Hacker Gets Linux Working on Japanese NES Classic Mini

A hacker from Japan managed to run another Linux kernel on a Famicom Mini. The Famicom Mini is the Japanese counterpart to the Nintendo Classic Mini and has a different design but uses identical hardware.

The hacker, who goes by the name ‘urandom’, made his success on Twitter known. He managed to access the console’s memory by soldering a USB cable to the motherboard and using Das U-Boot Universal Boot Loader in bright mode to load the files for his own kernel. The full bootlog can be found online.

Urandom has not yet managed to read and edit the Mini Famicom’s nand storage. As a result, it is not yet possible to use the device on its own and install another operating system on the storage. However, the hacker does not rule out that it is possible.

Although the mini console is many times faster than the original NES and Famicom, the hardware is quite limited compared to many modern devices. With a soc with four Cortex A7 cores and 256MB of ram, the specifications are less than many budget smartphones on the market today. Nevertheless, it is likely that in the long run other retro games, such as Doom, will be playable on the console.