Re: NetBSD for various consoles.

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Andy Ruhl wrote:

> 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...


  The purpose is threefold:


- We get a console with open specs and no licensing fees for game
writing. This gives the console gaming-hacker community pretty much
the nicest possible toy.

  Competition in similar price and functionality brackets:
  Existing consoles and PDAs for which sufficient specs are known.


- We get what amounts to an xterm or small PC, for less than a PC would
cost. It's a special-purpose machine, which means there's quite a lot of
cruft you can leave out. Score for the *nix-hacker community.

  Competition in similar price and functionality brackets:
  Rock-bottom used PCs and tweaked $50 embedded-*nix routers.


- We have a console gaming/small *nix machine platform that can't be
yanked out from under us. This is the point of making it open-source; even
if the original group developing it loses interest, it can be continued,
and it can be forked if religious debate boils over. It can also be put
back into production when desired (it would be nice if Dreamcast hardware
was still abundant, for instance).


  Anyways, I think it's a cool idea. It would be tempting to take this
idea and run with it, except that I'm already busy running with another
idea (academic research topic; if it pans out, you can port NetBSD to it
:)).


> I had no idea I would break my EULA if I did this stuff.

  It's the DMCA I'd be worried about. It's very hard to write a graphics
driver for an unknown chip without doing things that would be called
illegal reverse-engineering if the companies involved decide they want to
squash it. The US is a bit nasty that way. It'll blow over in 30 years,
but I'd really like to play with Dreamcasts before then :).

  Hardware-wise, the chip isn't strictly an ATI chip. On researching it,
it looks like it was developed by another company that was subsequently
bought by ATI. This makes it either a mutant cousin or a complete
stranger to the ATI line. Either way, existing ATI drivers won't help.

  If there's a Linux or other library available that uses it, you can try
clean-rooming it, but a) that's probably also litigatable and b) you're on
your own when the Linux zealots descend :).

  Roll back the laws by 10 years, and this would be much easier.


> Maybe I can start
> learning code enough to hack hardware someday... I'm cracking the
> books again...

  Best of luck. I'd offer advice, but I haven't messed with the *BSD
internals (driver work was for Linux, Windows, and BeOS [remember
BeOS? :)]).

Regards,
				-Christopher Thomas