PlayStation 2 - Major progress, help me finish!

Chewi · Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 10:23 pm Post subject:

Answered some of that in a PM.

Bootable ISOs are no good because Linux has to be started through the RTE and the only CD/DVD the RTE can boot from is the official one. What I can send you is a tarball of a base system, which you can then netboot from. If you want to use the hard drive, you'll still need to netboot initially because the only way you can get the files onto the hard drive is through Linux. Even if you hook up the hard drive to a PC, other Linux kernels don't have PS2 APA (Advanced Partition Architecture, I think) support so that wouldn't work. Maybe porting the PS2 APA driver to the latest stock kernel wouldn't be too hard but it's not a priority for me so someone else can tackle that.

Woo 16 megs! The Amiga needs all it can get. :wink:

Chewi · Posted: Sun May 28, 2006 10:43 pm Post subject:

More good news!

After disabling the "old kernel compatibility" option in the kernel configuration, two of the problems I'd listed went away!

ps and top now work fine and the boot process no longer stops at Starting local....

I also have C++ working. I'm not 100% sure if it's quite right yet. To get it working with uclibc, I had to patch some of the locale stuff but to be honest, I didn't really know what I was doing. Most of the things I've tried to build have failed but that was when I was cross-compiling. I tried building a couple of the same packages natively and they built okay. So maybe it's just a cross-compiling issue.

Chewi · Posted: Tue May 30, 2006 7:28 pm Post subject:

After refining the locale patches and adding a float wrapper patch to uclibc, I was able to build ScummVM.

Monkey Island 3 works. It's a tiny bit sluggish but very playable. Don't try and run it over the network though! Beneath A Steel Sky works perfectly. Unfortunately, Monkey Islands 1 and 2 don't work due to some palette problem, I think. The framebuffer doesn't support 8-bit. There are probably plenty of other ScummVM games that will work (Flight of the Amazon Queen, Broken Sword...) but the ones I've tested are the only ones I have.

Oh yeah, I tried joymouse so I could use the gamepad with ScummVM instead of the mouse. joymouse itself seems to work but SDL's fbcon driver screws things up. Maybe it'll work if I use the DirectFB driver instead. We'll see.

cyblord · Guru Joined: 22 May 2006 Posts: 424

wow... impressive

nibiru · n00b Joined: 09 Jun 2005 Posts: 38

Chewi · Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 2:45 am Post subject:

Even though I did own the Amiga versions of both, I used the PC versions. They work fine through ScummVM on this machine. It's not that the colours simply don't display properly, the games actually crash out to the ScummVM debug console after loading.

lord_muad_dib · n00b Joined: 01 Jun 2006 Posts: 6 Location: viterbo italy

great work men!
keep op the good work!

@Chewi: i sent you a pm

Chewi · Posted: Thu Jun 01, 2006 11:18 am Post subject:

Thank you.

I'll get back to you later on today, gotta get some real work done first. :wink:

Quick update. My girlfriend likes the Lemmings clone called Pingus so I thought I'd get it working. It needs ClanLib though, which is a monster of a package and very C++ heavy. I didn't expect that to work. Remarkably, after making one minor change, it built just fine. THEN I found out that I'd built 0.7 when Pingus needs 0.6. D'oh! I then tried building 0.6. I had to write a small patch to make it compile against uclibc (sending that upstream) but again, it built perfectly after that. Pingus also built okay. I tried running it through DirectFB but nothing appeared on-screen. I have a feeling it was running in the background somewhere though. I'd forgotten to emerge mikmod so I couldn't hear the music. I then tried running it under X. That did work but it was then that I realised the colours in X are screwed up. I think the framebuffer uses BGR while X uses RGB. I've found a small patch that might fix it though so I'll give that a try later. As yet, I haven't had anything working on DirectFB but I think I can figure it out.

boniek · Guru Joined: 26 Mar 2005 Posts: 373

Pretty impressive. Hopefully you will continue to work on that project.

ShALLaX · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 34

Redhatter · Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 12:19 am Post subject:

Chewi · Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 12:20 am Post subject:

Heh are you the main guy? I was referring to chrb, who is listed on http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/roll-call/userinfo.xml as being the dev responsible for it.

ShALLaX · n00b Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 34

I started Gentoo on the Xbox... then I was kicked from the dev team because I was "inactive" during exam season at University... I was given no chance to finish my exams or argue my case.

Instead of dealing with all the politics I decided to maintain Gentoox by myself at http://gentoox.shallax.com

Chewi · Posted: Sat Jun 03, 2006 1:32 am Post subject:

Sorry to hear that. I know how hard going university can be. If it's any consolation, even though I wasn't aware of the split, that's the site I've always associated with Gentoox and I do recognise your screen name.

Chewi · Posted: Sun Jun 04, 2006 12:51 am Post subject:

More good news. I was fed up with being forced to build packages on the PS2. Even with distcc, it's horribly slow, especially when it comes to linking and ESPECIALLY when you're linking against ClanLib. I think I left it for at least an hour before I gave up and stopped it. Maybe it would have taken less than an hour if it hadn't been linking over the network but still. Practically all the C++ dependent packages were failing to cross-build and just about every X package I'd emerged had failed to cross-build as well. To top it all, they were always failing for stupid reasons like trying to link against libraries in /usr/lib instead of /mnt/gentoo-ps2/usr/lib. Something had to be done.

