It’s been a turbulent year, and 2020 is definitely ending interestingly in the Linux / open-source space … If it wasn’t weird enough to see Sony offering a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for the end of the year, there is also a new Linux port for the Nintendo 64 game console … Yes, a new game console port released more than two decades ago.
Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen, who contributed to Mesa and the Linux graphics stack, developed a new Nintendo 64 port and announced it this Christmas. This isn’t the first time Linux has been ported to the N64, but previous attempts have not focused on the upstreaming potential in the main Linux kernel.
Lauri’s work is a new port for the Nintendo 64 and is not based on previous efforts. But Lauri remarked:[Request for comments] because I’m not sure if it’s useful to merge this. Old, niche and limited platform.”
This new port to the N64 has been partially tweaked to help port emulators and buffer-frame or console games.
There is a Linux port binary available from GitHub Lauri. The binary is a 64-bit MIPS version that can be loaded on the Nintendo 64 with a Flashcart.
The port notes that uClibc-ng turned out to be broken for MIPS N32, so the Musl C library was used. It is also worth noting that Linux on the Nintendo 64 is still a big buggy and “constantly flirts with [out of memory]. ”
The Nintendo 64 is powered by a 93.75 MHz MIPS64 NEC VR4300 with SGI Reality Coprocessor graphics clocked at 62.5 MHz, while it has only 4 MB of RAM. We’ll see if this N64 port gets up, but of course the utility is quite limited to more than two decades after the first game console appeared. In any case, this new port is now available in source and binary form, if anyone is interested.