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Post by RetroRic on Jan 2, 2022 12:28:39 GMT
Hi guys,
Sorry to sorta jump in here I know it's bad manners but I really don't know where to start.
I have an ntsc mini, bought by my girlfriend from a dodgy seller. I need a pal version and wondered if this method of x-windows would be a good way to change the mini from ntsc to pal?
Do you get access to the c64 bios chip images etc?
If not could anyone point me in a general direction of investigation?
Thankyou.
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Post by jj0 on Jan 2, 2022 12:39:49 GMT
Hi guys, Sorry to sorta jump in here I know it's bad manners but I really don't know where to start. I have an ntsc mini, bought by my girlfriend from a dodgy seller. I need a pal version and wondered if this method of x-windows would be a good way to change the mini from ntsc to pal? Do you get access to the c64 bios chip images etc? If not could anyone point me in a general direction of investigation? Thankyou. Probable general direction suggested here. |
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Post by RetroRic on Jan 2, 2022 18:10:12 GMT
Thanks very much, this looks helpful.
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Post by spannernick on Mar 16, 2022 14:58:03 GMT
Anyone know what OS is the closet to this...?
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Post by jj0 on Mar 16, 2022 19:33:25 GMT
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Post by CubicleNate on Dec 21, 2022 12:32:55 GMT
This is incredibly fascinating to me. I have the Maxi and I think this would be fun to play around with. I do have one question, since I do use my Maxi quite a bit, will I lose any functionality by installing this Firmware? I do use the mouse feature on it and am curious if I will lose that from the 1.6.1 firmware.
Thanks!
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Post by spannernick on Dec 21, 2022 15:37:13 GMT
I know this works on THEA500 Mini and works better so was wondering if we could use a better Linux OS so something newer maybe like ubuntu or something, you can drag the windows and they drag properly on THEA500 Mini and you don't get screen tearing....  ...? |
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Post by jj0 on Dec 21, 2022 17:14:33 GMT
This is incredibly fascinating to me. I have the Maxi and I think this would be fun to play around with. I do have one question, since I do use my Maxi quite a bit, will I lose any functionality by installing this Firmware? I do use the mouse feature on it and am curious if I will lose that from the 1.6.1 firmware. Thanks! You won't lose functionality, this doesn't change the internal firmware but runs standalone. Of course when you run it you can change things on the internal NAND storage. |
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Post by CubicleNate on Dec 22, 2022 13:31:13 GMT
This is fantastic! I am going to be playing around with this. I want to see what the capabilities are of this machine when accessing the Linux bits.
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Post by Wizart on Mar 23, 2023 12:31:22 GMT
question are you adding THEA500 support ? i realy like that if you do
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Post by jj0 on Mar 25, 2023 11:23:44 GMT
question are you adding THEA500 support ? i realy like that if you do I have no plans to do that as standalone version. Isn't it included in PCUAE? |
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Post by Wizart on Mar 25, 2023 19:25:08 GMT
yes but i was hoping for standalone version |
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Post by javierglez on May 6, 2023 20:19:45 GMT
Hello, it's been a few years since this developmen and I'm a casual Linux user, so I couldn't get this working, I wanted to share my attempts From the TheC64: - In 'start.sh' on the USB drive change the 'mount -o ro /mnt/rootfs.img /tmp/chroot' to 'mount -o rw /mnt/rootfs.img /tmp/chroot' to make it writable
- Put any stuff you want to change/add also on the USB dirve, e.g.background image, software packages. For software packages you need do download the corresponding .deb package for Debian Jessie
- Run the 'update' on the TheC64. The rootfs image is now read/write so you can make any changes you want. To install a .deb package do 'dpkg -i xxxx.deb'
With regards to this first approach, I couldn't find any .deb package for Jessie ready to download through Google anyway. But I tried to use dpkg with a .deb file (the TIC-80 console) which I found for the "Raspberry Pi", it complained that "dpkg database is locked". I googled the error, added the "quarktwosomething" user to 'etc/hosts', tried again with sudo. Then I deleted the dpkg/lock file, but it came up again as soon as I tried dpkg again. Then I gave up. From a PC running Linux: - Mount (a copy of) the rootfs.img on a suitable directory, e.g. sudo 'mount rootfs.img /mnt'
- You need to have qemu-user-static installed and possibly binfmt installed
- If you want to run X-Windows programs from the rootfs and have them displayed on your PC's screen, then from a normal terminal window on your PC do:
# xhost +
access control disabled, clients can connect from any host
# echo $DISPLAY
:1
- Start a root command-line session from the rootfs image:
sudo chroot /mnt /bin/sh or
sudo chroot /mnt /bin/bash
- Do:
export DISPLAY=<$DISPLAY from above>
- You can now edit the filesystem and also install packgages with apt-get and should have a normal network connection
- Some X programs will run on your screen, e.g. 'xclock'. But many others won't.
