Messages

1

Blackbird / Re: My Blackbird and Fractal Design Meshify C arrived yesterday

« on: August 09, 2026, 01:22:46 pm »

https://isengaara.de/u/isengaara/m/raubvogel-computer-der-schwarze-vogel-1/
https://isengaara.de/u/isengaara/m/raubvogel-computer-der-schwarze-vogel-2/

Still have to buy SATA-cables and 4-pin ARBG fans for the Blackbird
To control the ARGB LEDs I plan to use a custom RP2040 board.

2

Operating Systems and Porting / [HELP] How to propery configure https

« on: August 09, 2026, 10:29:00 am »

How do I configure my ThinkPad X200 running Debian that it trusts the https certificate of my BlackBirds BMC? I get the following warning:
rehash: warning: skipping blackbird.pem, it does not contain exactly one certificate or CRL

3

Blackbird / My Blackbird and Fractal Design Meshify C arrived yesterday

« on: August 04, 2026, 02:57:53 pm »

I completed assembling my system and everything is working perfectly. Except the two front panel LEDs, only one of them lights up when the chassis power is turned off.
Soon I will buy some SATA cables and 4-pin ARGB fans for the case. Unfortunately the included fans are 3-pin, which will always spin up at full speed.

4

Talos II / Re: Thinking of selling my Talos II System

« on: August 04, 2026, 02:49:03 pm »

Sold

5

Applications and Porting / Porting Overte and QTWebEngine

« on: May 27, 2026, 11:57:56 am »

I recently began porting Overte to ppc64le. Since Overte depends on Qt WebEngine, I decided that I should also start porting Qt WebEngine to ppc64le (and maybe also big endian ppc), so I am looking for co-maintainers. Maybe on the weekend I will update my blog post for the project.

6

General CPU Discussion / Porting Fayalite to OrangeCrab and Arctic Tern

« on: May 27, 2026, 11:50:11 am »

I am posting my proposal to port Fayalite to the OrangeCrab and later Arctic Tern FPGA boards. I have used the OrangeCrab to run Microwatt (with Linux and Micropython) with a maze-game written by
Jacob Lifshay some years ago. Now I am part of the Libre-Chip project and also doing my own hardware projects using KiCad.

7

Talos II / Re: Thinking of selling my Talos II System

« on: May 23, 2026, 02:18:04 am »

Good. In Summer there are some weeks where I am on vacation, please DM me.

8

Talos II / Thinking of selling my Talos II System

« on: May 14, 2026, 06:08:36 am »

I have a full Talos II (eary bird, Blackbird and Talos™ II Lite did not exist back then) that I baught for a quite cheap price.
Since I do not plan to add a second POWER9 CPU and a Blackbird with SATA and HDMI is better for my use case, I now think of selling my Talos II.

My system uses a SuperMicro SC732i-500B, a first generation 4-core IBM POWER9 CPU and has 16GB of RAM.
I live in Germany and accept cash payments in Euro. I also have a bank account that supports US Dollar.

9

Legacy POWER Hardware / Will it run DOOM?

« on: October 17, 2025, 11:51:56 am »

A few month ago I realized that both Nintendo GameCube and iCE40 FPGA can run DOOM. In both cases this is software rendering without any GPU. But there are also some GPU designs that run on Lattice FPGAs including RasteriCEr and RasterIX. In the last few years I have been working on OpenPOWER Microwatt and got a Maze game running. Many years ago at a LAN-party I played the Nintendo WII, a gaming console with DRM that has been cracked, thanks to its GameCube mode. After I found about the PicoBoot IPL replacement, I decided that I should make homebrew games for old BigEndian PowerPC hardware, using devkit-ppc and buildroot. Doing a port of DOOM for 32 bit PowerPC should be easy. Theoretically this could run on any computer with an IBM CPU, starting from the GameCube up to the Talos II. Since I am interested in implementing a GPU on the Arctic Tern (with dual HDMI later), I will also do a port of DOOM to Microwatt first. I also have an OrangeCrab where I can test my FPGA designs, before I buy an Arctic Tern. For a different project, I am currently designing my own iCE40 FPGA board, programmed using the RP2040.

10

Applications and Porting / Porting the Dolphin Emulator to the modern OpenPOWER systems

« on: March 11, 2025, 12:29:51 pm »

As I am using my Talos II mostly for gaming currently, I decided to port the Dolphin Emulator. From my work on Libre-SOC I have a good understanding of the Power ISA. At the same time I will also continue working on OpenPOWER Microwatt and jit compilers. Hopefully I will be able to reuse some of the code that I plan to write for a later Box86 / Box64. As a first game for testing I have selected SuperTux Wii (or the GameCube port).

11

Applications and Porting / Porting VR games to the Talos II

« on: May 05, 2024, 02:08:56 pm »

Today I did a talk at libreplanet: Gaming on a Talos II: How I avoid using Steam
A gameplay video is here.

My VR setup includes four ICE40 FPGAs, the first one is the Talos II System FPGA.  The two controllers KN0 and KN1 and the headset T20 use their own bigger FPGAs for lighthouse tracking. I plan to design my own hardware that tracks using lighthouse.

There is also a forum thread on the Trisquel site.

12

Legacy POWER Hardware / Dolphin Emulator banned from Steam

« on: May 31, 2023, 10:36:23 am »

When I yesterday saw that Dolphin was banned from Steam due to a DMCA takedown request, I decided to port the Dolphin Emulator to the POWER9. A few weeks ago I had a look at the the IPL replacement modchip called picoboot for the GameCube. Steam never ran on on any IBM CPU, so I loose nothing if Steam does not my Talos II.

13

Firmware / ASPEED 2500 VGA standby mode

« on: November 12, 2022, 04:35:08 am »

When I lock the screen on my Talos II, VGA does not go off, it just shows a black screen. Is there a way to switch VGA completely off in this case and enable VGA again, when I press any key?

14

Applications and Porting / Displaylink on OpenPOWER

« on: May 13, 2022, 11:48:05 am »

Displaylink recently released the Extensible Virtual Display Interface, a linux kernel module that adds a virtual graphics output. It is released under the GNU (L)GPL and used by their DisplayLink Manager. When I was reading the POWER9 Hardware Compatibility List, my assumption that USB3.0 DisplayLink devices do not work with POWER9 was correct. The source code of the DisplayLink Manager application is not published, and there are no binaries for POWER9 either. Since the kernel module is free software that comes with good documentation, I began writing my own replacement for the DisplayLink Manager, which allows me to use the built-in screen of a ThinkPad X200 as a second display, and also indirectly connect a third Monitor via HDMI.

15

Applications and Porting / Re: Porting Godot 4 to POWER9 and the Libre-SOC.

« on: February 25, 2022, 10:44:58 am »

I"m now able to run Godot4 on my Talos II using Debian SID which I installed on an external harddisk.

Godot Engine v4.0.alpha.custom_build.24fa2e75d - https://godotengine.org
Vulkan API 1.2.0 - Using Vulkan Device #0: Unknown - llvmpipe (LLVM 13.0.1, 128 bits)
WARNING: lavapipe is not a conformant vulkan implementation, testing use only.

Embree seems to be optional, and is not used on POWER9 and ARM.