KDE Running On A GameCube

Bruno_me writes "Some of the folks at the GameCube Linux project have gotten KDE to run on a GameCube. There's a screenshot of what it actually looks like and what it should look like. This is the first real 'GameKube.' And of course, here is the original frame buffer (dd if=/dev/fb0 of=./kde.fbdump)."

Comments

Gamecube: pretty hard to hack

[phoxix]

Unlike the Xbox or the PS2, there are no mod-chips for the gamecube. Nintendo did one hell of a job constructing this little machine.

The way to hack the Gamecube is somewhat interesting. Back in the days of the Sega Dreamcast, there was a game known as "Phantasy Star Online", which attempted to connect to a remote server to get and execute whatever code it got from the remote server.... grin :^).

When Sega ported the game to the GameCube, the exploit came with it. So what folks do is they load up Phantasy Star Online 1+11, run a "loader" on their computer (linux or windows). And have the loader on their computer send the gamecube whatever they want (home games, illegal rips, the linux kernel, etc).

This has been over-simplified greatly.

And note: some of you might be thinking about using this to play illegal copies of games. Don't bother. You end up needing to use a bazillion different loaders to load whatever game, and the network port of the Gamecube is limited to 10mbps, which makes many games unplayable.

Sunny Dubey

Re:What is this kde.fbdump garbage?

[vadim_t]

It's a dump of the framebuffer console. To view it, you've got to run Linux with vesafb, for example. Just "cat kde.fbdump > /dev/fb0". You need to use the right bit depth and resolution for it to work though, and it's not specified.

Re:Enquiring minds want to know

[danamania]

From all reports yes it booted but the color map was broken on the x server so it didn't look really great. Here is what it looks like. I think it took slightly less long than expected, only four and a half days.

nooooo. no no no.

The boot failed due to a byte-order issue with drive images made on PCs, and failed at the four and a half day mark. I'm not sure where you got the URL for the image, I can only presume once it was pasted on IRC it spreads everywhere :). That image is of the Centris display, but it's my Athlon's PearPC session merely using X11 on the Centris.

I'll have it booting sometime soon, just not this week :).

Re:applications?

[apanap]

Mplayer works fine, and you can see some more useless screenshots here. Snes9x has also been ported, as well as a couple other emulators (MAME and some neogeo emulator for example). Other than that I haven't found much use for it except for the geek-factor, the memory is too limited to do anything heavy... But playing SNES games on the cube is pretty sweet though.