It's Linux, on a Sega Genesis

It’s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive | Hackaday

If you were in the market for a games console in 1990, the chances are that the object of your desire was either a Super Nintendo with its 16-bit 6502 derivative, or the Sega Megadrive, sold as the Genesis in North America, with its Motorola 68000. Both machines featured impressive graphics and sound for their time, but they remain firmly in the 16-bit era. Which makes it a surprise to see LinuxMD. It’s Linux, for the Sega Megadrive, with the latest mainline kernel.

The Motorola 68000 series of chips was the first porting target for Linux, and is still maintained in 2026. This build runs from an SD card in a modern Megadrive storage peripheral, and is reported to run on the original hardware. The lowly 68000 in the Sega doesn’t have a memory management unit required for the full Linux experience, so what’s really running here is a kernel compiled with the -nommu option. That in itself is a feat, on this architecture. On it you get smolutils, a cut down coreutils, and that seems to be it.

We like this project, for pushing both console and kernel to the limit, even though we see that maybe it’s not the most practical Linux machine. Meanwhile though, this isn’t the only UNIX-like OS for this console.

Image: Evan-Amos, Public domain.

6 thoughts on “It’s Linux, On A Sega Megadrive”

Sega does what nintendon’t.

Also in 1990 the Super Nintendo wasn’t released yet (North American release on august 23, 1991, worldwide release throughout 1992), although the Japanese Super Famicom was released at the end of 1990 (november 21). By that time the Mega Drive had been out for over two years in Japan (october 1988).

Report comment

Also, I think, the Sega MD/Genesis did originally rival the Famicom/NES rather than the SFC/SNES.

Other rivals of the era were (for example) the NEC PC Engine/TurboGrafix-16 or Sega MasterSystem.

The MasterSystem (and earlier Sega Mark III and SG-1000) was Segas original answer to the Famicom/NES.

In Europe and Brazil, the MasterSystem did rather well.

In early 90s, the SMS II was quite common, on eye level with the NES.

It and its game collection was seen in stores and in catalogues of mail order companies.

That being said, home computers such as C64, ZX Spectrum or A500 were still common in parts of Europe before 1994 or so (MSX in other places too).

They were used by the older generations, still, who missed out on then-current consoles such as NES, Genesis/MD or Super Nintendo.

Report comment

Welp, I guess my whole RAM-hacking arc is officially postponed!

I was deep in my theoretical lore of how to get a massive RAM upgrade for the Mega Drive – the kind that’s totally overkill but, like, cute enough to be cool. Thinking about hooking up 5V SRAM and trying to sneak about 10MB of memory by messing with those unused address spaces (you know, where the Sega CD/32X bits usually hang out). It was supposed to be a total glow-up for the console! In all that I forgot that PSRAM is a thing and it’s pretty cheap (unlike 5v SRAM)

My backup plan involved getting the PiStorm to handwave the memory mapping away. But alas, the PiStorm doesn’t handle all the bus signals so no go there on a Megadrive.

But seriously, gotta shoutout to fifteenhex! Taking the time to make something this wild actually work is straight-up legendary. Maybe once all my other cute (and highly ambitious) coding projects are finished -like, when that actually happens – I’ll get around to it! Don’t wait up for me.

Report comment

In regards to Pistorm bus signals, you should check out the Atari section of the Pistorm Discord where they’ve added those bus signals (which atari also needed)

Report comment

Cool! A memory upgrade makes sense to 68010 users, maybe.

Because some games (Sonic 3?) use deompression of data and run out on memory if an 68010 is used.

Having slightly more memory could make those games run on a MegaDrive with the 68010 upgrade.

Report comment

SEGA DOES WHAT NINTENDON’T

Report comment

It's Linux, on a Sega Genesis

Related Articles

(no title)

Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good

The Anatomy of an AI-Native Org

Apertus – Open Foundation Model for Sovereign AI

How to Earn a Billion Dollars