Today I visited computerspielemuseum in Berlin and got dumps from SU2000. It turned out to contain an older version of PacMan VR from 1996 00.01.62. The newest known version so far is 01.01.00

Still for now I'm focusing on emulating 01.01.00

I got to play Zone Hunter and that's was quite interesting experience

But the headset was terrible. You can only adjust the back part of the helmet while the front part doesn't move up or down. After 5 minutes of play the lenses get really foggy and the sounds are extremely loud (should be adjustable but never tried)

I also found another lost version of PacMan VR 00.01.62. Still for now I'm focusing on emulating 01.01.00

I've been working on this for a while and got some progress on the PIX1000 graphics board. I partially emulated it, the game now passes the BIOS/hardware check and I'm getting actual video output (vector shapes/lines/DPRAM rendering, fps counter showing up)

I patched dosbox Staging to send hardware calls over a local TCP connection to a Python script, which emulates the PIX1000 graphics board (MMIO). There's also a second script that acts like an interpreter for the m88k coprocessor so it can run the original firmware files (MAINA.OUT/MAINB.OUT) instead of freezing

Still nowhere near full 3d geometry, but figured I'd share since I know a few people here have tried this game before and hit the same wall with the custom hardware. If anyone else is looking at virtuality stuff, happy to compare notes

I will post these files soon!

Why do you need root access and an unlocked bootloader on such a new devices? I never really understood the point of it (unlocked my bootloader because I think this phone will be worth a lot more to the rooting community + thats my second phone)

This month I found physical CDs of Red Flag Linux 2.0 and 3.0 on Chinese marketplaces (lost media cds, I posted about them earlier and I think many people already saw it). This time I went further and want to properly write everything about them

​

Some notes on both versions:

Version 3.0 feels more like a server build than a desktop, most applications don't work, there's only 1 game (which corrupts the UI when launched) and Paint is broken

Version 2.0 is extremely difficult to install and boot, it took me around 1.5-2 hours to get it running and fix all errors. Without a tutorial it's going to be very painful. That's also why I didn't bother porting it to Apple TV. Its the more complete system by far, all games work (Snake, Billiards, PacMan, Tetris and more), there's a file manager, text editor, support for any screen resolution, and basically everything you'd expect from a desktop (everything that 3.0 is missing)

​

I may dig deeper into both systems in the future, but one thing I can already confirm that both versions idle at around 40 MB of RAM

​

The discs I have differ slightly from the ones preserved on archive.org, mine are a bit newer builds. But that felt like a boring answer so I ported version 3.0 to apple tv gen 1

​

This method should now work for almost any early Linux distro built on kernel ~2.4.7 running on Apple TV hardware (e.g. old builds of Red Hat 32-bit)

This took me around 10-15 hours

​

What was required:

Hybrid MBR to bridge the gap between GPT (Apple TV) and MBR-only Linux 2.4.7

Direct kernel hex patching at binary offset 0x1FC to fix hardcoded root partition paths

x86 assembly utilities to force IRQ 10 assignment for the ICH7M USB controller, since 2001-2002 drivers had no knowledge of its existence (I don't know assembly so Claude Sonnet was my copilot here)

​

Because the utilities are already baked into the image you can swap in your own ISO, patch IRQ = 10 and older Linux distros should boot fine.

Both original ISOs (~1 GB each) + the Apple TV image (~5 GB) and an automated bash installer script are available for download on my preservation page:

https://errordanofficial.github.io/redflaglinux/

​

The website exists ONLY for preservation purposes, the ISOs and install tutorials are there because without them getting any of this running is nearly impossible

iMac G3 in Indigo always had that Frutiger Aero vibe. I’d really love to have one, but unfortunately my past attempts to work with it went badly (caught smoking). Still that doesn’t stop me from wanting to buy a painting of it and run a 24/7 iMac G3 ad video on an old monitor. It actually looks pretty beautiful