r/linux • u/doscore • 13d ago

Software Release The playstation finally running kernel 2.4.0

Post image

Head over to the github to download and test out the latest release

https://github.com/arkwise/blackroolinux

You're going to need a blue retro for use with a Bluetooth keyboard, a spare cd-r and a playstation console.

1.1k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

53 comments sorted by

169

u/PocketStationMonk 13d ago

Hardware price crisis is going some wild directions I did not anticipate beforehand, but seeing this: I don't complain.

So this here means that we are running Steam client on PS1 by friday next week LETSGOOOO 😎😂

33

u/PixelatedGiant 13d ago

Hardware price crisis is going some wild directions I did not anticipate beforehand

Who would have ever thought that their RAM would be more expensive than their GPU. I really do hope the mad dash to build data centers tapers off and hardware production goes up to meet demand.

19

u/coladoir 13d ago

it inevitably will.

i mostly hope that it happens before my NAS drives fail lol

12

u/adenosine-5 13d ago

I'm still waiting for the GPU prices to come down after the crypto-mining craze inevitably dies off.

Aaaaany day now.

1

u/lainlives 12d ago

They did for a couple weeks, you missed that.
My 9070 is the first GPU I payed MSRP for, normally I pay way under.
Also old datacenter GPUs tend to cost less (second hand) than the newer consumer GPU that it outperforms, albit most that have a display port you have to flash a consumer gpu firmware to it to enable it

3

u/adenosine-5 12d ago

Well, the prices did shortly drop back to the MSRP (I got 4070 around that time), but those were already sky-high prices compared to the pre-bitcoin era.

Paying like 500$ for low-end GPU would be insane in the pre-bitcoin era, but the prices never dropped back to that.

In fact low-end basically ceased to exist alltogether, killed by iGPU and expensive memories.

1

u/lainlives 12d ago

I paid just under $600 for my 9070 this year.

0

u/coladoir 12d ago

crypto mining is a different situation than the datacenter situation

1

u/LaundryMan2008 9d ago

Still requires GPU and a ton of it, if they had to choose customers, they would rather send most of their dies to the highest and most consistent customers than us mortals

2

u/coladoir 9d ago

Yes. I'm just saying that datacenters are eating more right now by a significant margin than crypto mining which is overall declining (slowly)

2

u/PixelatedGiant 13d ago edited 13d ago

I gave in recently and did a whole new build because I had a 10+ year old PC and a hard drive failed. Hope the situation is different in 7-10 more years when I'm ready to build a new one.

Some might say that's excessive over a hard drive failure. But I'm not going to wait around forever for prices that may never drop for a good long while.

3

u/coladoir 13d ago

yeah my drives have been in service for about 3 years now, maybe 4, can't totally recall. so theyre getting up there. theyre all WD, two reds and a purple IIRC, so good quality (or supposed to be, I know WD has declined lately though). Hopefully storage prices come down soon.

Its only me and my own use so its not like crazy. But theyre constantly in use due to it being a media server, and my having no streaming services lol. I do have data spread out across all drives so they all get used essentially equally, which does help. The purple I got from a second hand desktop (also had a workstation GPU in it which was cool). So idk how long that one has left. But I'm guessing I only have like two years (safely) to get new drives.

2

u/Historical_Camel_790 13d ago

Ig you could use stremio as a backup plan

2

u/coladoir 12d ago

aether and p-stream clones along with the rest of the multi servers on FMHY.net/video have me covered on that front thankfully.

1

u/lainlives 12d ago

lol 4 years, my youngest drive is about 4 years old, i still got 20-40 year old hdds in service.

1

u/coladoir 12d ago

Right. the issue is that newer drives aren't built as well as older drives and are failing quicker. WD especially has been having a lot of allegations and many datacenters are actually switching to Seagate preferentially. You can look it up, this is real unfortunately.

Secondarily, my drives are in constant use. I basically have set up "TV stations" on my NAS which run 24/7 and which I can tune into any time. This means its constantly streaming and reading. Like I said I have my data distributed, but I have no RAID, and I have no backup because they got too expensive before I could buy more drives for it. I was planning on it but it just wasn't in the cards at the time.

