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GameCube (Games) GUI KDE Software Linux Hardware

KDE Running On A GameCube 169

Posted by timothy from the loony-bin-too-full dept.
Bruno_me writes "Some of the folks at the GameCube Linux project have gotten KDE to run on a GameCube. There's a screenshot of what it actually looks like and what it should look like. This is the first real 'GameKube.' And of course, here is the original frame buffer (dd if=/dev/fb0 of=./kde.fbdump)."
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KDE Running On A GameCube More

KDE Running On A GameCube

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  • Wow. (Score:4, Funny)

    by SmithG ( 688785 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:21AM (#10684307)
    This seems very useful.

    • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gentlewhisper ( 759800 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:25AM (#10684325)
      On the keypad there is only A, B, C, and D, what about the rest? How do you type on this?

      • First step (Score:5, Funny)

        by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:28AM (#10684334) Journal
        Scratch out the "C" and replace it with a "K"

      • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Informative)

        by gustgr ( 695173 ) <gustgr.gmail@com> on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:32AM (#10684355)
        Maybe with somthing like this [cube-europe.com]?

      • Re:Wow. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 01, 2004 @07:00AM (#10684440)
        Well, there's the obvious "like a highscore table entry" method, or the "on-screen keyboard" method, and how about higher-speed methods for advanced users like chording? 4 buttons => 2^4 = 16 chords minus the 0 chord, gives 15 chords. defining each letter as a 2 chord sequence, that gives 15*15 = 225 2-chord combos, enough to cover a standard keyboard.

      • Re:Wow. (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        For the nitpickers:
        The actual buttons are A,B,X,Y,L,R,Z,START, and the joystick, the "C-stick", and the directional pad.

        • Re:Wow. (Score:2, Funny)

          by ion_ ( 176174 )

          The actual buttons are A,B,X,Y,L,R,Z,START, [...]

          You can write any ASCII text with just those buttons. Simply hold down the desired combination of bits and then press START to enter the character.

          Example:

          r: A-B-X-R-START
          m: A-B-Y-L-Z-START
          space: B-START
          =: B-X-Y-L-Z-START
          ^H: Y-START (oops, a typo)
          -: B-Y-L-Z-START
          f: A-B-L-R-START
          r: A-B-X-R-START
          space: B-START
          /: B-Y-L-R-Z-START
          ^M: Y-L-Z-START

          See, it's as simple as that.

      • Well, you could always:

        bc
        cc
        cd
        dc
        dd

        That should be enough to do serious work :-)
        • Or simply: Up Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, B, A, Select, Start....

          It's pretty old but i'm sure it's still compatible...

      • Re:Wow. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

        No idea. SSHing in? Some weird "use the keyboard of some other host" X11 hack? Wouldn't surprise me the least...

        ...or since they need Phantasy Star Online to load Linux in, maybe they have hacked together support for the Phantasy Star Online keyboard [ign.com] (with GameCube stick acting as mouse)... no idea if this is true, this is just extremely hopeful, completely outrageous speculation about the will and capability of the GCLinux people =)

        Still, I'd really want to know for sure, too.

      • "On the keypad there is only A, B, C, and D, what about the rest? How do you type on this?"

        More importantly, did they get copy/paste to work?

      • Re:Wow. (Score:4, Informative)

        by OneHungLo ( 265284 ) <honkeykong@h[ ]eykong.org ['onk' in gap]> on Monday November 01, 2004 @07:55AM (#10684606) Homepage
        To enter text commands, just do an "ssh -l root 192.168.0.47" from the console on your PC. The default root password is "cube". Once you've done that, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. Use apt-get to install links and BitchX, and you can brag to your friends that you're running a browser and IRC client on your Gamecube and typing through your PC.

        It's not really useful for anything but Geek points at the moment, but GC-Linux development is coming along very quickly. There's already a hardware-accelerated video driver, and ALSA is working, as well as SDL and many more things. I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future, some kind of Mplayer-based streaming media client was written for GC-Linux, and it found a practical purpose as a way of playing MP3/Vorbis/Videos from NFS shares on a LAN. All the framework is there, it would just take someone to put it together.
        • If they'd get Myth running and eliminate the need for disk swapping a GameCube would be my next Myth Frontend.
      • On the keypad there is only A, B, C, and D, what about the rest? How do you type on this?


        Well, up-up-down-down-A-B-A-B-C-D-start gives you...

        "kakaroto!"

      • Dasher would be cool.
      • What kind of GameCube controller do YOU have?

        Mine has A, B, C, D, L, R, U, X, Y, and Z. Some of them more than once.

    • Re:Wow. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'm still trying to figure out how to turn my computer into a gamecube.

      I'll just be happy once my toaster starts making coffee.
    • This seems very useful.


      The gamecube was never useful.