- Instead of using systemd-nspawn you might also be able to use Docker or qumu
- After logging out of the session do a 'sudo umount /mnt' and copy the rootfs image back to the USB drive for use on the TheC64
With regards to this second approach, I created a Mint USB as the desktop I'm using right now has only windows and its SSD is small I installed docker, qemu, qemu-user-static, mounted the disk image, executed systemd-nspawn, it gave no errors Then I tried to install a few games that were listed in packages.debian.org/jessie/allpackagesI tried to install with apt-get the following games: abe, ballerburg, barrage, bloboats, blobwars, bouncy But it complained about many broken links and missing files. After failing with the first game I tried apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade, but think they failed. Then I tried the other the games and gave up. I have used "TheC64-X-Windows v3" and "PCUAE-AIO-3.1.0-RC4", both seem pretty much identical with regards to the Linux session. I intended to use my second hand bought TheVIC20 as a keyboard in case I wanted to do some PETSCII graphics. But then discovered this, it's super cool to be able to run Amiga games on a VIC20. Even if the Favourites carousel of PCUAE is fantastic, I'm more of a collector and like the old machines and the CRTs, and find quite ugly the HDMI picture for VIC/C64. I'd be grateful if someone can give some advice in order no to give up. |
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Post by jj0 on May 7, 2023 20:12:15 GMT
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Post by javierglez on May 10, 2023 7:23:56 GMT
The second day I tried to install the TIC80 console compiling the code according to github instructions.
In the Mint pendrive it installed OK as if it were "Ubuntu 18".
In the rootfs.img, doing the spawn, compiling as if it were "Ubuntu 14", it complained about missing libglu-dev.
But there wasn't enough disk space, so I enlarged the image in 2GB.
As I kept trying things I ran out of disk space again, but this time I could barely enlarge it, as apparently there's was some size limit near 4GB.
I'll check the link, they add 4 entries to the sources list, at some time I added one.
Anyway I can't have this for saturday's gathering. Ultimately I'd like to install PICO8, but I think this will require some other mod, like swapping the board with a Raspberry Pi or similar.
Thank you.
