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<H1>Linux for Nintendo 64</H1>
<H3><a href="/ix/editors/js_dt.html">Jürgen Seeger</a></H3>
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<font size=-1><p align=center><a href="/ix/artikel/1997/04/036/">German
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<P>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
<I>iX</I> 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.</P>
<P>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 <em>Gemini</em>.</p>
<P>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 <em>iX</em>
2/96) and, since the beginning of 1996, has been
ready-to-run on R4x00 CPUs.</p>
<P>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.</p>
<P>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.</p>
<P>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.</P>
<P>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.</P>
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