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Running Ancient UNIX On Nintendo Gameboy

Posted by timothy on from the does-it-play-space-travel dept.

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!"

7 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great web site and a good read by Evangelion · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nintendo Corporation, Limited was originally founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce handmade hanafuda (Japanese playing cards).

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo

  2. Re:Great web site and a good read by vaderhelmet · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nintendo's Official History
    http://www.nintendo.com/corp/history.jsp

  3. Input by lachlan76 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Great web site and a good read... But FLAW by johnjones · · Score: 5, Informative

    their are a couple of flaws

    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/hse02 00 6/uclgba/gba-howto/

    regards

    John Jones

  5. Re:And also ... by makomk · · Score: 2, Informative
    But does it run Linux?

    Sadly, the GameBoy Advance doesn't have a MMU. Otherwise, I'm sure someone would be trying to port Linux to it already...

  6. Re:Great web site and a good read... But FLAW by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Informative
    they simulate a PDP11 on a game boy advance simulator running on a mac/pc

    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."

  7. Re:And also ... by McCall · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.