It’s been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interestingly in the Linux / open-source space … If it weren’t strange enough to see Sony providing an official new Linux driver for its PlayStation 5 DualSense controller by the end of the year, there too is a new Linux port for the Nintendo 64 game console … Yes, a new port for the game console launched more than two decades ago.
Open source developer Lauri Kasanen, who contributed to the Mesa and Linux graphics stack, developed a new port for the Nintendo 64 and announced it on Christmas Day. This is not the first time that Linux has been ported to the N64, but previous attempts were not intended to upstream it into the main Linux kernel.
Lauri’s work is a new port for the Nintendo 64 and not based on previous efforts. But Lauri noted: “[Request for comments] because I’m not sure if it’s useful to have it merged. Old, niche and limited platform.”
This new port for the N64 was sought in part to help port emulators and buffering frames or console games.
There is a Linux-sized binary available on Lauri’s GitHub. The binary is a 64-bit MIPS build that can be loaded onto the Nintendo 64 with a Flashcart.
The port notes that uClibc-ng was found broken for MIPS N32, so the Musl C library was used. It is also noted that Linux on the Nintendo 64 is still a big bug and “constantly flirting with [out of memory]. ”
The Nintendo 64 is powered by a MIPS64 NEC VR4300 at 93.75 MHz with SGI Reality Coprocessor graphics with a frequency of 62.5 MHz while having only 4 MB of RAM. We will see if this N64 port turns out to be upstream, but we recognize that the utility is quite limited more than two decades after the game console first appeared. In any case, this new port is now available in source and binary code, in case anyone is interested.