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[20070107] NetBSD support for Microsoft's Xbox committed (Update #2)
As reported a few days ago, Andrew Gillham is working on getting NetBSD to work on Microsoft's Xbox game console. Jared McNeill has joined him and after some serious sessions of hacking and cursing, the most essential bits to run NetBSD on the Xbox are in NetBSD-current now.

Quite some work also went into getting the nVidia ethernet nfe(4) driver working properly, getting a xboxfb driver to allow X to run, and getting an Xbox controller USB driver (looks like a mouse) written.

For bootstrapping, Andrew tells me that `` a hardware modchip is not needed to boot NetBSD. You only need to do the "soft mod" that involves booting a game save with a game like Mech Assault and crashing it with a buffer overflow. You do need the original game and a memory unit and the game save on the memory unit.''.

Maybe someone can assemble all the neccessary bits into a "Getting NetBSD going on Xbox" document next...

Update: Jared has also uploaded a bootable CDROM, archive for a NFS root filesystem and some instructions. You will still need a modded Xbox, see here and here for some details.

Update #2: Andrew also has some files up, including a picture of his pimped-up xbox which shows the Xecuter X3 LCD display, which is supported by the xboxlcd driver.

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