Linux on the Atari Jaguar

cakehonolulu•about 3 hours ago

This is a deep dive on what is necessary to get Linux on the 68000-based Atari Jaguar. No specialized hardware/flash carts. All runs within the original hardware vision (2 megabytes of RAM) and gets to a Busybox shell. Linux repository with the changes: https://github.com/cakehonolulu/linux_jag

jambalaya8•12 minutes ago

Might be fun to run this as a barebones router.

cakehonolulu•7 minutes ago

I've actually thought of that, but the memory space is so limited that I feel it'd be impossible. Also considering the fact that no official memory banking solutions exist for the Jaguar... maybe it'd be an interesting technical challenge to have a custom mapper that can do both ROM and RAM.

boznz•19 minutes ago

Still occasionally bring out my old jaguar for Alien vs Predator to try and remember what the excitement was all about, but as to putting Linux on it, amazing effort, but I think I'm going to pass :-)

cakehonolulu•4 minutes ago

Not that I blame you... in comparison with pretty much the rest of cartridge-based systems, the available flash cart is priced higher (And AFAIK no DIY open-source ones exist). AvP is one of the best games to play on the system, it was future technology at the time it came out.

coupdejarnac•38 minutes ago

Surely I must have seen someone do this already on Slashdot like 25 years ago. Cheers for using a recent kernel though, that's neat.

cakehonolulu•36 minutes ago

Hi! Thanks! Though' I must say that it also helped lots that there's still m68k (Heck, even base 68000) arch code on upstream Linux...!

basilikum•about 1 hour ago

How long does it take to boot?

cakehonolulu•about 1 hour ago

About a minute and a half. It varies by 2~ seconds at most. Could possibly be related to how Linux does the calibrate_delay() stuff? (And well, I'm also not too sure on how deterministic it's supposed to be in terms of time).

MPSimmons•about 1 hour ago

Honestly not that far off from my 486 DX2/66 back in the day

Linux on the Atari Jaguar

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