Re: NetBSD for various consoles.

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:51:57 -0500 (EST), Christopher John Thomas
<[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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?

I'm really not sure what good an open source console is. Someone would
have to explain that to me a lot of times to get me to understand it I
think. We have PCs for cheap and nice USB controllers...

On the console issue, I don't care all that much about running X
(yet). As long as the thing boots multi user, I can find a use for it.
Of course, it becomes a lot more useable once X is working. Then you
have something like a PC alternative.

I had no idea I would break my EULA if I did this stuff. Not sure I
care too much, but that's not a good way to try to start a new port of
NetBSD either. Ugh. I really have a hard time with an EULA not letting
me do what I want with their hardware as long as it's for my own
purposes... Seems to me it would be a nice thing to have a real
operating system running on these, but the game companies could care
less of course.

I'm interested in following along with any GameCube updates for
NetBSD. I can test stuff after I figure a way to boot (I knew about
psoload too, but I'm not buying it just for that). Maybe I can start
learning code enough to hack hardware someday... I'm cracking the
books again...

Andy