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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 has been in the gaming business since 1889
I believe this is when they came out with their first two hits, Horse and Buggy Kong and Prairie Invaders.
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. The site is well laid out and easy to follow. The history lesson alone is worth the time spent.
Cheers,
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
... but that guy better watch out. It'll be a race between Nintendo and SCO to see who can sue him first! ;)
If they aren't careful, Darl will start sueing Nintendo for runnning unlicensed code.
Whenever I see stories like this I am reminded of Installing Linux on a Dead Badger.
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Nintendo originally started out selling "Hanafunda" playing cards, 48 card decks that soon became popular with Yakuza for high stakes gambling.
So, in a way, Nintendo's empire was built thanks to gangsters.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
NO, not Unix 5th Edition, should have used NetBSD, mind you probably already been done so....
checks site.....
hmm apparently not, but lots of ARM ports should be doable..
it reminds me some odd april fool
...try not to mention "ancient eunuchs" and "gameboys" in the same sentence.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Nintendo has been in the gaming business since 1889.
His dates are flawed. Nintendo's been making games since 475 B.C. when the first version of "The Great Wall Tycoon" came out. Man, talk about addictive....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I wonder if... with a little work, this could be used as a 2004 presidential voting machine?
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.
You can actually use the GBA for a lot more than just UNIX -- one can import flash RAM packs and then put whatever they want on it. Check out some options.
/. to expose the world to the many functions of the GBA(?)!
You can even put different emulators and ROMs all on the same cartridge and then use a shell to organize and manage everything. I have an NES, SMS adn PC Engine Emulator with some of my favorite games from each system as well as 4 full GBA ROM images.
You can also check out one of my GUI interfaces to use with the shell.
I think we're a pretty underground group here (GBA flash RAM users), but who knows -- mabye I just used
Two freaks, no foes. It takes absolutely nothing to make some people angry.
When I first read the headline I thought it was refering to the original gameboy with the tiny black and white screen and I didn't really see the point of doing it.
Although, even now I know which one it is I'm still not entirely convinced this is all that useful either!
I'm probably just missing the point, which is something like because I can!
can it run a gameboy emulator??
It's a couple of years old now, but Adrian O'Grady developed a TCP/IP stack and Web server for the GameBoy Advance as part of his degree project. Source code, tips, and a pretty interesting development diary are there.
When I first saw it , I wondered how he actually typed in the C code, and then I saw the keyboard buffer code :). It'd have been fun to say, to save in ED, press Down Down , Up Left, X (Mortal Kombat memories).
Lookup Unix Version7 sources which have been ported to run on 32 Bit CPUs . With a 50k kernel binary and similarly shrunk libs , it's a nice thing to play around with.
I've been planning to play around with gpsim and gpsim-lcd for sometime nowQuidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The Workboy had a keyboard, a database management system (?) and more. A Google search for "Workboy" and Gameboy returned like five results, two Slashdot...
Good description, picture won't load
"Retro Space", picture Translation
The first link says they are "rare" too bad, I still want one.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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...
Control-Alt-Delete has been replaced by Up-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right-B-A
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."
What can you do with it? I'm not impressed with Linux on an iPod or Unix in the game boy or Linux in the XboX things... If you can't DO anything productive with it, It's useless. I don't care if you can put Linux in my digital watch.
MadOgre.com
A couple of years ago there were an article about using a Sega Dreamcast as hacking station. You hide the Dreamcast, plug it into the network, boot it with a special CD, and let it go. The Dreamcast would probe the network until it found a way out. Once it did it would hit a website, determined by you, with network's setup information; you could execute commands on your Dreamcast node and effect the network.
The same could be done here. Upload your ROM in to you host GBA; do this so that when the battery dies, so does the evidence. Create a serial connection to a cheap network adaptor or get one of the GBA Bluetooth adapters floating around. Now you have a low cost battery operated hacking machine. For under $200 you could compromise a network and be virtually untraceable.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
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.
Does this mean we'll soon see pages proudly displaying at the bottom:
"This page hosted on a 1997 Nintendo Game Boy."
I think I'd rather see a potato-powered server....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......