logoalt Hacker News

serious_angel • today at 4:45 AM • 2 replies • view on HN

The Community behind the marvelous project as ArchLinux32, are ineffably awesome... The project provide various options, including i496, i696, and pentium4 architectures with or without PAE requirements. The OS comes with pre-configured systemd, and supports numerous up-to-date repositories out-of-the-box. Some relatively lightweight custom window manager like Awesome or i3wm may also shape the environment if X required.

Apparently, I do still have a few photos in backups of someone's own enchanted marvel of a portal to universes powered by a Celeron D, USB pen-drive of 16 GiB, a single RAM of 1 GiB, we all managed to acquire and built, for such a short time we had!

Preview of the device: https://imgur.com/gallery/h1tWKp3

Since the CPU had no physical address extension (PAE) to electrify a more common OS, and something customary was required for the limited resources, where we chose ArchLinux 32-bit (now ArchLinux32, indeed) and arranged a custom AwesomeWM environment visually suggesting a console design just for it!

And dear... we adventured a few nights back then backed by this machine and some self-compiled emulation software, ZSnes and Gens, for the titles she had collected from a few local stores and magazines!

It was quite long ago... more than a decade and half... but it like all happened just yesterday, and how freaking awesome it was!

You likely had a similar event/memory! Please do remember these...

Related: https://www.archlinux32.org/architecture/ (The below table lists the compatibility of CPUs (identified by their available flags) with architectures...)

Replies

anthk • today at 9:20 AM

For SNES I'd use Mednafen with the snes_faust core; and for difficult games to emulate I'd use the snes core. Also Mednafen works for MD/NES/GB/GBA/NGP and tons more systems.

PCSX-PGXP runs really well too, forget PGXP on that machine but at low resolution games will run fine with a simple bilinear filter. Parasiteve Eve can be damn addictive ;)

Also, text adventure games; a good one with a great history such Tristam Island it's fine too.

Also, compile Scummvm with these options from git (pacman -S scummvm, check the dependencies; run pacman -R scummvm later), then compile it with these options:

    #!/bin/sh
    export CC="clang"
    export CXX="clang++"
    export CXXFLAGS="-fpermissive -fcommon"
    export LDFLAGS="-Wl,-z,muldefs"
    export LANG=C
    make clean -j4
    env CC="clang" CXX="clang++" sh configure \
    --enable-static \
   --enable-all-engines \
    --enable-all-unstable-engines \
    --enable-release \
    --enable-plugins \
    --disable-hq-scalers \
   --disable-dlc \
   --disable-scummvmdlc \
    --disable-discord
     make CC="ccache clang" CXX="ccache clang++"   LDFLAGS+="-Wl,-z,muldefs"
tommica • today at 4:50 AM

Beautiful little box!