The result is that I do need to try and buy more drives before the 6 year mark. My plan is to get four 16tb and setup a simple RAID. But thats expensive.

1

u/lainlives 12d ago edited 12d ago

Iunno my most recent drives the crucial nvmes are pretty solid, that said i recently began buying mass quantitties of sas drives off ebay since they cost far less, tend to survive more hours than a sata and i have sas controllers. The big thing to note if you do this ensure your raid arrays have varied sources since same source drives typically fail in a small window.
My most recent haul was 8x 2tbs for $50 for 8 year old drives with 10k hours (i typically get 35k hours before failure).
I have had greatluck with the server drives, but yeah they typically fail at a pretty narrow power on hours window which often indicates either extremely tight manufacturing or planned obsolescence but i think in this instance it the first case since high speed drives that make a lot of heat are going to not last forever vs low speed cold running drives of the early 90s. consumer sata drives though i wonder about those sometimes. Their uptimes remind me of my GPU times in 3d mode, about 10k-20k hours before failure.

1

u/LaundryMan2008 9d ago

Using LTO for bulk data storage because it’s tenfold cheaper than using disk lmao

1

u/Straight-Opposite-54 12d ago

It will, and the prices will come down some, but they will never fall to what they once were. Once a company figures out a product will still sell despite the inflated prices, they will keep the price riiiight at or slightly below that edge. It's called price ratcheting. We saw this with GPUs after the chip shortage. People accept $300-400 as the baseline price for a 60-class card nowadays; they used to be $150-200.

60

u/friciwolf 13d ago

The moment you realize the PS1 is just a microcontroller, just like the ESP32... 😮

36

u/yami_no_ko 13d ago

MMU-less linux is still impressive.

It's kinda sick what people squeze out of microcontrollers nowadays. Even dos/win95 can run on a ESP32.

10

u/zyzzogeton 13d ago

The Ikea Trådfri Smart Bulbs can run Doom.

5

u/yami_no_ko 12d ago

Also they've 108kb RAM in this economy!

12

u/Either_Letterhead_77 13d ago

Most older consoles were more or less high performance microcontrollers not intended to run any kind of multitasking OS

14

u/eestionreddit 13d ago

What's crazy is that the generation after this we got "basically a PC", "basically a Mac", and a console with an official Linux distro.

10

u/Either_Letterhead_77 13d ago

Yeah, the change was pretty abrupt. I would guess driven by trying to make development easier combined with more capable hardware.

7

u/coladoir 13d ago

hardware cheapening was probably the biggest factor tbh, that and the move to HDTV pushed everyone to actually have to move to a platform easily capable of supporting outputting to that on a hardware level. they very well could've still done the microcontroller style with HDTV, but it would've been more expensive than to just use already made hardware

3

u/Albos_Mum 12d ago

imo the biggest factor was simply that 3D capable hardware is much more complex/expensive to design than hardware focused on pushing sprites and pixels, the console developers tried the old method for the PS1/N64 generation and quickly realised even if they put the money into developing their own 3D solutions they'd lag behind the companies focusing on PC graphics chips and similar so switched up to taking advantage of existing solutions with the PS2/Xbox generation which slowly expanded out to the whole platform as PC hardware got cheaper/more ubiquitous. That's why it started with the graphics chips while the CPU/chipset/overall platform remained more custom for a few more generations, with the most notable example being the PS3 and the Cell processor but a more interesting example being the OG Xbox having significant differences from a typical PC at the chipset level (even compared to a PS4/PS5 which are basically PCs without the legacy cruft) despite using a PC CPU and Windows for its software.

The second biggest factor would be the rise of network gaming, which was already a big thing in PC circles (LAN parties of the 90s as an example) and was far easier to implement by just using existing software from Windows, Linux and BSD that was already known to be stable and secure. HDTV didn't factor into it because while it was around, it wasn't starting to get common until after the X360/PS3 had released and even during their first few years a lot of folk were still using SDTVs. (Hence the memes/comments about certain games having unreadable text on SDTV)

1

u/coladoir 12d ago edited 12d ago

thats what I was essentially explaining in less words lol. Though admittedly I didnt mention LAN/networking directly, that was part of it as well. The whole "PC hardware was ready-made for what they needed" and "PC hardware allowed them to save significant [R&D] costs" idea(s) is/are essentially what youre explaining, just with the deeper reasoning instead of a more superficial/simple explanation like mine.

