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."

Comments

Booting DC with a CD-R

[llzackll]

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.

Linux wanted a console.. here ya go!

[cybrthng]

Well, here is the Chance. A 200mhz CPU, plenty of memory, plenty of horsepower to throw out roughly 5,000,000 polygons.

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.

Re:Linux wanted a console.. here ya go!

[slim]

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.

Interesting point, but since the DC uses an SH/4 CPU, not MIPS...

Meanwhile, though, there *is* an SH4 port of NetBSD :)

Keyboards are available for the Dreamcast, and they all have a modem on board. I guess the order of play would be:

1. Get NetBSD booting
   
2. Work out the modem interface
   
3. Get PPP talking to a second modem in a PC
   
4. Get a workable NetBSD distribution working, with the read-only filesystems on CDR, and writeable filesystems on NFS.
   
5. Get the DC keyboard working
   
6. Port X (or better yet GGI?)
   
7. Get the DC mouse working... once it's released.
   
8. Um, other nice things :)
   

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Good work, but now redundant?

[slim]

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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Umm, hardly a development tool

[Jon Erikson]

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

DC "demo scene" using CDR is a possibility now

[vkim]

About a week ago, a demo disc for Dreamcast Gameshark CDX was bundled with a magazine in the UK, and it turned out that you can bypass the region-check using this disc - thereby enabling you to play import games (JP games on US DC, and US games on JP DC). What's even more interesting is that the disc is an ordinary 2-track CD-ROM that can be burned onto a CDR - and the CDR can still be booted on a DC. The ability to bypass region-check *and* to boot CDR... now that opens up new opportunities for spawning an amateur "demo scene" for the DC, using a MIPS target GCC and a CDR burner. Sure remote debugging isn't possible unless you modify the hardware like these guys, but at least it is possible now to create home-made software for the DC! We could even get that NetBSD port for DC going now... if someone will disassemble the content of the gameshark demo disc and figure out the proper bootloader setup.

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.