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Free Dreamcast Development System Started
Axel M. writes: "
The Hitmen guys of PSX coding fame developed a piece o'hardware to code for the Dreamcast. They even wrote the first little demo. See this page for screenshots & pics or
this new page which announces the second (smaller) version of the hardware using the PSX CommsLink ISA card."
Keyboard
Mouse
Zipdisk
Ethernet
Large Capacity VMUs
The list seems endless. DVD has been shown, but get a real DVD player with Dolby Digital DTS outs and AC3 decoding and other bells and whistles..
This will provide very interesting outcomes in regards to the advancement of the gaming community in general. We could get a lot of cool games from this.
Perception is reality
To all the fools up in arms just because someone didn't get the dreamcast processor right........ SHUT UP AND POST SOMETHING USEFUL.
The Super Hitachi chips (including the SH3 and SH4) are very very similar to MIPS processors and most of the code ported to these processors is a result of MIPS work that other people have done. If someone says "The HP Jornada can run Linux" nobody really bothers to think that it's an SH3!
Linux is already running on SH3 and about 99% running on SH4. This Page is a pretty comprehensive list of Linux-on-SuperHitachi resources.
Think before you post.
Thank you,
GoRK
check out this page, http://marcus.mangakai.org/dc/ip0000.bin.html it describes some detail on the booting process of the Dreamcast. There is a file called IP0000.BIN on every DC disk. Normally, for the DC to consider a disk bootable, this needs to be in the first 16 sectors of the disk, as well as in the high density area of the disk. Well the folks at datel have figured a way around this. You can download the image from http://jove.prohosting.com/~sonikku/Dc-cdx.rar
It burns best with a program called CloneCD , since there is a special file in the rar archive describing how to burn the image, sorta like a cue sheet file in CDRWIN.
I'm guessing what they did was just added another session, and somehow fooled the DC into thinking it was a valid GD-ROM. just a guess.
=)
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Nobody in their right mind would attempt to write anything more than a simple demo on one of these, and I don't think that was ever the intention.
There's already a port of NetBSD to the Hitachi SH/3 -- with which the Dreamcast's Hitachi SH/4 is backwards-compatible.
GCC can output SH binaries.
Would you change your tune if someone used this "crack box" to turn a Dreamcast into a fully-fledged UNIX box?
What's more there is at least 1 100% homemade demo, and there are screenshots of it on the referenced site.
And finally, this box doesn't help you copy Sega's proprietary GD-ROM format, so quick and easy piracy is still out of reach.
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A while back I was interested in learning how to develop/code for a console. There is a wide lack of information available anywhere, and after weeks of tracking someone down at sega, I found out their development system costs $50,000 (US) - not quite in the price range for someone looking to learn. The dreamcast is a great piece of hardware, and I would love to code for it, but I am not going to fork down that much money (I know, it is intended for companies, like capcom and such, but still)
Now, I know much development still needs to be done, but this is the first step, and surely others will start making their own api and tools for developing on the dreamcast.
I hope to die peacefully in my sleep like grandpa, not screaming like his passengers.
The beauty of the GS/PAR is that it had a DB25 serial connection that allowed it to easily be linked with high-speed serial communication ports on the PC (such as the 'CommsLink card' that is talked about on the Hitmen site.
Some very enterprising hackers wrote alternative ROM sets (the ROM was flashable) for the GS/PAR that made such a setup a REALLY good development environment, including step-debugging! When you can link such a 'cheating/patching' card to a PC and have good software control on the PC side, you can do nearly anything. It makes it easy to upload data (which can include code) into the system, do a system soft reset, and viola, you are running custom code that could be whatever you wanted, on the console system. There was even two way communications such that you could 'load' datafiles off the PC for your demo/game as if they were being loaded from the PlayStation's CD.
When paired with good development tools on the PC side (like a leaked copy of SN System's PsyQ compiler system, or even just the gcc toolchain which was released as part of Sony's own Yaroze program) this made an excellent development system that was capable of doing a lot more than the simple hacks and patches you mention.
This Dreamcast setup sounds very similar, just with everything custom-made.
