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Lately there is a lot of things going on regarding the Bennu community:

First of all, we knew about a new forum being born for the English speakers. The list of users is still short, but some really interesting things have sprung in the forum’s short life.
You can find it at http://www.bennugd.co.uk

(Jump to see why consoles are the new cool kids in the neighbourhood…)

Then, Pixel came and decided this stupid battle to get the first Bennu port for Wii was over, released all the required stuff to get your games working on Wii on the fly (SD card sold separately) and claimed victory…

Not much after that, Burbuee on the bennugd.co.uk forums decided to grab xbox-linux and check how the linux version of Bennu worked there. It happened to work like a charm 🙂

If you hadn’t enough with that, there’s this cool idea that it’s high time Bennu got ported to the GP2X Wiz floating around the bennugd.org forums…

And well, Splinter keeps fragging bugs for us all to have a nice 1.0 release to port to our own consoles… Anybody willing to port Bennu to NES? 🙂

Nice coding!

(Read more for a video showing how it works and a some technical details).

What you see in the video above is a “standard” Gentoo for Wii Linux distro where Pixel’s compiled Bennu and some of its modules to launch one of his games (Carrera peligrosa, a Frogger-like game).

In order to make the system use as little resources as possible, the port is running on the Linux framebuffer instead of on top of X, which is what you’d probably run on your computer to run Bennu on Linux. This has not been done before, and that’s why the port is still quite buggy, but from what we can see on the video, what Pixel has already achieved is more than impressive.

Happy coding!

PS: No, no downloads yet.

Vote for BennuGD clicking here

As the online created 2.0 web-like logo states, Splinter (Bennu’s coding master) has announced plans to release a 1.0 version of Bennu. (More details after the break).

Bennu has been quite stable for most of us for a while now, and some people on the forums have been asking for a 1.0 release for some time. If everything goes fine and no major bugs are found on this RC, the time will have come for it.

Although calling it “1.0” doesn’t really make it a better release, it is certainly an indicator that the project has stabilized a lot and gained many features from where it took off (say “hi” to the 32 bpp, they’re here to stay!). Even if most of us will continue to use the “unstable” svn releases, having a 1.0 release is an important milestone for the project.

You can get the official release candidate from here. If you’re using the unofficial Ubuntu PPA, and have updated your system in the last couple of days, you should have it already.