    • Well, at last a screenshot of a linux "dist" that differ from the rest.
    • Can you just imagine the amount of chicks this would attract?

      Hey babe want to see my hack kde running on my gamecube? That has to be the ultimate pickup line.

  • What is this kde.fbdump garbage? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:21AM (#10684309)
    Sorry, I don't speak fbdump.
    • Photoshop will read raw data, but I have no idea what the dimensions or bitdepth of the image are. Post them here if it's applicable.

      • Lets see....
        The file is 1228800 bytes in size. Looking at a hexdump, it looks like 16-bit data. Unfortunately 614400 has many integer factors, including most of the likely widths/heights. If it's for NTSC then it's going to be 480 lines high, making it 1280x480. Bit of an odd resolution. It's not divisible by 576, so it can't be PAL. It could also be 800x768, 640x960, 1200x512...

        Damn, I can't seem to find anything to convert packed 16/15-bit RGB data. I'll have to resort to writing a simple Perl or C p

        • Re:What is this kde.fbdump garbage? (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Just open it as a 'raw' image file, 640x480x16bpp. You say you'll have to write a program specifically for this? Sounds like you are a true /. geek! :-)

          • Re:What is this kde.fbdump garbage? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Ford Prefect ( 8777 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @09:10AM (#10684989) Homepage
            Just open it as a 'raw' image file, 640x480x16bpp. You say you'll have to write a program specifically for this? Sounds like you are a true /. geek! :-)

            Oh crap. I win the 'Geek' prize, then.

            I wrote a really poor PHP program [hylobatidae.org] to do it - and ended up with a fairly uninteresting screenshot [hylobatidae.org].

            Okay, so KDE on a Gamecube is pretty useless, but it does show that the cross-compiler is working on complex software (even if it is just for a PowerPC), and that pretty resource-intensive software will work on the machine. Plus, I bet the people doing it have learned a lot in porting this stuff to work on an unfamiliar, undocumented hardware platform.

            Now, port Linux to run on any generic Postscript printer! :-)
          • I was surprised to find that nothing I had could read it. I guess the 15/16-bit formats are pretty much limited to graphics hardware. No one uses those formats to transport images, using 24-bit formats instead. I was surprised to find that Gimp 2.0 didn't have a raw format option.
          • Photoshop 7.0.1/OS X, Raw, 640x480, 3 channel interleaved, 16bpp, Mac byte order (gonna assume that cuz it's a PPC) returns "Specified image is larger than file". Ideas?

    • Re:What is this kde.fbdump garbage? (Score:5, Informative)

      by vadim_t ( 324782 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @07:05AM (#10684453) Homepage
      It's a dump of the framebuffer console. To view it, you've got to run Linux with vesafb, for example. Just "cat kde.fbdump > /dev/fb0". You need to use the right bit depth and resolution for it to work though, and it's not specified.

      • Re:What is this kde.fbdump garbage? (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "To view it, you've got to run Linux with vesafb, for example. Just "cat kde.fbdump > /dev/fb0". You need to use the right bit depth and resolution for it to work though, and it's not specified."

        Reminds me of the saying...

        "But Linux IS user friendly. It just is really picky about who its friends with." ;-)

    • Re:What is this kde.fbdump garbage? (Score:4, Informative)

      by imroy ( 755 ) <imroykun@gmail.com> on Monday November 01, 2004 @08:44AM (#10684819) Homepage Journal

      (I'll post this one further up the chain after my last message was somhow modded "overrated" with no other mods)

      Here's the technical details:
      It's 640x480 in 16-bit 5-6-5 format. Big-endian of course (tripped me up initially on my x86 machine). The file is a dump of the whole frame buffer but only half is used.
      Hope that helps.

      You might be able to read it with Photoshop or something. I had to write a little C program to convert the packed 16-bit values into 24-bit ones. Then it was simple to pipe that through rawtopnm with some guessed dimensions. It's nothing spectacular, just a blank KDE desktop running with Ktip describing how you can minimize all windows with the desktop button.

  • But didnt someone try this a few years back? and give up because of the disc drive as the only real data storage... and a few other things?

  • KDE is heavy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gustgr ( 695173 ) <gustgr.gmail@com> on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:22AM (#10684315)
    Does KDE run smoothly on a 486Mhz PowerPC with 40mb of RAM?

    • Re:KDE is heavy (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Actually, it depends mostly on what theme you use. Many kde themes, including the current default, are gradient-heavy and slow, just as WinXP or MacOSX are mainly slow due to their graphical frills.

      But a plain theme can be much faster, on KDE, GNOME, WinXP (MacOSX I haven't seen themes for, not to say they don't exist, I just haven't gone looking as I have no mac).
      • I'm not sure exactly why you think a gradiated fill would be any more expensive then a plain one.

        The difference in computation is so insignificant that it's irrelevant.

