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[Delioth]

engraving of Armok.  I plan to use his eyes and mouth as the path for heat to escape from the top.

General consensus is that the player himself is Armok, creating new worls, controlling the lives of dwarves, then destroying the world to create a new one.

So... you're saying... the case should be a mirror?

[Dirst]

I like the idea.  Would there be any allowance for leaving the network on to run the DF Wiki, DFFD or Bay12Forums in a browser window?  Said browser ought to have the absolute minimum set of extensions to function.

[soulsource]

I play over SSH (via a modified version of PuTTY) and I have a custom script and executable that locks the DF account to the game using Screen.  That way I can always resume the game, wherever I am, as long as I have Internet access.

Personally, I want to do this to my own console once I get it up and running, but still limit its access to the internet.  Just so I can play anywhere in the house.  I love novel things like being able to do that.

But why disable access to the internet? Shouldn't it be enough to block access from the internet? As long as you don't install any services, nothing will be listening for incoming connections. Even if you set up an SSH server (which I'd offer as an optional feature to users) it can be configured in such a way that it only accepts connections from certain IP-addresses (I know that this isn't secure - but in addition one has to have login credentials - what in the case of your project probably means private-/public key authentication). If that's not enough, you can still set up a software firewall using nftables (or iptables if you prefer), the package filtering function of the Linux kernel. The reason I'd suggest to stay connected to the internet is the possibility to access the Wiki. There are several text based browsers, and it might not be the worst idea to have one of them running on another terminal.

What linux distro will this be based on? (and all other highly techy questions)

I will need to get back in touch with Urist McProgrammer on his progress.  We've mostly been discussing the features needed, and his status on implementing them.  We are close to the prototype stage 1 (hardware only), and oddly, I haven't asked him about which distro he is using yet, lol.

If I may suggest: Use something minimalistic. Although I've never user used it, Arch would come to my mind. It's rolling release, so no reason to bother with distribution lifetime. Also, it uses systemd. Many might see this as a downside, and it might indeed be from a technical standpoint, but from a user's standpoint it's extremely convenient, as managing services (as in: making the system boot into dwarf fortress and shut down when dwarf fortress exits) has never been easier - except maybe with the much less flexible BSD-style Init.

Linux is happy to boot off cheap USB drives, once it's booted you can run from ram

The original idea was to do exactly this.  People would update their system by just updating their portable USB stick and everything would be easy.  But that doesn't really feel much like a console
In reality, the reason we are not opting to do this is that hard drive access has a generally minimal impact on the gaming experience, and it is WAY cheaper to buy a decent little SSD than lots and lots of RAM for those big, long historically significant worlds.

Don't forget that dwarf fortress is just 32bit. This means, that it'll anyhow be limited by the address range. On a 32bit Linux system, dwarf fortress won't get more than about 3 GB of RAM, while on a 64bit Linux system it should get just short of 4 GB maximum (source). This means that you'll probably want a 64bit Linux kernel. This will waste some HDD space for the additional 32bit libraries required by dwarf fortress, and use a bit more RAM than a 32bit Linux system, but the additional 1 GB might make a difference on large worlds. A further consequence of this is, that you'll probably want to have 8 GB of RAM available, as dual channel mode is kind of a must for dwarf fortress, meaning you'll either want to mount 2x2GB, what will require swapping if df gets close to using all possible 4 GB of RAM (or without swap, it'll crash), or 2x4GB. While this means you'd have easily enough free RAM for a small ramdisk containing the root filesystem, I don't see much use for it in your particular case, as all storage access to the root filesystem will happen during boot (if the system is configured in that way at least), at which point a ramdisk would have to be loaded from permanent storage as well... One might argue that the ramdisk images are typically compressed and therefore might require less storage I/O, but compression is also available at the filesystem level, for instance with btrfs.
Long story short, I don't think a ramdisk is a good idea in that use case, even when using a slow storage medium.

Anyhow, I'd like to bring up something else: The KMS terminal. What is the reason you don't want to use PRINT_MODE:TEXT?
And, semi-related: Why doesn't dwarf fortress allow to draw to the KMS terminal framebuffer? Other SDL based applications (openttd, dosbox, ur-quan masters,...) can output graphics without an X11 server just fine.

[BigD145]

Between your comment about using usb not feeling much like a console and the Reddit talking about a 3d printer.

I'm now thinking you are making a pc fit in a keyboard like this VT100 keyboard (but with more beard),

Not enough wood. You need to cut down at least a few hundred trees for the facade and stuff the interior with a thousand boulders. The keyboard should be as big as a dragon, ie one tile wide and tall. It should have an access cover on the bottom that can only be opened from inside the keyboard itself. A true console.

[soulsource]

God, you nerd-sniped me with the idea of a dedicated df machine...
I've been looking into CPUs and their prices, and it seems that there is a rather cheap one on the market, that might run dwarf fortress pretty well. The Pentium G5420. It's just clocked slower by 10% than the i3 6320 or the i5 6600K (with Turbo), otherwise single core performance per GHz in benchmarks is about the same. The question about Pentium-i3-i5-i7 is actually, how much the L3 cache size influences dwarf fortress' performance, but I'd guess that as long as one doesn't go in the thousands of dollars CPU price range (there are Xeons with more than 100 MB Cache), it won't matter much, as only a tiny fraction of memory reads will actually hit the cache anyhow.
I'd only take care to pair the CPU with the fastest supported memory, in that case DDR4-2133 dual channel. While measurements on the performance impact of RAM latencies would be welcome (and it seems that for almost all workloads they are pretty insignificant - but our question is about df specifically...), it might be worth to go for CAS 13 memory, given the small price difference to CAS 15 modules.

[jaked122]

--snip--
General consensus is that the player himself is Armok, creating new worls, controlling the lives of dwarves, then destroying the world to create a new one.

We have consensus?


As to the distro, if you are considering running it like you have stated, it won't matter terribly much which one you use. There's no reason not to use ubuntu for it, after all, it seems that most people have an easier time getting it running on that than fedora, which is what I'm using now.

[NullForceOmega]

--snip--
General consensus is that the player himself is Armok, creating new worls, controlling the lives of dwarves, then destroying the world to create a new one.

We have consensus?

We have Word of Toad.

[Shonai_Dweller]

--snip--
General consensus is that the player himself is Armok, creating new worls, controlling the lives of dwarves, then destroying the world to create a new one.

We have consensus?

We have Word of Toad.

Link? I always thought this was something forumites made up. Toady actually said Armok was an actual thing (besides a nifty title)?

[Dirst]

--snip--
General consensus is that the player himself is Armok, creating new worls, controlling the lives of dwarves, then destroying the world to create a new one.

We have consensus?

We have Word of Toad.

Link? I always thought this was something forumites made up. Toady actually said Armok was an actual thing (besides a nifty title)?

It was originally one of the status variables, armOK being the number of functional arms on the player character.  But it turns out that this particular bunch of letters is pronounceable.