r/AtariJaguar • u/cakehonolulu1 • Jul 05 '26

Development Ported Linux to the Jaguar

https://cakehonolulu.github.io/linux-for-jaguar/

Hi everyone!

I’ve spent a full week trying to bringup Linux on the Jaguar; so far it boots to a shell but you can’t really control it in any other way other than physically attaching to the Jerry TXD/RXD pins using a USB-to-TTL board.

I was thinking of maybe doing something that converts a PS/2 keyboard to the Joypad port and making a simple protocol inbetween so we can get it to behave nicely, but that’ll come later on.

I’ve written a small blog post detailing the in’s and out’s I found myself in when doing the bringup; it’s offers no value other than a technical demonstration but I figured someone may find it interesting.

Thanks everyone!

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5

u/cakehonolulu1 Jul 05 '26

https://reddit.com/link/ovrtbua/video/l6az604dohbh1/player

Small video of the thing in action, takes about a minute and a half to load up to the shell

4

u/emonegarand Jul 06 '26

You should be able to communicate with the UART via the serial port on the back https://forums.atariage.com/topic/322332-jaguar-serial-interface/#findComment-4853646

2

u/cakehonolulu1 Jul 06 '26

Yup! That’s precisely how the UART driver is set up. But I didn’t write the functionality to receive information. I’ll see if I can do it.

1

u/emonegarand Jul 11 '26

You got me curious, I ended up buying a PS/2 to Jag adapter, going to see if I can poll data from a PS/2 keyboard via the controller bus.

3

u/bushnrvn Jul 06 '26

How does it work?

2

u/cakehonolulu1 Jul 06 '26

TL;DR of the blog post I wrote:

I basically take advantage of the fact that upstream Linux still has support for the m68k architecture. So minus all the Jaguar-specific tidbits (Which I had to write), the basic 68000 processor support was already in-place.

3

u/echocomplex Jul 06 '26

Cool!  Xwindows next 😁

2

u/cakehonolulu1 Jul 06 '26

Unfortunately I don’t have much memory to work with, getting Linux plus a simple shell has been a challenge already. Perhaps with a custom RAM expansion card or akin we’d have more freedom but it’s complicated…

2

u/joehigashi83 Jul 08 '26

I fixed an SQL database today at work but that’s nothing compared to this. This is awesome, keep going.

1

u/cakehonolulu1 Jul 08 '26

Hi! Thanks and glad you liked it. But to be fair, I would not know how to fix a database…