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Dreamcast Ethernet Adapter Released (Nearly)
mattbee writes: "Looks like the Dreamcast is going to be the first games console to have ethernet access; both ebworld and Lik-Sang are taking pre-orders for the long-awaited modem replacement at $60 a pop, and they'll ship with new versions of the Internet software. But who cares about their dull ol' Web browser? :) This is great news for the people doing the Linux port, and the guerilla DC development community at large (see Jules' page for links galore). At the moment, you have to upload your code over the serial port which is a little... slow."
An aspect of the PS2 hacking is that it uses a completely new CPU design with little in common with any other processor in major production. The DC on the otherhand uses a slightly modified SH-4 chip which is a line of widely documented processors. There's already been work done porting Linux to the SuperH line.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
True. But we're still a long way off. Both my digital cable boxes, all 3 of my TiVos, and my HDTV converter/DirecTV tuner all need to connect to a phone outlet. Thankfully, most of them are capable of negotiating shared phoneline use correctly.
Unless and until there's a fundamental shift in thinking, and the default connectivity option in the home is wired or wireless Ethernet (or some similar layer 2 protocol, with either TCP/IP or some form of TCP/IP encapsulation), and until those same homes have adequate home-wide network security coupled with "grandmother-simple" plug-and-play configuration, analog phone connections will continue to reign.
In terms of Joe Sixpack acceptance and preparedness for fully-networked appliances, we're standing in a place similar to the early 1940's with the transition from radio to television -- it's coming, but it's a long way off, and there's going to be a lot of growing pains along the path.
Things like this add-on, and recent work replacing the default TiVo modem dial-in with straight Ethernet access (both by subverting the existing PPP config, and by building an ISA slot onto the unit and adding a regular ISA Ethernet card), demonstrate that there's a small segment of society that wants and is capable of taking advantage of such advances. But right now, that segment is EXTREMELY small.
.@.
is here ... for those of you who don't want to go through the linked page (which has some sort of script that makes my machine have a heart attack).
It doesn't have much information, though. I just want to know if I can use it behind an IP masquerading linux box. (Or any other NAT router for that matter.) I ordered one anyway. =)
Major price advantage? You're talking about the difference between a $300 product and a $150 product in the same line of conversation as someone talking about multiple TiVOs. Not to mention broadband rates.... I don't think the extra hundred and a half is going to break the bank for the type of person that this article's aimed at.
One thing that hasn't been addressed in some time, that I'd like to know about, what happened to the Dreamcast hard drive? The Dreamcast memory card, even the 4x released by Sega, can't adequately hold enough to make broadband a worthwhile endeavor in my mind. Any progress being made in getting a nice large hard drive option for the Dreamcast?
It would have been nice if Sega had thought about it a little more beforehand. See, the network layer isn't transparent to developers - you have to actually write seperate code and include drivers for both a modem *and* an ethernet card in your game if you want to support both, instead of just making your game TCP/IP capable. So all those Dreamcast modem-capable games you have now aren't going to work with it. Just a little word of caution.
On the other hand, while it makes things nice for the Linux port, it's good for the NetBSD port as well...
-lx