        If you don't believe me, try using Macromedia Flash (or some other vector-painting tool) to fill a bunch of areas with gradients, then do the same thing with solid fills. You'll see that they both break down in viewing at roughly the same time.

        If the code is well optimized, there is no reason why a gradient fill would be more expensive the
    • Something like fluxbox would be a lot better I would think. My laptop runs fluxbox just fine, can play movies/etc, and it's a 500mhz 686 with 64mb ram. Not sure if the difference between archetectures would make much of a difference. Now, if I try to run KDE on my laptop it grinds to a halt. However, my laptop doesn't have the hardware accelerated graphics and memory that the game cube does. AFAIK, the project mentioned in the post has not exploited the graphics hardware to it's fullest potential, but
    • Increase the RAM to 128, and it should run smoothly. When you see kpersonalizer when first booting KDE set it to a slow CPU.
    • i say port over twm, really use the power of the gamecube graphics there :). JK, im a kde user when i go gui so just for the fun factor i hope they get this going.
    • Well, as a comparison, I ran SUSE with KDE on a Pentium II 300Mhz with 64MB of RAM for quite awhile (my old laptop). It felt fine. I'd imagine that, this being a custom distro(?), it would have less loaded and thus be slimmer memory-wise.

      --
      Evan

  • Screenshots (Score:5, Funny)

    by rudib ( 300816 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:23AM (#10684318) Homepage
    So, the first screenshot is when you are sober and the second one is when you are on acid?

  • Well (Score:4, Funny)

    by bburton ( 778244 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:24AM (#10684319)
    Well I'm convinced... if KDE can run on a gamecube, it must be better than Gnome.

    laugh, its a joke
    • Don't you mean a Gamekube? :)

      At least now I know why Nintendo always calls things 'Game Paks' and 'Memory Paks'. Their marketing department used to work for KDE.

      • Re:Well (Score:2, Funny)

        by strider44 ( 650833 )
        that should be "kalls things 'Game Paks' and 'Memory Paks'."

        Remember, there is no 'C' in KDE, so there obviously should be no 'C' in the english language either.

    • Re:Well (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      > Well I'm convinced... if KDE can run on a
      > gamecube, it must be better than Gnome.

      Well KDE can run, but it can't hide.

      Gnomes and elves are good at running and hiding. Right now, GNOME chooses not to be seen.

  • about the shots (Score:4, Funny)

    by sla291 ( 757668 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:24AM (#10684321)
    Well, at least, we can say that KDE runs well on black&white TVs :)

  • Gamecube: pretty hard to hack (Score:5, Informative)

    by phoxix ( 161744 ) * on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:32AM (#10684353)
    Unlike the Xbox or the PS2, there are no mod-chips for the gamecube. Nintendo did one hell of a job constructing this little machine.

    The way to hack the Gamecube is somewhat interesting. Back in the days of the Sega Dreamcast, there was a game known as "Phantasy Star Online", which attempted to connect to a remote server to get and execute whatever code it got from the remote server.... grin :^).

    When Sega ported the game to the GameCube, the exploit came with it. So what folks do is they load up Phantasy Star Online 1+11, run a "loader" on their computer (linux or windows). And have the loader on their computer send the gamecube whatever they want (home games, illegal rips, the linux kernel, etc).

    This has been over-simplified greatly.

    And note: some of you might be thinking about using this to play illegal copies of games. Don't bother. You end up needing to use a bazillion different loaders to load whatever game, and the network port of the Gamecube is limited to 10mbps, which makes many games unplayable.

    Sunny Dubey

    • Re:Gamecube: pretty hard to hack (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Didn't the PSO exploit originate from the Xbox version? Something about the GC and (later) Xbox versions both using the same keys to sign downloads...

      Someone got the key from the Xbox game and guessed that the GC version might have used the same one and it did! Sega messed up.

    • Re:Gamecube: pretty hard to hack (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 01, 2004 @07:45AM (#10684569)
      Unlike the Xbox or the PS2, there are no mod-chips for the gamecube. Nintendo did one hell of a job constructing this little machine.

      The problem has never been the mod chips, it's been the fact that Nintendo uses a custom media disc, not the CDs/DVDs that the PS2 uses, or the DVDs that the Xbox uses.

      If the GCN could take commodity media, then I'm sure a mod chip would be forthcoming. However, Nintendo stopped you from getting to the point where a mod chip would be useful.

      You do have to admire the fact that they, unlike Microsoft or Sony, managed to beat the piracy problem on the cube.

      • Re:Gamecube: pretty hard to hack (Score:5, Insightful)

        by StillAnonymous ( 595680 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @09:15AM (#10685034)
        "You do have to admire the fact that they, unlike Microsoft or Sony, managed to beat the piracy problem on the cube."

        And it answers the age-old argument that gets posed back and forth. You know, the "I wouldn't pirate games if they were cheaper...Games would be cheaper if you didn't pirate them"

        Apparently the industry lied and games aren't made any cheaper even when they aren't pirated.

