A peculiarity of Sega's fondly-remembered Dreamcast game console was that it was compatible with Windows CE, a minimal version of Microsoft's desktop operating system. But that's nothing. Now you can have Linux on a Sega Genesis/Megadrive, thanks to Daniel Palmer. "Is this a joke?" he writes. "No."
Note that is insanely slow right now. A 12MHz 68000 system I have is way more usable than the megadrive is right now. This needs a bit of optimization. Interacting with the EverDrive fifo is pretty slow.
Jenny List explains some technical context at Hackaday.
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.
File under "because it's there." Whatever next, BeOS on a SNES? TempleOS on a Virtual Boy?
Previously:
• 40-year-old arcade game OutRun ported to 27-year-old Game Boy Color
• Jordan Mechner's favorite version of Prince of Persia
• Royal Mail issues stamps honoring classic British computer games
