#itrunsunix

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The Commodore Amiga? It runs NetBSD.

The story of the Amiga is perhaps one of the most tragic tales of innovation and mismanagement in the history of personal computing. Developed by a team of bona fide American geniuses, the first Amiga computer - the 1000 - made high-fidelity graphics and sound affordable in a time when most of us still ran Apple IIs and Commodore 64s. The OS implemented preemptive multitasking, the custom chipset allowed for unparalleled graphics and sound performance - it could even process raw video signals from VCRs or early digital cameras, as demonstrated here by none other than Andy Warhol. These features made the Amiga especially desirable in the video editing department - Babylon 5 rendered all of its special effects on Amiga hardware.

The line ran strong until about 1992, when the hardware finally started being eclipsed by PCs and Macs. Due to a series of business mistakes and mismanagement of the Amiga division, Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, taking down the Amiga line with itself. No new official hardware would ever be released, while the intellectual rights to the Amiga were sold off to a selection of companies, leading to a confusing situation for the userbase.

Commodore's demise didn't stop the die-hard Amiga fandom from releasing custom hardware and software well into the 21st century, bringing the little computer that could into the internet age. Although pricy, these accelerator boards and expansions allowed Amiga users to prolong the lifespan of their machines by well over a decade. There are still dedicated communities that develop new hardware and software releases, although no hope remains for another official Amiga computer.

Thankfully, the NetBSD project was in its infancy when the Amiga line was killed off. In fact, the Amiga line was one of the first targets for NetBSD! While Amiga users would wait six years for a semi-official update to AmigaOS, the NetBSD project provided modern Unix software to die-hard users.

While the NetBSD port works on any Amiga model, please keep in mind that it does require a fair bit of hardware. It is indeed possible to run NetBSD on an Amiga 500, but it will need to be upgraded with a 68020 CPU and at least 24 MB of RAM. It is also possible to run NetBSD on the UAE emulator.

I can't do enough justice to the story of the Amiga in these four paragraphs, so I would like to direct you to either this excellent video by the Nostalgia Nerd or Jimmy Maher's The Future Was Here. And, of course, please be sure to check out my favourite Amiga game.

On a more personal note, sorry for the unplanned lack of activity on this blog. We're back now. Thanks for sticking around. We're fast approaching 1,000 followers and we're going to do a special series of posts once we hit that milestone.

[itrunsunix]

Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day from everyone at It Runs Unix!

[itrunsunix]

The GP2X? It runs Linux.

The GP2X is a South Korean handheld games console made by GamePark Holdings. It came out in 2005 - roughly a year after the Nintendo DS and the PSP, featuring roughly the same hardware capabilities. Two ARM cores - unusually, capable of overclocking - were supplemented by a whopping 64 MB of RAM, the display was roughly the same as the one on the DS, the battery life was decent - what's not to love?

This system was designed to be as open as possible. It featured virtually no first-party games, relying instead on the userbase to develop their own homebrew software. It became quite popular as an import in the mid-2000s, as it was an excellent machine for emulators. It could emulate virtually anything up to the original Playstation, albeit obviously it did some systems better than others.

As for the Linux system underneath it all, it was a fully featured OS hidden behind a custom UI. Hidden beneath was a version of Samba, a HTTP server, FTP and telnet. While the console itself didn't feature Wi-Fi, it could connect to the internet via USB networking.

Also notable is the expansion port. Users could use a multitude of special dongles to get composite television output, or to add USB ports to the console. Using a special breakout box, up to four devices could be plugged into the console at any one time.

And yeah, it also runs Doom.

[itrunsunix]

The Dingoo? It runs Linux.

The Dingoo is another one in a long series of Asian handheld devices mainly aimed at emulating old systems. Although several original games were released for the device (along with native ports of titles like Doom - because of course It Runs Doom).

For some reason, it came with built-in Flash and RealMedia support. Yes, RealMedia. On a device that came out in 2009.

It was also capable of rudimentary 3D acceleration, allowing it to run games that wouldn't look entirely out of place on the original Playstation. None of them were terribly interesting, thought.

The built-in emulators, ostensibly the raison d'être for this device's existence, were unfortunately all terrible. With the exception of the NES and, oddly, the Capcom CPS-1 arcade board, the device cannot emulate anything in a playable manner. Fortunately, where weird Chinese devices go, Linux nerds swiftly follow. A version of the Linux kernel was developed shortly after the device launched and allowed people to run much better emulators than the ones the device came with (as well as as a better version of Doom, natch).

The console died quietly after selling a couple thousand units,with no further software updates released by the parent company. If you want to see the device in action, I recommend watching this excellent review of the device.

[itrunsunix]

The Game Boy Advance? It runs UNIX.

No, not some weird uClinux + busybox contraption. This is 5th edition UNIX, from June 1974, running on a Game Boy Advance.

Amit Singh achieved this by porting SIMH, a minicomputer system emulator, to the GBA. From there, it's a simple matter of running a PDP-11 system image and re-working the emulator to output nicely onto the GBA screen.