        • Re:Gamecube: pretty hard to hack (Score:4, Informative)

          by bedouin ( 248624 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @02:45PM (#10690314)
          And it answers the age-old argument that gets posed back and forth. You know, the "I wouldn't pirate games if they were cheaper...Games would be cheaper if you didn't pirate them"

          If it's of any worth, when I owned my modded PSX about 5-6 of my games were legitimate copies. As a Gamecube owner, with no pirated games, I still only own about six. It's the age old realization most companies never come to: just because one pirated 50 games doesn't mean he/she was going to buy them in the first place.
      • We'll get an Emulator.

        BIOTCH! :P

        But seriously what is the temptation to do that to a cube?

        Lazy pirates are taking advantage of the HD in the other systems so they don't even needs disks anymore.

        Modding a gamecube would be like switching to a mac to play CS.
      • And the gamecube has a very small marketshare as a result. A lot of ps2/xbox owners don't buy any games, but they still contribute to the platforms market and mind share.

  • Correction (Score:3, Funny)

    by tempest303 ( 259600 ) <<jensknutson> <at> <yahoo.com>> on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:33AM (#10684357) Homepage
    The story reporter got a link wrong - the screenshot ought to look like this [gnome.org]. :-P

    (it's funny, laugh.)

  • mmmm trippy (Score:3, Funny)

    by D3viL ( 814681 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:35AM (#10684367)
    maybe it's just me but I like the fist picture better, or maybe it's just the mushrooms talkin

  • "original frame buffer" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 01, 2004 @06:48AM (#10684408)
    probably get modded down or troll for admitting i use IE6, but the FB link crashes it. maybe i'll be using that gamecube for my browsing soon..
  • What applications can I run with GameCube Linux?
    What about MPlayer? FireFox? Vim?
    Do you know are they working on XBox/PS2?

    • Re:applications? (Score:5, Informative)

      by apanap ( 804545 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @08:05AM (#10684635) Journal
      Mplayer works fine [gc-linux.org], and you can see some more useless screenshots here [gc-linux.org]. Snes9x [voidpointer.org] has also been ported, as well as a couple other emulators (MAME and some neogeo emulator for example). Other than that I haven't found much use for it except for the geek-factor, the memory is too limited to do anything heavy... But playing SNES games on the cube is pretty sweet though.

  • It's official (Score:5, Funny)

    by Admiral Justin ( 628358 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @07:20AM (#10684491) Homepage Journal
    It's official, Linux does run on everything, toasters, xbox, gamecube, your grandmother, robot cheney...

  • dd? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ezzzD55J ( 697465 ) <slashdot5@scum.org> on Monday November 01, 2004 @07:25AM (#10684505) Homepage
    I wonder why people like to use 'dd' when it comes to devices. Without skipping, conversion, truncating, etc., (i.e., just naming an if= and an of=) dd is the same as cp, but trickier. (e.g., you can't use tab completion in the shell easily due to the if=.. syntax).

    In short,

    cp /dev/fb0 kde.fbdump
    is exactly the same as
    dd if=/dev/fb0 of=./kde.fbdump
    but simpler and easier to use. No good reason to use dd..

    • Re:dd? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Famanoran ( 568910 )
      That may be true, but I for one like to set block sizes for copies, and block counts too... A block size of 256k is rather good for copying from CD's, for example.
      • Ok, you're right about being able to set block sizes, as cp might be more conservative with that than you'd like. However, I did qualify my 'cp=dd' statement by saying that they're only the same if you don't specify skips and truncations and whatnot, as cp can't do that. block is are part of that, even though they won't affect the result (it's just that the copying may be more efficient with a larger blocksize).
        • Sorry dude - my bad. :) Blind as a bat tonight, think I'll go to bed (being 1.43am).

        • Re:dd? (Score:2)

          by winse ( 39597 )
          so why not use cat as in cat /dev/fb0 > /tmp/kdestuff

          I use this all the time for dvds that I want to rip. I guess using cp just never occurred to me, but cat seems to work fine except of course the blocksize thing.

  • Anytime... (Score:5, Funny)

    by BaltikaTroika ( 809862 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @07:32AM (#10684528)
    The first screenshot is what KDE looks like when the Predator is using it.

  • virtual (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 01, 2004 @08:44AM (#10684818)
    So... when do we have the first person claiming to run KDE on a GameCube emulator on his 486-33 MHz? Or runnning a GameCube emulator in the 486-33MHz emulator on the GameCube?

    (Cry, I'm serious ;)

  • Colour skeme (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nodatadj ( 28279 ) on Monday November 01, 2004 @09:56AM (#10685469) Journal
    Now I see where games.slashdot.org got its colour scheme from. Taco was browsing using a gamecube.

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