Installing Yellow Dog Linux 6.0 was even easier than installing psubuntu. I just followed instructions from the installation guide. Everything worked out of the box, even the resolution was fine from the beginning. I first chose 1080p as my resolution but quickly became aware that it’s too high for my 37 inch fullHD screen. I later changed it to 720p and it is much more usable. Also, some emulators really don’t run well in fullscreen 1080p (just a friendly warning). YDL PS3 forum is one of the best places to find information about after installing to set up YDL. You should definitely check out at least the first two threads on the forum: Please READ ME FIRST (known issues, useful links, and help & Howto: Install software (the easy way).

After installation and setting up it was time to test the emulators. I found out that there is an unofficial repository called PS3Bodega Software Repository which has updated emulators and other interesting software that the official ydl repositories lack. So I followed these instructions on how to set it up. It seems that the PS3 Bodega is a gold-mine to everything related ps3 and YDL (especially emulators & games) so i highly recommend it. Check out the how-to section and forums at least.

Again, my first choice was playing sega megadrive/genesis games. As I knew from my earlier experiences, I didn’t even bother to try dgen. Instead I did some digging (in YDL & PS3 Bodega forums) and found out that there is a multi emulator system called xe, that should run megadrive (and many other) games fine. It can be found from the Bodega repository. It worked flawlessly! Well, as I said before, first I had 1080p and the the fullscreen emulation was way too slow but after changing to 720p (which is better anyway, because now you can even read the text on screen as it’s not that small anymore) that worked fine as well. Even the pad worked right away, after choosing to use joystick from the settings menu. GREAT!

Then I tried vice (c64 emulator), which didn’t even launch on psubuntu. Vice can also be found from the repository. And yet again, it worked out of the box. Now, however, I ran into my first real problems. There is no fullscreen in vice. That’s right, no fullscreen! What a bummer. This is strange, as I remember playing vice with my pc-linux in fullscreen (I could be wrong, didn’t check if it can be done). Well, the ps3 version doesn’t support it, or at least the version I installed didn’t support it. Also, the emulator complained something about the sounds when started. After spending few hours to find a fix for these I came across this forum post that saved my day. It doesn’t give you fullscreen, but it shows how to set up vice to double screen size and other settings as well (like fixing the sound problem). I guess I could have figured out the settings eventually but vice isn’t exactly the most intuitive piece of software when it comes to setting up (most of the settings are under vic-II in setting menu).

So now I have a working environment to play my sega & commodre 64 games with my ps3. I can use my sixaxis gamepad and I’m happy. What’s next? I have already installed amiga emulator and I’ve read great things about an emulator called sdlmess (again, multi emulator system). I have also installed snes9x-gtk for super nintendo games, but haven’t tried any of these yet. I also want to set up my sixaxis controller to use bluetooth so I don’t need to attach USB cord to play games. I’m probably going try some fps games as well, and dosbox of course! It seems my exploration days are not over…

I finally got around to install linux to my ps3. I dreamed of playing c64, sega megadrive and other emulator games with it, as playing them with computer without a pad and big screen tv just doesn’t cut it. And if you can do something with your console, you should!

The first thing I did was to install bigger hd. That was surprisingly easy as the manual had detailed instructions how to do it. The only tool you need is a philips screwdriver. The linux installation requires you to format your hd anyway, so it was a natural thing to do at that point. Ps3 provides a backup utility that you can use to backup up your games, music, pictures & everything to external USB-drive, so you don’t need to loose anything. The first strange thing was, that you can only partition the disk to either have 10GB to “other os” or 10GB to ps3. That’s it. I figured I was going to use my ps3 primarily for other things than linux, so I decided to allocate the smaller partition to linux. Why there is such a restriction, who knows?

I have used Debian & Ubuntu distributions in the past with my pc so my first choice was psubuntu. Version 7.10 (Gutsy), as newer versions don’t support ppc I followed installation instructions from the wiki and about an hour later it was running fine. Fine but slow. Really slow! I guess the low amount of RAM in ps3 was the main reason, or GNOME. Well, the slowness didn’t bother me that much. There were also problems with screen overscanning but googling with keywords: “1080p full screen overscan ps3videomode” helped out a lot. The cool thing was that the sixaxis controller worked out of the box. You just needed to press the ps button to get it registered (to test and calibrate it I used jcalibrator). Also, it needed to be connected with usb cable, as bluetooth connection required some additional tweaking. I also installed new kernel, for no particular reason, and it took a lot of unanticipated work.

Finally I was ready to play some games. I figured I’d start with dgen, the default megadrive emulator from ubuntu repositories. It installed fine and loaded my sonic the hedgehog rom. I was eager to heard the famous “Seeegaaa” sound… Duh, segmentation fault: core dumped. What the hell? After a lot of googling I found out that dgen isn’t working with ps3, nobody seems to know why. Damn. No problem, I’ll just try some another megadrive emu. Turns out most of them are not working or not found from ubuntu repositories. I even tried to compile some of them by hand but it just took way too much effort so I gave up (for some reason compiling with ps3 seems to be a lot harder than with i386). I moved on to c64, and tried out my favorite emu vice, also from the repo. Guess what? It didn’t work. At this point I had spent an entire day trying to play emulator games with my ps3 without luck. After a good night sleep I decided to ditch ubuntu, even though I love it in pc world. It worked great in every other way except for emulators. I’m sure they would’ve worked eventually, but it just seemed like too much work. I decided to try fedora based (yuck) Yellow Dog Linux, which I think is the “preferred” ps3 linux distro. Watching youtube videos and reading forums posts I expected it to run the desired emulators… But that’s another story. (to spare you, it did run them ok).