Linux has many benefits, however it’s particularly well-suited to operating on older {hardware}. There are very light-weight kernels on the market that don’t want a lot energy to run — particularly in the event you’re 1337 sufficient to work solely within the shell and don’t want a GUI. Have a 30-year-old PC gathering mud? It is going to run Linux, no drawback. However what if in case you have even much less horsepower than that to work with? To dunk on each different working system on the market, DeCrAzYo proved that it’s doable to run Linux on unmodified NES {hardware}.
That’s really a lie — however we’re solely passing on DeCrAzYo’s lie. This isn’t actually operating Linux. As an alternative, it’s operating what DeCrAzYo describes as a “Unix-like working system.” Sadly, even Linux wants extra sources than an NES has to supply. However that is shut sufficient that we hope you’ll forgive the misdirection.
Particularly, DeCrAzYo selected to run LUnix (Little Unix), which was developed for Commodore 64 computer systems and obtained its most up-to-date replace (Model 0.21) approach again in 2004. LUnix is good as a result of it’s ridiculously light-weight and constructed to run on the Commodore 64’s 6502-compatible MOS 6510 processor. The NES’s Ricoh 2A03 processor can be largely 6502-compatible, so DeCrAzYo concluded it might in all probability work.
However the NES solely has 2KB of RAM (plus one other 2KB of VRAM), whereas the Commodore 64 has a beneficiant 64KB. The Commodore 64 additionally has the flexibility to learn from disks.
Each of these points have been solvable through the use of a Japanese Famicom as an alternative of a North American NES. The Famicom had upgrades obtainable so as to add a further 32KB of RAM and a rudimentary disk system. There’s additionally a keyboard for the Famicom, which makes navigating a Unix shell a lot simpler.
By using the Famicom’s upgraded reminiscence and disk system, DeCrAzYo was capable of modify LUnix to load packages from disk as needed. DeCrAzYo additionally needed to change the best way the Famicom’s disk system works, as a result of it could usually solely learn information sequentially. With these modifications, LUnix boots and the consumer is ready to work throughout the shell.
In emulation, this labored effectively. However that was solely as a result of DeCrAzYo was capable of crank up the run pace by 100 instances. In actual life and on precise {hardware}, it is rather sluggish. DeCrAzYo was capable of take a look at that on an NES utilizing an Everdrive flash cart. With no Famicom keyboard obtainable to sort instructions, nevertheless, he simply acquired a blinking cursor within the shell. However he did show that Linux Unix can run on an NES!