We’ve all seen tons of solutions for running NES games on non-NES hardware, but not so much in the way of running non-NES software on the NES itself.

But now, you can run ‘Linux’ on the NES, as seen in a demo done by programmer and tech enthusiast DeCrAzYo. His solution relied on original Nintendo hardware alone and included software he coded himself.

The inspiration for this project seems to be hacks that claim to run non-NES code on the NES but do so through devices like the Raspberry Pi, which, to DeCrAzYo, is basically just using the NES as a graphics output. His goal was to run Linux on the NES’s processor and within its memory using completely original hardware, which is certainly a much higher bar to clear.

The key problem is that the hardware used for the NES is massively underpowered for running Linux; there’s a mere 2KB of RAM to work with, after all. Because of this limitation, DeCrAzYo decided to use a Unix-like operating system, LUnix, rather than an actual Linux distribution. That puts a bit of an asterisk on the whole running-Linux-on-the-NES thing since Unix-like OSes include MacOS and even arguably Windows, but it might just be close enough, and it’s not like the programmer had much of a choice.

See the video below and more on Tom’s Hardware. And see the project code on GitHub.