I have now written some fairly small, semi-intelligent wrapper scripts. I've so far managed to cross-build two versions of ClanLib, Pingus and a few X packages with them. This is a good sign.

The only packages that will probably still fail are compilers (those work without wrappers anyway), packages that try to execute programs they've just built and packages that require checks that can't be done when cross-building. I see no reason why X can't be entirely cross-built now. Furthermore, these scripts would certainly be useful for other target platforms too. Indeed, this entire project deals with common cross-building issues and also issues relating to uclibc. I'm planning to launch a wiki and these two subjects will no doubt be covered. So what am I going to call these scripts? I think I'm going to call them Magic Cross.

UPDATE: Hmm the stuff it's producing doesn't seem to be working quite right. I think I know why though.
UPDATE #2: Fixed it.

Chewi · Posted: Sat Jun 10, 2006 12:51 pm Post subject:

Hello again. I've been pretty busy with work over the last week so I haven't done too much.

Magic Cross was having trouble building anything tcl-related. After a while, I realised it was a problem with the wrapper dropping quotes from the given arguments. I fixed that. The tcl, tk, tls and amsn packages all built fine. amsn won't run though. It loads for a while then drops out with "Aborted".

I just tried building ImageMagick with Magic Cross but it failed a little way in. I think it's a uclibc issue though. I'm quite sure I've seen this error before.

Chewi · Posted: Sat Jun 10, 2006 7:24 pm Post subject:

amsn works! For some reason, the latest version, 0.95, wouldn't work but 0.94 does!

I also got Magic Cross to build ImageMagick. The problem was with the old kernel headers and was easy to fix. I had Magic Cross producing some rather verbose and colourful output to let you know what it was doing but that output seemed to cause some configure tests to fail. Neither stdout or stderr works in all cases. I guess Magic Cross will seem even more magic now because you won't even see what its doing. :wink:

The colours in X are still screwed up. Using ImageMagick to display a photo of my girlfriend was amusing. She had a blue face. :lol:

The server is now fully updated and I will be setting up Trac shortly.

Chewi · Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2006 1:07 pm Post subject:

Very busy but just a quick note to say fvwm works!

I'll probably post less about various packages working now, I think we can assume that most stuff works within reason.

Chewi · Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2006 9:50 am Post subject:

Okay, okay, one more because I know a lot of people are interested in this one - mplayer works!

After a bit of tweaking, I was able to build it with Magic Cross too, which is a big plus.

Chewi · Posted: Thu Jul 06, 2006 9:54 pm Post subject:

Someone asked me for an update. I'm not dead! I've been very busy with work and my recent focus has shifted to getting Gentoo to work on an old iMac using GCC 4.1 and uClibc 0.9.28. I've been told that this combination is almost as crazy an the PS2 project - indeed, it has been rather tricky.

This project certainly isn't dead either. I was getting frustrated with the framebuffer RGB/BGR problem so I decided to give it a rest for a while. I shall return to it once I've done a bit more work with the iMac. Fortunately my work with the iMac has allowed me to make further improvements to Magic Cross, though I feel that I now need to rewrite it in C because repeatedly calling sed through bash really slows things down and the shell's slippery handling of backslashes, quotes and other special characters makes things trickier than they need to be.

billiob · Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 9:16 pm Post subject:

Hello Chewi.
Great work !!

Can i ask you to try to install aMSN 0.95 again, and report me the compilation error, please ? (if the compilation doesn't fail, can you give me the error when launching amsn, please ?)
In fact, can you investigate that issue a bit more ?
It would be great to have amsn running on PS2 ! (the current version, because amsn 0.94 has only tcl files, that's why if tcl is compiled, amsn0.94 should work)
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billiob

Chewi · Posted: Fri Jul 07, 2006 9:24 pm Post subject:

If I remember correctly, it built okay but when I tried to run it, it bombed with "wish: aborted" or something like that. Not too helpful. What's interesting is that aMSN 0.95 does not work on the iMac either but 0.94 does. It's almost certainly a uClibc issue. The error I received on the iMac was different though. I can't remember exactly what it was but I'll rebuild it soon and let you know.

sonyman · n00b Joined: 30 Nov 2005 Posts: 31

I'd like to help you out on your project if possible. I don't have much skill in the way of coding, but I'd like to test your work on my own PS2. I recently spent a great deal of time compiling hundreds of Debian packages on my PS2, but that took way too much effort when I look at the end result. I'd much rather have Gentoo on it since it's so much leaner and meaner. I've added you to my MSN contacts and hope to correspond with you further regarding your developments.

Scott

Chewi · Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2006 9:05 pm Post subject:

BIG NEWS! Someone just pointed me to this on playstation2-linux.com...

yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL

hey, i'm just preparing to install linux on my ps2.

could you briefly sum up what do i need, from hardware and from software to get going?

i know i need network adapter and some hd drive, a linux kit dvds and usb keyboard, at least. what else? any pointers where should i start?
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