PowerPutt Notes

notes.md

Notes for My PowerPutt (Nighthawk) Hack

Here’s what I’ve done so far to try to get PowerPutt working outside of a real “Nighthawk” arcade machine — I only have the CID 21 and I/O board. I know a lot of people say PowerPutt is super picky about hardware, but since it looks like it's running something very close to Linux From Scratch, I figured maybe we can run it on more common hardware.

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What I Have & What I Did

1. I purchased a hard drive from a “Power Putt 3 course” that had a label: PP1.00.06 08-25-08 When I examined it, I saw: Nighthawk V9.11, Boot Agent V1.30, and Software 21‑V1.00.08.

2. I pulled an image (.img) from the drive.

3. I converted the image to a VirtualBox disk (VDI) using:
   "C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" convertfromraw --format=VDI E:\pp3cdump.img E:\pp3cdump.vdi

4. I attached the VDI to a VirtualBox VM — but it would not boot.

   LILO got stuck at:

LILO Loading ITLINUX  
…  
Decompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.

5. So, after some trial-and-error, I discovered:

   It doesn’t accept AHCI → had to switch the VM to IDE (so VirtualBox presents the disk as IDE).

   Because of that, the kernel needs to use /dev/hda instead of /dev/sda.

6. My GRUB command line (in the VM) that does boot:

set root=(hd0,msdos2)  
linux /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda2 rw nolapic noapic init=/bin/sh  
boot  

Interesting discovery: The init scripts look almost exactly like LFS-style init.

7. I modified /etc/rc.d/init.d/HardDriveBuild so I can choose between SATA and IDE, because it kept forcing sda when I needed hda:

echo "Select drive type for build:"
echo "  1) SATA (/dev/sda)"
echo "  2) IDE (/dev/hda)"
read -t 10 choice  # 10‑second timeout
case "$choice" in
  1) MYDEV=/dev/sda; MYDEV_NAME=SATA ;;
  2) MYDEV=/dev/hda; MYDEV_NAME=IDE ;;
  *) echo "No selection, defaulting to SATA"; MYDEV=/dev/sda; MYDEV_NAME=SATA ;;
esac
export MYDEV MYDEV_NAME

8. To make this bootable more “cleanly,” I used a Live CD (GParted Live) and ran:

sudo mount /dev/sda2 /mnt  
sudo grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sda  

9. Because grub-probe wasn’t working nicely (probably due to overlays / weird mount), I manually created a GRUB config:

nano /mnt/boot/grub/grub.cfg

My grub.cfg:

set timeout=10  
set default=0

menuentry "PowerPutt" {  
    insmod part_msdos  
    insmod ext2  

    set root=(hd0,msdos2)  
    linux /boot/bzImage root=/dev/hda2 rw nolapic noapic  
    # initrd /boot/initramfs.img  # if using an initrd  
}

10. When I boot under VirtualBox, I sometimes have to select the IDE drive a few times (because of how VirtualBox’s IDE controller is exposed), but eventually it boots.

My next step: try booting this on real hardware (bare‑metal) and see what new challenges pop up.

Update: I was unable to get it to boot on a Dell optiplex 9020. I tried ahci/ide with the root set as sda2 and hda2, no luck. I have been toying with using a more modern kernel but I suspect I'll have issues with the usb CID chip or IO board.