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Linux for Nintendo 64
As early as Comdex fall 95 Netscape Corp. is said to have presented a port of their Navigator to the Mips CPU based Nintendo 64 behind closed doors. Talking to iX during the 1996 GUUG meeting, SCO's Doug Michels, too, regarded alliances with Sega or Nintendo as a "real option", especially as far as the postitioning of the Network Computer against the wintel dominance is concerned.
Insiders assume that Netscape's initiative failed because of a personal animosity between young entrepreneur Marc Andreessen and the very conservative Nintendo boss Hiroshi Yamaushi. SCO wasn't able to follow up their plans, for they have to concentrate their resources to the development of the 64 bit Unix they have codenamed Gemini.
And, as has happened before, the internet community, strongly committed to free software, put things to work, which were not completed in the commercial field. At the end of last year an Italian programmers' team got hold of the US version of N64 and a SGI Indy, including the N64 card. Thus the team ported Linux/Mips to the play station. Linux/Mips originally had been initiated by the music company Waldorf (see iX 2/96) and, since the beginning of 1996, has been ready-to-run on R4x00 CPUs.
The main difficulties, according to the Italians, were caused by the port of the X Window System to the N64 I/O hardware. At first they ported the output routines to the dedicated co-processors. Although N64-X11 is not yet really stable, legendary 500000 XStones have been reached so far - running on an ordinary TV set, driven by high frequency signals. Of course, the quality of the picture is much better, if an AV cable and a high-quality monitor are used.
Input media can be either the bundled console (see photograph above) or a PC keyboard via adapter. The first solution requires a bit of experience when entering text, because each character is represented by a 3 degree angle of the analog stick. Internationally less frequently used characters like the backslash were, therefore, not implemented.
Those who buy the optional N64 controller pack, can even save some data, e. g. personal preferences or WWW hotlists. The prototyp available at editorial deadline hasn't yet got a reliable network connection, because there are still problems between the manually soldered 100 MBit/s Digital 21140 chip and the 93.75 MHz of the R4300i CPU.
Like the former Mips RISC OS Linux/N64 works in bi-endian mode and, therefore, can process data of the two possible byte orders. Yet the kernel version 2.11 based Linux/N64 doesn't use Nintendo's 64 bit address mode - which is not really a disadvantage, considering the 4 MBytes of memory available. A further problem: Nintendo Kyoto headquarter so far has steadfastly refused to build cards in significant volumes or to include Linux/N64 in their distribution channels. Siemens Nixdorf and Silicon Graphics, on the other hand, have expressed "a lot of interest". "This project could lead to a new deal in the desktop market", a speaker of the Munich based company figured. According to their speaker, Luciano Aprilia, the Italian developers, are going to make the software available under the GPL, so it can be used free of charge.