked.
Hmmm.... put those two together, and I'll bet even you can figure out where I'm going with this....
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
Quite true that this is useless to you/the world, but to him, the person that did this, he has learned a great deal. I mean, what have you done? what "valuable" asset have you produced?
Yes, I'd agree. Probably the most useful things I did was to write a ROM ripper for the C-64 to read game cartridges, and a graphic printer driver for the MPS 802 printer (No mean feat - it only had one 8x8 graphic character per line - boy did that print head fly with all those carriage returns).
Point is, neither of those things were terribly useful. So what. They were fun. I don't look back at my youth with regret because I could have done something else with my time.
To be truthful, I'm rather envious of Adrian for having the skills to do this sort of thing.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I'm having trouble seeing it as pratical or useful
;-)
So do I. Because it's not intended to be any of those. Why does everything have to be USEFUL? I bet the guy had loads of fun hacking this thing together. And besdies, it's damn cool. Oh well, I guess it should be useful to the guy who made it, since he'd have learnt a great deal in the process.
On the other hand, I fail to see how your comment is useful or practical either. It's great that you took the time to write it but I'm not gonna take it. Feel free to mod me flamebait
Don't quote me on this.
In related news, port scans of wehavethewayout.com indicate that it is running on a GameBoy Advance. It is reputed to be much more stable than the Windows IIS put in to replace the FreeBSD box.
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
If you look way down on his web page, back to the october days, he starts by creating a multi-threading kernel, and then writing alternate A's and B's to the screen. This is what Linus did when he was testing his first attempt at multi-threading two processes.
/. effect :-)
If you read through the site, you get the idea he is learning all kinds of requisite CompSci skills along the way. That's good enough reason to do a project like this.
From a late night hacking session on 3rd April 2002: I believe this may be a world first. My GBA is currently connected to the Internet (yes, if I gave you the address, you could access it right now!).
Now, if he only would post that IP address, we could see how it stands up to the
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Me and my homeboy back in the admin lab almost ten years ago, fixing 286s or 8088s, i forget, got the idea to see how many monitors and separate video cards we could put in one box. When our supervisor walked in, he said "Are all those monitors running off that one computer? Why do you have three monitors attached to it?"
We replied, "Because four wouldn't work."
This is taken from an interview with the author http://www.consolevision.com/features/interviews/g ba/adrianon.shtml
"I wanted to write something that was technically perfect but practically useless so that the university couldn't make any money out of my project. "
for the same reason writers write novels and not instruction manuals.
or something.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
blah. This is taken from an interview with the author http://www.consolevision.com/features/interviews/g ba/adrianon.shtml
"I wanted to write something that was technically perfect but practically useless so that the university couldn't make any money out of my project. "
i like girls
Ok we can explain this easily...
If you wanted to write a comms protocol for the GBA that was a standard (TCP/IP over ppp) to write a game that can play against multiple players you (if you have a brain) use an established and open protocol. now you need to figure out how to write clients and servers... well the easiest thing to write is a http server.
this guy wrote it for learning.. he now has the tools to make something really cool for the GBA.
this is why.. edu-ma-cation and learning and research.
why did we go to the moon? we knew what was there. so why did we kill 3 astronauts, and waste gagillions to do it? we could have just bought a 30 billion dollar telescope to look at it.
understand now?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, supposedly the largest (EP)ROM you can buy right now is 255 Mbit (note, not megabyte, megabit, so 32 megabytes).. can Linux be squeezed into such a small space and still have functionality to boot/etc? Is there even enough volatile memory available in a GBA to work? I know NetBSD was running on a Dreamcast (though I don't think they've (the developers) have gone much farther than just getting it to boot and run), so it seems reasonable to see atleast that running on the GBA's ARM processor...
Does anyone know the minimum memory/media constraints for Linux though? I've never given it much thought. =)
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
Hell yeah. I heard someone actually wrote a version of the UNIX kernel that would run on home PCs. Like anyone would ever use something like that.
Phear my l33t homepage.
"If you have to ask why, you're not a member of the intended audience. Please go on about your business and accept my apologies for this distraction."
---Bob Zinbinski, author of TTYQuake
If you ping it, will it pong?
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
The fact that it can run a web server certainly makes me overlook the "screen is too dark" issue.
It's called play. Most curious people learn through playing. A few people with Eric Cartman-like personalities, however, can't understand the concept.
soo... what games do you have for your GBA?
games? oh, I never got into the whole gaming thing.
so what are you doing with a GBA?
oh, just hosting a website or two. you know, in my spare time.
Are you happy now?
Got a website about that? I'd like to see how you built it....
Actually, in my experience, engineers will spend more time, money, and effort developing an easier, faster, more cost-efficient way than if they had just done it the normal way in the first place. :)
I skimmed some of the posts on this topic and was a little disheartened by some people's reactions to the usefulness of this hack. Let's put a couple of things into perspective:
1.) It's not a product
2.) It looks as though he just wanted to do it for shits and giggles, not seriously trying to solve any probelms other than 'it can be done.'
