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I can point you to many people.

dcemulation.com
dcemu uk
ConsoleVision
Boob

There's already a rather large Dreamcast site called Boob. (Yes, that's the name. No, I don't know why it's called that.) I'm surprised the site wasn't in the writeup or any previous comments.

Don't forget BOOB!, either, it's a great site.

The DC was a great machine, but there's really only a small number of titles available. That said, many of them are pretty unique (Seaman, anyone?), but if you like RPGs, you're almost out of luck, since there are only three good ones (Skies of Arcadia, Grandia 2, and Record of Lodoss War). There are, however, no less than 50 bazillion racing and fighting games.

I'm not trying to flame or anything, but the DC has what is probably the largest homebrew communities around. Check out DC Emulation or BOOB! Dreamcast Development. A lot of people still use the Dreamcast (I still do, even though I've got a PS2 and Xbox). It still has it's supporters, especially in the homebrew, emulation and open source communities.

Is that the daedalus version, I haven't tried it out yet. Is it any good?

Of course, all you budding warez kiddies (excuse me again, Linux enthusiasts) need know that if you leave it bridged, your bios can be flashed at any time, like say from some joker who puts bios-destroying code in a file called "Halo 2.ISO" and uploads it to your favorite gene6 ftp.

So you should unbridge it once you are done with the flash?

Although everyone yells "warez" when they here about something like this, and it's probably true, there are some legitimate uses. Independantly written software is one of them, look at the Dreamcast. Though, yeah, the Dreamcast is well known for allowing copies to run with no mods. I own one, though I don't have any pirated games, I run Linux and other free software on it. I would have to say the PSX was the most popular machine for playing copied games.

Firstly, there is not yet an N64 emulator that runs well. There are the preliminaries of a port of Daedalus for the XBox, including a leaked beta binary. It runs so-so because it was still early in development. This is not a comment on the author - I'm sure something will be developed soon that will make the majority of people happy, but don't get your hopes up about emulating all your favorite N64 games just yet.

There is also no PSX emulator yet. You can find the usual hype/marketing ploys on modchip reseller webpages about modchips allowing you to emulate "great systems like SNES, N64, PSX...". Please remember when you read such things that these people want your money. Look into it yourself first. There are no PSX emulators for the XBox yet. I'm sure something will be ported over in the future ( or Linux-on-Xbox will be able to run a linux PSX emu at a decent speed soon).

The good news, however, is that the world of emulation on the XBox is unparalleled on any other console. Here is a list of emulators ported to the XBox which work almost flawlessly:

Stella (Atari 2600)

Gnuboy (Gameboy/Gameboy Color)

FCEUltra (NES)

SMSPlus (GameGear/Sega Master System>

HU-GO (Turbografx-16/PC-Engine)

NeoPop (NeoGeo Pocket Color)

DGen (Sega Genesis)

Bochs (x86)
Bochs emulates the PC architecture and has prebuilt packages for running DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11, and Windows 95. Windows runs too slowly in Bochs to do anything useful, but it runs old DOS games very well.

Snes9x (SNES)

MAME (Arcade machines)

Daedalus (N64)

Frodo (Commodore 64) (url?)

Handy (Atari Lynx) (url?)

GBA (Gameboy Advance) (url?)

Final Burn (Arcade/CPS2 esp) (url?)

Owning a modded XBox allows you to easily play just about all of your console classics on the TV in your living room. (No, not everyone has computers in every room of their house yet. :P ) IMHO, the most fun I've had with my XBox so far is playing games on all of the above emulators. Now that there is a solderless modchip, just about anyone can enjoy them also.

Firstly, there is not yet an N64 emulator that runs well. There are the preliminaries of a port of Daedalus for the XBox, including a leaked beta binary. It runs so-so because it was still early in development. This is not a comment on the author - I'm sure something will be developed soon that will make the majority of people happy, but don't get your hopes up about emulating all your favorite N64 games just yet.

There is also no PSX emulator yet. You can find the usual hype/marketing ploys on modchip reseller webpages about modchips allowing you to emulate "great systems like SNES, N64, PSX...". Please remember when you read such things that these people want your money. Look into it yourself first. There are no PSX emulators for the XBox yet. I'm sure something will be ported over in the future ( or Linux-on-Xbox will be able to run a linux PSX emu at a decent speed soon).