Therefore, I'm guessing it will run great in Dreamcast Bleem! The great thing about this, of course, is that the whole Rockman Complete series is available from importers. Sigh, I feel sorry for modern gamers, they don't even get to play decent sprite based games when they come out in Japan... Um... if you want them, you'd better hurry, when I checked Rockman2 was _sold_out_!!! @.@
Hooray for Bleem! for Dreamcast!
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
Linux already cross compiles and boots on MIPS. With the CE Linux varients i'm sure you can dump that on CD fairly quickly and use nice big VMU cards to store data/variables or whatever.
Hell, go to japan, buy the 64 meg VMU, the 10/100 megabit ethernet adaptor and a 64meg vmu and you have a cheap/compact webserver. Throw linux on there or write a java webserver once the JDK is finally released
The ZIP disk option is even coming out. The beginings are being laid, and the backend work is already done.
So hack away.. I would love to see the days of the likes of Future Crew and such. Nothing like having a finite piece of hardware with infinate uses :)
Oh yeah. You can go out and get a DC at buy.com for 179.00 signup for 1 month of sega.net trial (free) and get a $50.00 rebate so you get a nice system for 120 bucks. Get on ebay and get a DC with games for 200 bucks. They're affordable, plenty of games and with stuff like this, another powerfull machine to hack away on.
This sounds neat. It appears to be a widget that falls between an In Circuit Emulator and a hardware monitor (like old computers usta have, remember? Like the Sun 350's had 'em, as did apple II's and old macintoys...) It does sound neat though. THe switch to CD's as a game distribution medium makes it much more in reach for people to produce small to medium runs of a game/demo/os/ etc.. they have created. =:-) Masking roms is expensive, and you need a larger run to make it worth it than mastering CD's. Also the boards to which the roms are attatched and the wacky edge connectors of traditonal cartridges are a bitch and a half if you want to only make a few of 'em. SO this is cool for up and coming hobbiests and those who wish to create games that are not considered marketable enough to be worth the bother of the large companies. This is cool =:-)
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Play Six Pack Man. I
We now return you to your regularily scheduled slashdot.. already in progress...
Firstly, I'd like to congratulate the people responsible for this: they've done a great job, and the remote dynamic debugger will be very handy to the few people who will be doing actual coding.
For those who just want to boot their own code, however, it seems like Datel have worked out how to produce a CD, unendorsed by Sega, which will boot on an unmodified Dreamcast. The coverdisk of this months DC-UK magazine (in the UK) has a demo disk. Not only that, but if you burn a CDR copy, that works too! There are ISO images on the net as we speak.
From that, I'm guessing it won't be long before people are hacking their own code into the Datel ISO, producing their own bootable Dreamcast CDs. I truly hope the OpenBSD/SH4 gang get back to work, now that they have a means to boot their own code.
Implications for piracy? Well, AFAIK still nobody can do a straight copy of a GD-ROM, so it'd take some heavy modification (stripping music, movies etc, coding around the fact that they're missing) so I don't expect to see widespread Dreamcast piracy any time soon.
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Yeah, sure you can upload patches onto the Dreamcast's VMU using this, but that hardly makes it a tool for coding anything more than quick hacks and patches. Nobody in their right mind would attempt to write anything more than a simple demo on one of these, and I don't think that was ever the intention.
No, this is just a crack box really, like the Game Genie or its relatives.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
This kind of device is going to be extremely useful to the amature and pro developers.
Back when I was hacking the N64 using a rom emulator/copier (Doctor64) we had to compile the code and pray that it would work. System lockup all the sudden? Try and debug by looking at the code. Unfortunately the doctor64 did not allow the n64 to communicate to the pc through the parallel port interface.. so an interactive debugger wasn't possible. This limited development severely.
With this system.. someone will be able to code a simple loader/bios to put on cdr that will communicate over the lpt port to get files... when the Game/demo/whatever is working they can burn that to cdr.. replacing the file loading routines with ones that work off the actual cdr...
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
I have a mirror of the demo disc image up at my homepage under the "downloads" link - it's a disc image for the NTI CD-Copy software.
Or a link to the DC-UK magazine somewhere?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --