NetBSD for various consoles.

On Wed, 19 Jan 2005, Andy Ruhl wrote:

> I don't know what hardware is in a GameCube other than PPC processor.
> Don't know if NetBSD drivers already exist for the stuff in it.

  I seem to recall hearing a very long time ago that the Game Cube's
graphics chip was a custom ATI variant. However, it's quite possible that
my cough drops are past their best-before date and I'm hallucinating.

  Even if it is an ATI variant, that only gets you half way to a driver. I
did 3rd-party driver development for many graphics cards a while back, and
even _with_ specs, it's very messy if you want to use their hardware
acceleration features. And each variant had its own special version of the
initialization sequence to get the card working at all (now picture
writing a hybrid driver that handles 5 different ATI chips...).

  But, it would be better than nothing.

  The second-best way to get information would be to gut a Game Cube and
snoop the system bus during boot, or to do the equivalent with an
emulator, but my understanding is that neither of these options is legal
in the US.

  The best way is to get Nintendo and $graphics_chip_manufacturer to
_give_ you the specs. Good luck. They live and die by licensing fees, so
anything that allows unlicensed game software is anathema to them.



  On the Other Console front, one of my pipe dreams for a long time has
been to build a sane, _useful_ open-sourceish game console. SH4 looks like
a good workhorse for it, which makes the idea of interest to the
Dreamcast crowd, but development cost is a bit out of my league (estimated
$2M, most of it developer time, to get production-ready hardware and
software). Are people still interested in this sort of thing in general,
or is the stench of Indrema's demise still to pungent?

Regards,
				-Christopher Thomas