The NES Classic is a $60 Single Board Computer Running Linux

"Nintendo's accurate NES emulator apparently needs no less than a quad-core CPU," joked Ars Technica. "The next step, of course, is unscrewing of the nostalgic little box to see how it ticks -- and whether its limited functionality might ever be expanded, either officially or by hackers." Slashdot reader romiz summarizes what's inside Nintendo's new miniature emulator for classic games: With a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7, 256 MB of RAM, and 512 MB of NAND Flash, it is typical of the hardware found in Linux single board computers, like the Raspberry Pi 2. Surprisingly for Nintendo, there does not seem to be any custom components in it, and it looks like it even does run Linux. [YouTube video] The GPL license for the kernel and many other open source components is visible in the legal information screen. The source, however, is not yet available on Nintendo's open source page.

But it is the re-edition a 1980s video console: there is no network access, no hardware expansion port, and the 30 games cannot be changed. Changing the system running on it will probably be difficult.

Comments

Emulator

[Dwedit]

Apparently, it's not even a good emulator.

Re:FPGA

[Lisandro]

Um, why? Not only this was quite possibly much easier to implement on a Linux mini PC, it was also way cheaper.

Re:FPGA

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That would have been a more elegant solution; but why would Nintendo use a ~$70 FPGA to do something they can get a bottom-feeder ARM SoC to do; with the added advantage of being able to share the emulator software with any of their other products that are adequately powerful?

If cost-per-unit were the binding constraint, Nintendo would presumably be best served by building their own, hopefully less eccentric, version of the NES-on-a-chip hardware that you find under a glob top in the assorted 'famiclone' consoles of the world; but doing that would both make doing the design relatively expensive; and be useless for any of their products that don't have the resulting hardware embedded.

Emulation is kind of an ugly, brute force, approach; but it gives Nintendo the flexibility to add 'NES' to just about anything powerful enough just by providing a copy of the software.

Offer under GPLv2 is to "any third party"

[tepples]

Not until someone *who owns one of these* requests the source code.

That's true for GPLv3, but GPLv2 is slightly different in that the offer for a copy of the source code must be valid for "any third party". From GPLv2 3b, with my emphasis:

Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange

And from GPLv3 6b, with my emphasis:

Convey the object code in, or embodied in, a physical product (including a physical distribution medium), accompanied by a written offer, valid for at least three years and valid for as long as you offer spare parts or customer support for that product model, to give anyone who possesses the object code either (1) a copy of the Corresponding Source for all the software in the product that is covered by this License, on a durable physical medium customarily used for software interchange, for a price no more than your reasonable cost of physically performing this conveying of source, or (2) access to copy the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge.

But I imagine that for GPLv2-or-later software, Nintendo is choosing the GPLv2 option because of the effect on Tivoization. The GPLv2 requires distribution of "the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable," but many believe this condition is substantially weaker than the "Installation Information" condition in its successor.

So if Nintendo turns you down for not possessing a copy of the object code, you can assume they're relying on GPLv3, and you can request Installation Information.