Linux on PS2 (was Re: [rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?)

[James Sharp]

> With the price of the PS2 falling like a chicken from a cessna, it'll be a very
> short time before I get one of my own.  I can't wait...
>
> I assume that the Linux kit includes a keyboard and mouse.  Yes?  I also assume
> that it plays PS1 games?

The PS2 plays PS1 games quite well.  There are some options in the "PS1
Driver" to add some graphics enhancement to the PS1 games.

The linux kit for the PS2 comes with a USB keyboard, a 40GB IDE drive to
install linux on to, some cables to connect to a sync on green monitor
(you need this to do the initial install...afterwards you can route out to
the NTSC video port), and a 10/100 USB ethernet adapter.

Supposedly, the drivers in the linux kernel give you access to pretty much
everything in the PS2.  The main processor (of course), the two vector
engines, the "Emotion Engine", USB, the big hairy graphics pipeline via
OpenGL and Mesa, and both the digital and analogue audio outputs.

The only things they don't give you access to are the hardware De-CSS
engine, the audio playback part of the CD drive, and the Dolby Digital and
5.1 encoder hardware (but you can still get 44.1Khz PCM audio out of the
digital audio fiber port).

I'm looking forward to porting MAME to it and playing all the old arcade
games on my TV system.