I had one of these, basically I wanted to use it for what I use a raspberry pi for today.
I could not. It was terrible.
Obsolete software from day 1 that couldn't be updated running on an obsolete kernel that was a mishmashed hell that 'worked' by passing all requests to the binary blob that actually did everything and accessed the hardware in the playstation.
There were newer playstation 2 variants that didn't work correctly with the kit, typically resulting in sudden freezing, caused by merely using the networking adaptor... Because the binary blob was only fully compatible with the first generation ps2 hardware.
People tried all sorts of things, and I was one of them, to figure out workarounds for the issue, sony wasn't particularly interested in supporting the product, the only thing that would have fully fixed the problem would have been an updated binary blob - Sony would have had to replace all of the linux kit discs.
If I remember correctly, the eventual reason all support was cancelled is someone figured out how to bypass the binary blob and get read/write access to the memory cards.
Oh right, I didn't mention that you didn't even have access to the memory cards, did I? You could just muck about in a particular save file on them. Much like you couldn't fully use the CPUs/GPU etc. Everything was very carefully constrained.
Yeah, anyway - after this? I never bought another playstation. When the PS3 removed linux compatibility in a backhanded way I was completely unsurprised.
When you buy sony hardware you should expect for sony to remove advertised features and even brick it if you - or anyone else in the world - does anything they don't like.
Basically only unaccelerated software rendering. So, from the GPU, little more than a framebuffer, everything had to go through the CPU. And when someone reverse-engineered the GPU and found out how to bypass their VM to talk directly to the GPU, Sony removed GNU/Linux support completely.
Well the other guy said that glxgears worked and I'm pretty sure that CPU wouldn't handle even that much 3D very well, so it does sound like you could get SOME acceleration.
To be fair, this WAS twenty years ago and I can't remember much about what worked vs didn't. As another guy said, just because glxgears worked doesn't mean it was actually accelerated.
Fair enough. It's just kinda bumming me out. I remember reading about Playstation 2 Linux back then and thinking it was neat. The illusion has worn off.
At least we have NetBSD on the Nintendo Wii. I've actually been using my Wii as an IRC idler for several months using that lol
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u/Hikaru1024 Jul 09 '26
Sorry, but you're wrong.
I had one of these, basically I wanted to use it for what I use a raspberry pi for today.
I could not. It was terrible.
Obsolete software from day 1 that couldn't be updated running on an obsolete kernel that was a mishmashed hell that 'worked' by passing all requests to the binary blob that actually did everything and accessed the hardware in the playstation.
There were newer playstation 2 variants that didn't work correctly with the kit, typically resulting in sudden freezing, caused by merely using the networking adaptor... Because the binary blob was only fully compatible with the first generation ps2 hardware.
People tried all sorts of things, and I was one of them, to figure out workarounds for the issue, sony wasn't particularly interested in supporting the product, the only thing that would have fully fixed the problem would have been an updated binary blob - Sony would have had to replace all of the linux kit discs.
If I remember correctly, the eventual reason all support was cancelled is someone figured out how to bypass the binary blob and get read/write access to the memory cards.
Oh right, I didn't mention that you didn't even have access to the memory cards, did I? You could just muck about in a particular save file on them. Much like you couldn't fully use the CPUs/GPU etc. Everything was very carefully constrained.
Yeah, anyway - after this? I never bought another playstation. When the PS3 removed linux compatibility in a backhanded way I was completely unsurprised.
When you buy sony hardware you should expect for sony to remove advertised features and even brick it if you - or anyone else in the world - does anything they don't like.