One architecture in the obscure category is SuperH, a chipset released by Hitachi in the 1990s that was used in three of Sega’s consoles-the 32X, Saturn, and Dreamcast-and not many other places. (via r/retrobattlestations) Why Linux has always found a home on video game consolesĪs operating systems go, Linux is a chameleon, one that can be installed on architectures both incredibly mainstream and absurdly obscure.

Ernie Tediumīefore we get going, be sure to check out today’s sponsor, SetApp.Ī Sega Dreamcast, running BBS software over Linux. Today’s Tedium talks about OtherOS, or how Sony made the Linux and hacker communities mad. The PlayStation 3, while it did not best the Nintendo Wii, may have bested Apple at making the most popular PowerPC platform intended for a degree of general purpose computing … well, until Sony, under duress, threw that crown away. As I wrote in my prior piece on Apple and PowerPC, the Wii’s primary competitors in home video games at the time-the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3-also used architecture based on the PowerPC. The winner was technically the Nintendo Wii, which sold more than 100 million units during its seven-year history on the console market, all while rocking a variant of the PowerPC G3 processor line used in many early Macs. Now, while it was the most influential company that offered PowerPC computers for sale, it was technically not the largest-not by a long shot. ( I want one.) As I wrote earlier this year, the Apple Silicon shift is not its first move away from a CPU architecture, but its third, and the parallels between the transitions from PowerPC and Intel are interesting to watch in real time. In the case of Apple’s M1 chip, it took away the ability to upgrade basically anything.

Today in Tedium: As companies innovate over time, they inevitably take things away.

Ps3 slim custom firmware