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Running Ancient UNIX On Nintendo Gameboy
An anonymous reader writes "Amit Singh has a piece on his site about running the 5th edition UNIX distribution on a Nintendo Gameboy, of all things. Tons of screenshots and source included but what really makes this entertaining and informational in an ubergeekly sort of way is his side stories on UNIX history ... ARM CPU ... compiling and running random programs on the Gameboy, etc. There are even notes on recompiling the original Unix kernel to make it smaller for the GBA!"
Nintendo Corporation, Limited was originally founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce handmade hanafuda (Japanese playing cards).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo
Nintendo's Official History
http://www.nintendo.com/corp/history.jsp
I don't have a GBA, but how easy would it be to input commands into one?
I am aware that commands currently need to be selected at compile-time.
It's interesting, but doesn't have a lot of practial uses.
Nintendo has been in the gaming business since 1889
On a more serious note, this is well worth the time to read. It is fairly long but well written (other than a few tiny errors as above) and extremely informative.
Actually, that was not an error. Nintendo has been in business in the gaming area way before the advent of computer games. They started out as a Hanafuda (traditional Japanese) playing cards company. They also made Mahjong boards, and western style playing cards. In the long history of Nintendo, computer games has been a very recent event, which started when Nintendo first created the "Game Watch" series, and later released the Nintendo in the early (19)80's.
their are a couple of flaws
2 00 6/uclgba/gba-howto/
o 1 the game boy is not running unix
o 2 they dont have a game boy they have the game boy advance
o 3 they simulate a PDP11 on a game boy advance simulator running on a mac/pc
instead why dont you look at howto use uclinux on GBA...
http://wwwhsse.fh-hagenberg.at/Studierende/hse0
regards
John Jones
Sadly, the GameBoy Advance doesn't have a MMU. Otherwise, I'm sure someone would be trying to port Linux to it already...
There is a version of Rogue for GBA, which happens to work quite well, at : http://www.freewebs.com/drussell/
From TFA: "You can try gbaunix either using a Game Boy Advance emulator, or on a real Game Boy Advance. For the latter, you would need, say, a flash-based cartridge and a flash programmer."
But the worst limitation is "gbaunix does not have an input mechanism currently. You can only execute a canned sequence of UNIX shell commands. The sequence must be specified at compile-time as an array of strings in gba/gba_kbd.h in the source. While UNIX is running, pressing the START button feeds the next command line into the TTY's input buffer."
ucLinux is in the process of being ported to the Gameboy Advance, as can be seen here.. It seems like its getting to be quite usable, if your pretty good with a directional contral pad and 4 buttons...
I could imagine that the serial port could be used for some sort of network input like this guy did here.