A lot of things we take for granted today were based on ideas that people questioned the usefulness of. Did anybody think Pong was useful? "Why would I pay $119 for a game that I could play on a pingpong table?"
Consider that usefulness depends on the individual too. You yourself may not care about running a websever on a GBA, but soembody might find an interesting use for it. If I were setting up a brand new network somewhere, I could see the potential of firing up a GBA, getting it on the network, and seeing if I could connect to it. It could be a troubleshooting device, maybe. (Although if it's connected to a Linux machine, that idea seems a little absurd. But if they made the GBA independent of it...)
What of somebody took the code from this project and made the GBA into a VNC client? I think there are sysadmins out there who would find that rather useful. Seeing as how GBA's are $70 nowadays, that could turn into an interesting product. There are some of us out there that would think it was totally cool that I could buy a GBA and get reimbursed from my company with it, heh.
Come to think of it... if the XBOX were a little more open, it could turn into one hell of a sysadmin tool....
"Derp de derp."
Somebody needs to get that dude laid.
License to "Be Silly": $0
Skills learned: priceless
Hands on tinckering is a good way to learn, even if the result is silly.
Yeah, but a webserver on a PIC is a much cooler thing. Yes, even your watch could have a web server. I'm thinking that building something cool and useful is even more l337. I think that a line of sight optikal ethernet link is pretty kewl (and useful!).
That's just my 10b cents.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
While this was meant as a joke (and moderated as "Troll"... do they hand out free crack with the 5 points?) I could point you in the right direction. Personally, I've been into hardware hacking for about 3 years now, and I have tried my hand at 10baseT. Good thing I'm an amateur too, sucess rate has only been about 50%. 802.11 is something else entirely though... I know *just* enough to know that I'll never be any sort of RF engineer. This doesn't seem as important at first, providing that you can get ahold of some sample chips, it's not like you're designing a fancy antenna, right? The thing is pretty much a 1 chip solution. The problem is, that the whole pcb itself tends to affect the signal in ways that I just can't understand, no matter how I try. I'm one of those guys, that all the physics I know, I learned from star trek (another joke, crackmoderator... besides, I just got my karma up to 40, have fun trying to knock me down).
;-)
- want-to-talk-to-you.com. I can at least walk you through the process of finagling crystal to send some sample chips (not so keen on hobbyists).
Now... have someone figure out the RF aspect of it, and I might have a shot. It wouldn't be the best designed 802.11 card ever, it would probably even be pretty skanky, but I might manage a functional design. And since this guy already has a tcp/ip stack written...
Actually, there are 2 pico ip stacks that I know of anyway, if that's even necessary. The GBA is pretty beefy, right? No longer the ugly little z80 with 32k of ram. Hell, you might even manage to funk the linux kernel and drivers well enough, to not have to worry so much about drivers. Haha, that might actually be fun, providing you can make it small enough to fit a pass through connector... play multi-player wireless (I'm not so great on the software side of things, but some sort of software shim to make it think that you were using the serial port can't be that impossible). Hell, I might even go for wireless web browsing. Does the color screen do high enough rez to get some porn on it?
If you're truly interested, email me at john.oyler@attbi.if-u-cant-figure-this-out-i-dont
If we slashdot it, will it catch on fire? I always wonder what happens to all these little webservers people keep making.. a watch, a gameboy... what will a DoS attack do to it?
Drain the batteries for sure..
- This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along, move along..
"why did we go to the moon? we knew what was there. so why did we kill 3 astronauts, and waste gagillions to do it? we could have just bought a 30 billion dollar telescope to look at it."
Because the Soviets put the first satellite and astro/cosmonaut in orbit?
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
TI-89.....
*thinks*
*laughs evily*
*disappears into darkness*
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
In other words, anybody with an EPROM burner could 'rip' a C64 cartridge
Getting off topic here, and replying to an AC post as well, but the aim was to copy the ROM to tape or disk and then run from RAM, so you didn't need any extra hardware.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Think about it... how about plugging your gba into your network and firing up a gamespy type utility on your gba
If only I could code worth a damn - this would be a great toy to port tcpdump to. Set it up to fill a flash EPROM and dump it all across the 'net to one of my own boxen, maybe, and leave it sitting in a drop ceiling somewhere.
--saint
What *I* really want is and ftp server, or SMB share, on my Clie (any palm, really). Sure would make grabbing stuff from it or putting stuff on it quite nice. It shouldn't be hard, somebody just has to write it...yeah, I know, but it's not so important to me to take my time away from other projects yet :)
When can I buy liksang items here in the USA ?!?!?!
Now. LikSang.com still sells Game Boy Advance development accessories to customers in the U.S. It has just dropped UPS for United States destinations. Just ship your accessories via EMS Speedpost, and you'll be fine.
[ /me goes back to playing his spinning tetris clone on GBA ]
Will I retire or break 10K?