IBM gets AS/400 running on PSone

'Not particularly difficult'

By gamesindustry.biz • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 6th August 2003 08:22 GMT

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Hackers may have oiled the rails for Linux fans eager to run their favourite Penguin-fronted operating system on Xbox, but that's nothing compared to IBM's latest in-house project: running the OS/400 enterprise operating system on a humble PSone.

It sounds unlikely, but according to Dr. Frank Soltis, iSeries chief scientist for IBM, researchers at the company's Rochester laboratory are doing just this.

"I'm still looking forward to seeing AS/400 running on a PlayStation," he said last Thursday, adding somewhat jokingly, "I'm not sure there's a big market, but we're working on it." Reports since then suggest he's now managed it.

Given that OS/400 is usually found on enterprise servers, and - with apologies to Al Yankovich - about as useful to gamers as JPEGs to Helen Keller, the project is never likely to make it out of the Rochester lab, but has been undertaken anyway as part of research associated with IBM's "CELL" project - jointly underway with Toshiba and Sony to develop processors for entertainment applications.

"There's common architecture there, so it's not a particularly difficult process," Dr. Soltis said of the transition.

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