It’s been a turbulent year and 2020 is definitely coming to an interesting end in Linux / open source space … If it weren’t weird enough to see Sony offering a new official Fiscal Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 Dual Sense Controller to complete the year, there’s Nintendo There’s also a new Linux port for 64 game consoles … yes, a new port for game consoles launched over two decades ago.
Open-source developer Laurie Casane, who contributes to the Mesa and Linux graphics stacks, began developing the new Nintendo 64 port and announced it this Christmas day. This is not the first time Linux has been ported to N64, but previous attempts were not intended to potentially upstream it in the main line Linux kernel.
Laurie’s work is a new port in the Nintendo 64 and is not based on previous efforts. But Laurie noted, “[Request for comments] Because I’m not sure if this is useful for merging. Old, exclusive and limited platform.”
This new port in the N64 was used to support fine-tuning and frame-buffer or console games.
Linux port binary is available from Laurie’s GitHub. Binary is a 64-bit MIPS build that can be loaded on Nintendo 64 with Flashkart.
The port notes that the Uslib-NG MIPS was found to be broken for N32 so that the Muscle C library was used. It’s also worth noting that Linux on Nintendo 64 is still a big bug and “constant flirting. [out of memory]”
The Nintendo 64 MPS is powered by 64 NEC VR 4300, which clocks at 62.5 MHz at 93.75 MHz with SGI reality coprocessor graphics while the RAM is only 4MB. We’ll see if this ends up being an N64 port but acknowledging that the utility is rather limited after the first two decades after the game console. In any case, this new port is now available in the resource and should be of interest to anyone in binary form.
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