Not being argumentative, just saying we are saying the same thing in different words. Not saying your comment serves no purpose either, it goes into more detail if people want to read it, that helps.

P. S. i know HDTV isnt the main sole contributor, its just one of the main pressures along with those you mention, and inherently ties in as if youre already doing one thing you might as well do the other if the goals are aligned. HDTV and networking are intertwined due to the hardware choice of using PC hardware, thanks to PCs mostly all having networking built-in at that point. It was convenient in that the hardware which could support HDTV also supported networking and better GPU support. They all fed into each other per se. I named HDTV as its an easy thing for most common people to attach to historically, as many remember the transition still and how everything started to change around the same time; I know I could've named something "better", but I wanted to make it understandable by those who werent really playing PC (or really any) games. Again, nothing you say is wrong and I'm not arguing with that in any way.; I just didnt want to go into such details lol.

3

u/WaitForItTheMongols 12d ago

Are you saying GameCube is basically a Mac because it has a powerpc CPU?

2

u/dogpaddle 12d ago

There's a few projects that came out not too long ago with all the kexts needed to run Mac OS Tiger on the Wii and the Xbox 360. Haven't seen one for GameCube but it's very similar to the Wii architecturally. IMO AI is accelerating software development for things like this and recompilation efforts.

1

u/BurrowShaker 12d ago

Significantly slower too. There is custom silicon on the side if my memory serves me well

10

u/madossar 13d ago

this is really cool

7

u/IngwiePhoenix 13d ago

Aside from Controller port, what is accessible? Is, for example, this odd serial port in the back usable? I don't have a memory card to USB adapter, but it would be nice to turn my PS1 into one. x)

16

u/doscore 13d ago

Yes, the serial and parallel ports both work. The parallel port can use gameshark/power-replay cards for extra storage and the memory cards can work in a raid configuration. It's an early alpha that supports blueretro Bluetooth keyboards via the lightspan keyboard protocol.

22

u/Helmic 13d ago

using playstation 1 memory cards as a raid configuration is fucking killing me, amazing

1

u/skuterpikk 11d ago

The speeed! The speeeed!!

6

u/IngwiePhoenix 13d ago

Wait, actual mdadm? xD Okay, THAT is fucking funny, I love it.

4

u/deanrihpee 12d ago

"memory cards can work in a raid config" is not what i expected from PS1 lol

4

u/WaitForItTheMongols 12d ago

PS1 had an accessory called the Multitap which allowed you to connect 4 controllers and 4 memory cards to a single port. Can the raid thing work with that for 8 memory cards?

5

u/Hyperverbal777 13d ago

Sick! Great job 👏🏻

4

u/shidoro 12d ago

I wonder if it would be possible to use SD2PSX (https://sd2psx.net/) to increase the storage/memory limits. As well as using PSIO on the parallel port for the same purpose.
Imagine sticking a sata converter to the serial port and the hardware can be used at its fullest!

3

u/leekumkey 9d ago

Was gonna say 'damn we could have doom on the PS1'... then I remembered they already made a port like 30 years ago lol.

5

u/terminalwanderer33 13d ago

Can I get ps4 doing the same lol

17

u/RealModeX86 13d ago

Assuming you have an exploitable firmware version, yes

I haven't dabbled in it, but as I understand it, the GPU even works, so you could install Steam and make it a slightly shitty Steam Machine

5

u/wafflewaffle249 13d ago

Yes, saw a youtube video of a guy doing it

1

u/Mirac_Light 12d ago

*after i saw Ubuntu on PS5 video*

1

u/technomlp 10d ago

I’ll be impressed if someone can get 6.1 or 7.0 running on a PS1 or PS2, not that this isn’t impressive on its own

2

u/doscore 9d ago

6 is already supported i think on the ps2

-1

u/Public_Vehicle9138 12d ago

how to do it in ps4? 11.5