Well, I say "simple", but I still can't get over how cool emulating a 1970s minicomputer on a handheld console is.

Unfortunately, because the Game Boy Advance is seriously lacking in the input department, potential users are required to specify the commands to be sent to the system in a text file and re-compile the ROM with it. Pressing Start sends the next command into the emulator. Because of this, this Unix port is nigh-unusable and only exists as a mild curiosity.

Fortunately, SIMH is available on a variety of other platforms, so you can emulate 5th Edition UNIX (and other systems!) much easier.

EDIT: Soenderg correctly points out that the PDP-11 was a minicomputer and not a mainframe as I have originally stated in this post. Thanks a lot for catching that!

[itrunsunix]

The Commodore 900? It ran UNIX.

Well, not quite. The OS for this unreleased Commodore machine was Coherent, a roughly-compatible clone of Unix developed in the 1980s by the Mark Williams Company.

The Commodore 900 was an unreleased computer made by Commodore International as a business workstation or server. Only a couple prototypes were made and development was scrapped after Commodore acquired the Lorraine computer, which you might know under a much more marketable name: the Amiga.

Coherent was a legitimate clean-room implementation of Unix - definitely cloning the original, but completely re-written from scratch, to the point even Dennis Ritchie couldn't find a fault with it.

While it was mostly compatible with System V, it didn't feature compatibility for mice, TCP/IP, SCSI or anything which would have made it useful past the early 1980s. That didn't stop it from being ported to a variety of different architectures and platforms, including IBM compatibles and the PDP-11.

Being cheap, relatively powerful, light-weight and - most importantly - working on Z8000 CPUs - Commodore chose it as the OS for its new business computer. Development got far enough for a couple of complete, functional prototypes to be manufactured. Amiga's acquisition forced Commodore to scrap the computer. Commodore would later have a line of professional Amiga computers, but at that point they were aimed at the graphics and video market.

More about the Commodore 900:

The CBM 900, The Secret Weapons of Commodore

The Commodore C900, This is Z

Photographs taken from The Secret Weapons of Commodore.

[itrunsunix]

The EVO Smart Console? It runs Linux.

The EVO Smart Console is another one of those products nobody asked for. Released in 2008, it was a Steam Machine before the Steam Machine was a thing; it's basically a tiny PC, with a controller, designed to be plugged into a television. It ran its own in-house fork of Fedora Linux and was designed as an open platform for easy video game development.

Unfortunately, it failed miserably, because the concept is inherently flawed. What Envizions, the company behind the EVO, failed to grasp is that a console lives or dies by its games. Unless you're Nintendo, you require heavy third party support throughout your platform's lifetime in order to keep it alive. Making a box and expecting your customers to provide the content for it is the best way of wasting your investors' time and money.

What didn't help were the hardware choices that went into it. It had an Athlon 64 X2 processor - a midrange chip that was on the market for two years by the time the EVO was released; coupled with it was an ATI Radeon 3200 - a very low-powered GPU designed for laptops. This made the system massively underpowered, even when compared with its console competitors.

The system could run Amiga games and reportedly, WINE didn't run that bad. Still, when you ask $250 for an unpowered device with no real third-party software support whose only purpose is to play video games from twenty years past, it's no surprise that the EVO died after less than two years on the market.

The people behind the EVO would later attempt to repeat their failure using Android as the base OS (because Android is famously known for the quality of its games). The project failed to gain traction, so the CEO started a new company and attempted to cash in on the Ouya's Kickstarter success by annoucing the OTON, a platform supposedly capable of procedurally generating its own games.

Needless to say, that failed too.

The PC-gaming-on-the-couch concept would later be revisited by Valve Corporation and their Steam Box platform, which also failed due to a lack of market demand.

If anything, the lesson this whole story re-inforces over and over again is the oldest principle in the world: don't solve a problem that doesn't exist.

[itrunsunix]

The SAGE IV? It kind of ran UNIX.

The SAGE IV wasn't as popular as some hardware previously covered on this blog. It was expensive and unsuitable for personal use - indeed, it was most commonly found as an ersatz minicomputer in science laboratories, where it would be connected to several terminals. It had some rudimentary multi-tasking capability, which made it a perfect target for UNIX ports. Other operating systems for the machine included CP/M, PDOS, TRIPOS and the UCSD p-System, which the machine shipped with.

Although UNIX itself was never released for the SAGE IV, Idris, written by P.J. Plauger, was ported relatively quickly, as it already had an M68k port developed. Idris is an Unix-like, multi-user operating system, initially developed for the PDP-11 and ported to a variety of different architectures.

Later on, Idris was pitched to Atari as a replacement system for the Atari ST. While Atari wasn't interested, Idris was released for the ST anyway, but that's a story for another time.

As for the SAGE IV, it left its mark on history - this was the machine on which the Lorraine was developed. The Lorraine, of course, was the MacGyvered prototype of the original Amiga computer. The SAGE IV was used to develop the operating system for the machine.