Game Dev On IBook G4 With NetBSD

July 23, 2025 by Tyler August 5 Comments

What can you do with a laptop enough to drink even in the Puritan ex-colonies? 21 years is a long time for computer hardware– but [Chris] is using his early-2004 iBook G4 for game dev thanks to NetBSD.

Some of you might consider game dev a strong word; obviously he’s not working on AAA titles on the machine he affectionately calls “Brick”. NetBSD includes pygame in its repositories, though, and that’s enough for a 2D puzzle game he’s working on called Slantics. It’s on GitHub, if you’re curious.

Slantics: possibly the only game written on PPC Macintosh hardware this year.

Why NetBSD? Well, [Chris] wants to use his vintage hardware so that, in his words “collecting does not become hoarding” and as the slogan goes: “Of course it runs NetBSD!” It’s hard to remember sometimes that it’s been two decades since the last PPC Macintosh. After that long, PPC support in Linux is fading, as you might expect.

[Chris] tried the community-supported PPC32 port of Debian Sid, but the installer didn’t work reliably, and driver issues made running it “Death by a thousand cuts”. NetBSD, with it’s institutional obsession with running on anything and everything, works perfectly on this legally-adult hardware. Even better, [Chris] reports NetBSD running considerably faster, getting 60 FPS in pygame vs 25 FPS under Linux.

This is almost certainly not the year of the BSD Desktop, but if you’ve got an old PPC machine you feel like dusting off to enjoy a low-powered modern workflow, NetBSD may be your AI-code-free jam. It’s great to see old hardware still doing real work. If you’d rather relive the glory days, you can plug that PPC into a wayback proxy to browse like it’s 2005 again. If you get bored of nostalgia, there’s always MorphOS, which still targets PPC.

The Future We Never Got, Running A Future We Got

March 6, 2025 by Jenny List 39 Comments

If you’re familiar with Java here in 2025, the programming language you know is a world away from what Sun Microsystems planned for it in the mid-1990s. Back then it was key to a bright coffee-themed future of write-once-run-anywhere software, and aside from your web browser using it to run applications, your computer would be a diskless workstation running Java bytecode natively on the silicon.

What we got was slow and disappointing Java applets in web pages, and a line of cut-down SPARC-based JavaStations which did nothing to change the world. [FatSquirrel] has one of these machines, and a quarter century later, has it running NetBSD. It’s an interesting journey both into 1990s tech, and some modern-day networking tricks to make it happen.

These machines suffer as might be expected, from exhausted memory backup batteries. Fortunately once the serial port has been figured out they drop you into an OpenBoot prompt, which, in common with Apple machines in the ’90s, gives you a Forth interpreter. There’s enough info online to load the NVRAM with a config, and the machine stuttered into life. To do anything useful takes a network with RARP and NFS to serve an IP address and disk image respectively, which a modern Linux machine is quite happy to do. The resulting NetBSD machine maybe isn’t as useful as it could be, but at risk of angering any Java enthusiasts, perhaps it’s more useful than the original JavaOS.

We remember the promise of a Java-based future too, and tasted the bitter disappointment of stuttering Java applets in our web pages. However, given that so much of what we use now quietly runs Java in the background without our noticing it, perhaps the shade of Sun Microsystems had the last laugh after all. This isn’t the first ’90s machine that’s been taught new tricks here, some of them have received Java for the first time.

NetBSD Bans AI-Generated Code From Commits

May 18, 2024 by Maya Posch 38 Comments

A recent change was announced to the NetBSD commit guidelines which amends these to state that code which was generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) or similar technologies, such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot or Meta’s Code Llama is presumed to be tainted code. This amendment was to the existing section about tainted code, which originally referred to any code that was not written directly by the person committing the code, and was due to licensing concerns. The obvious reason behind this is that otherwise code may be copied into the NetBSD codebase which may have been licensed under an incompatible (or proprietary) license.

In the case of LLM-based code generators like the above-mentioned, the problem stems from the fact that they are trained on millions of lines of code from all over the internet, which are naturally released under a wide variety of licenses. Invariably, some of that code will be covered by a license that’s not acceptable for the NetBSD codebase. Although the guideline mentions that these auto-generated code commits may still be admissible, they require written permission from core developers, and presumably an in-depth audit of the code’s heritage. This should leave non-trivial commits that got churned out by ChatGPT and kin out in the cold.

The debate about the validity of works produced by current-gen “artificial intelligence” software is only just beginning, but there’s little question that NetBSD has made the right call here. From a legal and software engineering perspective this policy makes perfect sense, as LLM-generated code simply doesn’t meet the project’s standards. That said, code produced by humans brings with it a whole different set of potential problems.

SNES Toaster

March 22, 2009 by Eliot 17 Comments

nintoaster

From the same person who brought you the NES toaster comes the Super Nintoaster. It looks like the most difficult part of the construction was extending the cartridge connector. The slider button works as the power button. The toast control now changes the brightness of the glowing red LEDs. Video introduction embedded below.

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