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Post by MeneerJansen on May 10, 2023 8:37:12 GMT
Yep. You can still install packages on any old Debian distro if you use the archived repository. javierglez wants to compile stuff etc. You shouldn't do that for/on a 'The C64': the hardware isn't meant for that. It ain't no Raspberry Pi. Bottom line: it's fun and interesting to know that it's possible to run Linux on 'The C64' but it's not very usable. Especially NOT for running other resource heavy emulators like the Amiga. You need special hardware for that or a Raspberry Pi. |
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Post by javierglez on May 10, 2023 12:47:06 GMT
Especially NOT for running other resource heavy emulators like the Amiga. I checked a few games in PCUAE Amiga mode (WHDLoad), Zool, Ruff'n Tumble, Robocop, they seem to run OK. It's true that it takes an awful lot to start up and to shut it down, but once it's doing the emulation, I find it's usable. There's old posts in this thread of someone who had taken advantage of the linux mode to install some emulators, but apparently it's much more difficult now. |
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Post by darpio on Aug 17, 2023 15:23:53 GMT
Cheers; great efforts on this ! For starters, I am not planning to use theC64 as linux machine for compiling code or anything else; but knowing I can run linux is great; as for reference, I run linux on a lot of old machines (talking about old P2 and P3, and some ancient 233 MHz StrongARM RISC CPU). My idea is to use it in pure text mode, as I don't really need the GUI to speed up things, once I have a decent file manager on it like Midnight commander, Ranger or LF; although not sure if those are even able to run on theC64. Did anyone tried any of the console file manager or tried to run this distribution without a window manager at all? That should reduce the load on the memory and CPU and should speed up considerably the operations. I used to run a text-only system on a single board computer that has similar specs to the one in theC64, and it was blazing fast for what it was; so I was wondering if anyone tried or not. I would like to spend some time this weekend to try, if anyone didn't yet For most part I would like to fire up linux on theC64 to move/manage files, modify/create files and maybe run simple scripts in sh/zh (running anything like python or compile with GCC is probably out of this world on that poor thing I assume). Just for the fun of it run some other emulator maybe, to emulate other 8 bit computer like a Dragon, Tandy, Spectrum, MSX and similar, but that is more for the fun of it than anything else, as I imagine there is not enough juice to run anything else but linux kernel at that point probably, as that alone should take more than half of the available resources I imagine. Curious to hear what people tried |
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Post by spannernick on Aug 18, 2023 12:43:23 GMT
This is in PCUAE too plus it works on THEA500 Mini too, I made it look more like a desktop on that so added desktop icons and add a background image, so the the windows folder and terminal does not come up, you have click on its icons to bring them up now like how it does on Linux.
It does not have the dragging problem too when you drag a window where it can not refresh the window on the screen, it drags it properly, wish that would work OK on THEC64, do not understand why it does that, maybe that could be fix sometime, because its ok on THEA500, or maybe not because its a THEC64 Models thing or glitch, one way of fixing this is... can X-Windows Mod drag windows without you seen the window been dragged so just is the image of the window dragged so a shadow of the window then it would only need to refresh the window when its in the new position on the desktop, you can do that in Windows and in Linux but do not know how to enable it.
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Post by jj0 on Aug 19, 2023 9:23:52 GMT
Cheers; great efforts on this ! For starters, I am not planning to use theC64 as linux machine for compiling code or anything else; but knowing I can run linux is great; as for reference, I run linux on a lot of old machines (talking about old P2 and P3, and some ancient 233 MHz StrongARM RISC CPU). My idea is to use it in pure text mode, as I don't really need the GUI to speed up things, once I have a decent file manager on it like Midnight commander, Ranger or LF; although not sure if those are even able to run on theC64. Did anyone tried any of the console file manager or tried to run this distribution without a window manager at all? That should reduce the load on the memory and CPU and should speed up considerably the operations. I used to run a text-only system on a single board computer that has similar specs to the one in theC64, and it was blazing fast for what it was; so I was wondering if anyone tried or not. I would like to spend some time this weekend to try, if anyone didn't yet For most part I would like to fire up linux on theC64 to move/manage files, modify/create files and maybe run simple scripts in sh/zh (running anything like python or compile with GCC is probably out of this world on that poor thing I assume). Just for the fun of it run some other emulator maybe, to emulate other 8 bit computer like a Dragon, Tandy, Spectrum, MSX and similar, but that is more for the fun of it than anything else, as I imagine there is not enough juice to run anything else but linux kernel at that point probably, as that alone should take more than half of the available resources I imagine. Curious to hear what people tried THE64's linux kernel does not support text mode out of the box, the framebuffer console drivers are not compiled in. XWM starts in graphics mode by directly executing startx. However you should be able to use the framebuffer console kernel modules here, loading them in XWM's start.sh and then do the chroot starting /bin/bash instead of startx to get into a text-mode console. XWM is pretty old though, based on a Debian Jessie image for the OlinuXino Lime so quite outdated. You could try to replace it with a newer version, e.g. for compilation of VICE I used an Armbian Xenial (yes, also pretty old) image. |
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