KDE Running On A GameCube

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)."

Gamecube: pretty hard to hack

[phoxix]

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:Wow.

[gustgr]

Maybe with somthing like this [cube-europe.com]?

Re:Enquiring minds want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

From all reports yes it booted but the color map was broken on the x server so it didn't look really great. Here is what it looks like [danamania.com]. I think it took slightly less long than expected, only four and a half days.

Re:Gamecube: pretty hard to hack

[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:What is this kde.fbdump garbage?

[Zorilla]

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.

Re:Now correct me if i'm wrong..

[Poltras]

IIRC, they boot on NFS, since there is no real HDD on the gamecube. And it's more useful that way, since they don't have to burn a mini-DVD backwards every time they make a modification. What seems more a problem now is color management. :)

Re:KDE is heavy

[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).

Re:What is this kde.fbdump garbage?

[vadim_t]

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:Enquiring minds want to know

[danamania]

From all reports yes it booted but the color map was broken on the x server so it didn't look really great. Here is what it looks like. I think it took slightly less long than expected, only four and a half days.

nooooo. no no no.

The boot failed due to a byte-order issue with drive images made on PCs, and failed at the four and a half day mark. I'm not sure where you got the URL for the image, I can only presume once it was pasted on IRC it spreads everywhere :). That image is of the Centris display, but it's my Athlon's PearPC session merely using X11 on the Centris.

I'll have it booting sometime soon, just not this week :).

Re:Wow.

[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.

[OneHungLo]

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.

Re:applications?

[apanap]

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.

Re:Practical uses?

[mausmalone]

(a) no modding involved, so in that respect it's really easy to get up and running. (b) Well, since they have mplayer running, you could use it as a network media player. I think if someone developed a front end specifically for gclinux that would let you specify a samba/windows file share in a .conf file somewhere, displayed the files in some user-friendly way, and then spawned mplayer when you clicked on one,... well that'd be nice. ... sadly, I don't know how to program squat on linux or I'd be all over that.

Re:What is this kde.fbdump garbage?

[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?

[imroy]

(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.

Re:Gamecube: pretty hard to hack

[falcon9x]

Does the GC have regional lockouts? If so, how do people get round them without modchips?

Yes it does. You can use the Action Replay [codejunkies.com] product, or its derivative, Freeloader. That's what I use to play import games.

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.

IIRC, the GameCube uses standard off-the-shelf miniDVDs (1.5GB). The thing is, the discs are written backwards. Spinning the other way. That is what prevents the burning of GameCube DVDs.

Re:Gamecube: pretty hard to hack

[bedouin]

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.