The good news, however, is that the world of emulation on the XBox is unparalleled on any other console. Here is a list of emulators ported to the XBox which work almost flawlessly:

Stella (Atari 2600)

Gnuboy (Gameboy/Gameboy Color)

FCEUltra (NES)

SMSPlus (GameGear/Sega Master System>

HU-GO (Turbografx-16/PC-Engine)

NeoPop (NeoGeo Pocket Color)

DGen (Sega Genesis)

Bochs (x86)
Bochs emulates the PC architecture and has prebuilt packages for running DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11, and Windows 95. Windows runs too slowly in Bochs to do anything useful, but it runs old DOS games very well.

Snes9x (SNES)

MAME (Arcade machines)

Daedalus (N64)

Frodo (Commodore 64) (url?)

Handy (Atari Lynx) (url?)

GBA (Gameboy Advance) (url?)

Final Burn (Arcade/CPS2 esp) (url?)

Owning a modded XBox allows you to easily play just about all of your console classics on the TV in your living room. (No, not everyone has computers in every room of their house yet. :P ) IMHO, the most fun I've had with my XBox so far is playing games on all of the above emulators. Now that there is a solderless modchip, just about anyone can enjoy them also.

Buy a Dreamcast.

No, really. They cost almost nothing, you can get great games for them also for almost nothing, and they can do all of those things for free out of the box, no modding required.

Check Boob, ConsoleVision etc for more info.

BTAF

If you are worried by all this MS stuff come and hack on the box MS can't close down - the Dreamcast. As well as Linux, we've got NetBSD, QNX and NewOS (Open BeOS clone to follow??)

If you want to buy a system to hack on then buy a Dreamcast. They're cheap (about $40) - and you can run Linux to your heart's content on the thing.

Not only Linux, either - lots of homebrew games, NetBSD and even QNX

There are even lots of good, and now very cheap, commercial games available for it.

Sure, it's not as advanced as an Xbox or a PS/2, before someone makes that very obvious point. But that is not what we are about, is it? The fun for many of us is in subverting the manufacturer's intentions and doing something unorthodox with the hardware - well the DC's the best for that.

cadcdev.allustion.net

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dcdev/

b00b Dreamcast Research (no, NOT pr0n. sorry.)

DCEmulation.

ConsoleVision.

Hanger Eleven

Have fun!
--j0shua

There isn't anything that comes in only in .cdi format only except for commercial games. I'm pretty sure everything at dcemulation.com, boob.co.uk, and dcvision.com have alternate formats for everything. .cdi files can only be burned with Disc Juggler, and it's only for Windows, but I believe there is something called "cdirip" or something to extract those images into something you can burn with tools like cdrecord. This page tells you how to burn things in for Dreamcast in unix/linux with cdrecord.

For that price or less you could buy a Dreamcast and, of course, run Linux or NetBSD on it.

There is even a thriving dev scene

You can play MULE on everthing from a Dreamcast to the NUON DVD player using a trusty Atari 800 emulator. I don't see how getting a PC version with gee whiz graphics is news or stuff that matters.

D

I myself ordered a "DC Coder's Cable" from Lik-Sang a few months ago, and had it shipped via airmail (USPS). It arrived without a problem. Anyway, the fact that SEGA would nail people for this is very strange, especially since the DC is all but dead and the serial cables are (mostly) used for legitimate purposes, by Dreamcast homebrew hackers.

I wonder if this thing was misidentified by customs as one of Lik-Sang's "Gameboy Advance Backup and Development system. Nintendo has always been more sensitive to piracy, and the GameBoy Advance seems like a big enough market to crack the whip on.

I didn't say there was a KyroII X server. Come to that, you didn't ask for one - you wanted a dreamcast running X. You can do that today.

Take a look at Boob! and check in the download sections.

http://mc.pp.se/dc/
http://dcdev.allusion.net/
http://www.boob.co.uk

The GameBoy Advance is also rather lovely to code for, although it does require special hardware to get started..

