Dreamcast Ethernet Adapter Released (Nearly)

Posted by michael on Monday December 25, 2000 @07:32PM from the geeks-bearing-gifts dept.

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."

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ethernet adapter is cool, but... by Lx · 2000-12-25 17:48 · Score: 4

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