If there were an ethernet device I would mention booting an image off of the network (kinda like you can with Dreamcast). Looking at amateur software development methods is, of course, a nice, legitimate way of looking at whole console backup idea. Some of the free software written for the Dreamcast is pretty smooth.

I expect there to be a backup device for the GameCube just as there have been for most game machines. Take the N64, for example, there was the Z64, and the Doctor V64 which let you play N64 backups off of CDs. I imagine a backup unit for the GameCube to use the serial or parallel ports and probably use CD or DVD media, or maybe it would have hard drive or use a network file system.

In any case the internals of the GameCube look pretty smooth. The only hardware hack I can think up at this moment would be replace the cooling fan with a nice, loud ~50cfm fan :)

Yeah, it's cool to play with Linux on them, but don't you already have 5 computers in various states of disrepair running Linux/BSD? I know I do...

Despite all this, the DC is/was a great console. Its library of titles whips the PS2 and probably will until at least the middle of next year...and it has a thriving homebrew community.

Dreamcasts manufactured after October, 2000 can't boot from CDRs [boob.co.uk - Dreamcast Research], which would put a serious dent on any plans for a farm of these DC+Linux boxes :(

There's quite a bit of useful information(Boob has some good links in addition to the aforementioned) out there and it's got some great games. Bangai-o is especially worth, errm, researching.

Although it may not have the raw power of upcoming consoles, it has a thriving homebrew community with lots of emulators and other cool stuff. Dreamcast research for more details.

This sounds an awful lot like the dynamic recompilation of MIPS to x86 done in many emulators (such as UltraHLE, Nemu, Daedalus and PJ64).

I've been working on the dynarec for Daedalus for about 2 years now, and currently a 500MHz PIII is just about fast enough to emulate a 90MHz R4300 (part of this speed is attributable to scanning the ROM for parts of the OS and emulating these functions at a higher-level). Of course, optimisations are always being made.

After reading the article, I'd be very interested to see if they can consistently achieve the 25% or so speedups that they claim (even between RISC architectures).

For those interested, the source for Daedalus is released under the GPL.

Even if Sega *were* to halt Dreamcast production - which they've denied, the Dreamcast is getting a position as *the* console for hackers, so isn't about to die completely just yet. I just got my serial cable and have been playing about, and there's a lot of scope for doing some really kool stuff. The fact that GCC can compile SH-4 well is a big help. If you want to get into it, check out sites like boob.

Anyway, remember that it's all just a rumour at the moment, although we all know Sega's been having serious problems.

It would seem rather odd for this to come on a day when Sega's share price has increased by 200 Yen a share though.. dirty tactics perhaps?

--

While I think the DC ethernet adapter is a step in the nice direction, I'm still not in a rush to go out and order one. For one thing, it only works with a small, select group of games. And while some people are going to be excited at the prospect of being able to play low-ping 4-player games of Quake III Arena (that's all the DC version supports) at 640x480 resolution, that's going to strike a lot of people as old news. Of course, one can expect there to be more broadband-enabled games in the future.

Up until recently, I would have been more excited about the ethernet adapter, what with the fact that progress has been made porting Linux to the DC, as well as lots of emulators and other projects (VCD and MP3 players and like). But alas, the rumors I'm hearing more and more frequently are that Sega is going to start shipping new Dreamcasts that won't boot CD-ROMS (only the proprietary GD-ROM), in an effort to keep people from copying games. That'll work real well for all two weeks until a mod chip comes out, but could really cramp the efforts of people doing independent development on the system, if their project won't work on new Dreamcasts without a hardware modification.

I guess the main reason I won't be investing in new DC gadgetry, though, is that it becomes more and more apparent over time that game companies are by and large not neat, creative cottage industries interested in hacking, exploration, or or neat development products. They are evil consumer electronics corporations who want my money are who are all too eager to restrict, dumb down, and hobble their products if it is in the interest of their bottom line.

My bottom line is that I think I'll use that $90 to buy some art supplies and used CDs, and do something with my spare time other than point and drool for a change.

Just note all the cool (free) apps for the DC...

mpeg player - GypPlay
also an..
mp3 player

gb emulator in development
snes emulator in development
nes emulator in development
Boob!