NetBSD Supports SEGA's Broadband Adapter

hubertf writes: "NetBSD now supports the SEGA Broadband (i.e. ethernet) Adapter. Check out the screendump of someone telnetting into a Dreamcast running NetBSD!" Considering that this adapter only came out a short while ago, this is pretty fast work. Next stop: electric toothbrushes.

Comments

Re:seems to me....

[linuxpimp]

once the netbsd port catches up, we need a beowulf of these. maybe its time

And we thought we had a problem when Iraq was buying the Playstation 2s...

Re:MAME!

[deusx]

Well, no MAME yet, but I imagine someone will pick it up soon. In the mean time, check out this:

http://boob.thegypsy.com/emulators.html

NES, SNES, Gameboy, Genesis/Megadrive, PlayStation, NeoGeo pocket color...

I bought one of the suckers for this.

[TellarHK]

Dead in production or not, there're supposedly 1.2 million unsold Dreamcast systems that'll still be in the retail pipeline. With the machine at $99 and the broadband adapter for sale through the Sega Store for $59, you can get a really killer new toy, cheap. And I've gotta say, it annoys me sometimes that all the talk here in Slashdot seems to expect that geeks will all be making the Silicon Valley bucks. A lot of us don't, a lot of us -won't-, and we (Well, okay, I) get annoyed that every Cool New Geek Toy(tm) seems to cost an entire month's pay.

I just spent the cash on my Dreamcast (Got it at $149, will get it price-match refunded in a couple weeks, I'm sure) and will be shelling out for the broadband adapter soon. There aren't a lot of Just Because I Can(tm) toys for geeks making $8.50 an hour part-time working the tech support desk at a college.

And there's another rant. Gah! Working for an MCSE in a shop with two mission critical Linux boxen. Fun, usually, to be the only half-clued one, but kinda depressing. :)

Re:I bought one of the suckers for this.

[SubtleNuance]

tech support desk at a college.

Ill trade you my $75k per year:

"mine the widget production data from Oracle and stick it in a pie chart on a webpage"

job anyday for your

"meet interesting people with something to say about the universe" if you'd like.

Re:MAME!

[GeorgeH]

Not quite what you're looking for, but check out http://mc.pp.se/dc/dreamsnes/
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saturn + the dreamcast

[British]

I remember seeing Keyboards + internet connectivity for the Sega Saturn units.

I wonder... could you do a whole client(saturn)/server(dreamcast) setup entirely of Sega gaming units?

Turn a sega nomad into a networked palm-like device, and you could have Sonic be your IS!

Re:System Specs

[GeorgeH]

System specs are at http://www.dreamcast.net/systeminfo/. CPU runs at 200Mhz, which may sound slow, but remember it's not an Intel processor. RAM: 16 MB main RAM, 8 MB video RAM, 2 MB sound RAM.

AFAIK, you can't add a hard drive, you burn it to a CD-ROM and NFS mount the root fs.

Funcoland is still around.

I'm constantly surprised that people think it's easier to post a question than do a simple Google search.
--

PCI? Lummie.

[WasterDave]

The real story's in the dmesg, look how many drivers they've got up:

maple0 at shb0
Dreamcast Controller at maple0 port 0 not configured
mkbd0 at maple0 port 3: US keyboard
wskbd0 at mkbd0: console keyboard
pvr0 at shb0: 640 x 480, 16bpp, NTSC, composite
wsdisplay0 at pvr0: console (80x30, vt100 emulation), using wskbd0
gdrom0 at shb0
g2bus0 at shb0
gapspci0 at g2bus0: SEGA GAPS PCI Bridge
pci0 at gapspci0 bus 0
pci0: memory space enabled
rtk0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0: SEGA Broadband Adapter
rtk0: interrupting at SH4 irq 11
rtk0: Ethernet address 00:d0:f1:02:ab:30
ukphy0 at rtk0 phy 7: Generic IEEE 802.3u media interface
ukphy0: OUI 0x000000, model 0x0000, rev. 0
ukphy0: 10baseT, 10baseT-FDX, 100baseTX, 100baseTX-FDX, auto

So: The controller, keyboard, console keyboard, the powervr2 accelerator (!), the gdrom thingy, a PCI bridge that I had no idea was in the dreamcast, the PCI bus, finally what looks like a realtek ethernet chip.

Realtek? Shit, they must've been reckoning on cashing in big time here. Ten brownie points for anyone making a 'make yerself a sega broadband connector for only $5' webpage.

Anyway, immense kudos to the NetBSD team (@shagedelic.org ??). If this is for real, I'm well impressed guys.

Dave :)

digital divide

[linuxpimp]

Remember the /. article the other day about Brazil rolling out $200 pcs to the poor? This is even better! The Dreamcast is only $99, has a broadband connection, and best of all, it runs UNIX. So not only can the poor surf the web and check their e-mail, but they get the skill set needed to be sysadmins! Talks about escaping from a life of poverty...

"Next stop: electric toothbrushes"

[AntiNorm]

Next stop: electric toothbrushes

Just think of what would happen if some 31337 h4x0r broke into your toothbrush while you were using it to brush your teeth. My guess is that the results would be rather painful.

---
Check in...OK! Check out...OK!

Re:"Next stop: electric toothbrushes"

[Chris Pimlott]

Actually it you who didn't count. Fuck You.
Oh-ho-ho! It you who give good comeback! It him who driven into shame!

Re:"Next stop: electric toothbrushes"

[popular]

Nah, your Dreamcast firewall would keep 'em out, and if they got past that, you could put a honey^H^H^H^H^H coffeepot on the network to distract 'em long enough to detect the intrusion ;-)

--

Rising to the bait...

[main()]

Where do you people who have probably never contributed *anything* to *anyone*, *ever*
get off...

Oh fuck it, I really can't be bothered.

Suffice to say, great work NetBSD camp, you seem to be doing pretty well despite the drivel some
people post in response to any *BSD stories here on Slashdot.

Si

--
"Make them stop, please"

Re:Rising to the bait...

[SubtleNuance]

Where do you people who have probably never contributed *anything* to *anyone*, *ever* get off...

Sounds like you have issues friend. Thats alot of hostility for one /. post. Please, seek council.

Re:Firewall?

[Webmonger]

Not nessesarily. Many DSL providers use PPPoE (PPP on Ethernet). Plug the DSL modem into a hub. Plug the dreamcast into the hub.
Packets go into the Dreamcast in TCP/IP, go out in PPPoE. Because nothing else speaks to the DSL modem, you've got a firewall.

Re:Push for Sega to Release SDK to Open Source?

[bugg]

They don't make Dreamcasts anymore. Hence, this argument is fairly moot- they're trying to liquidate- if you're willing to buy, I don't think they care what you're going to use it for.

Re:Jobs for Dreamcasts

[AntiBasic]

PCs are full of legacy technology, not legacy hardware or designs.

I bet to differ. Legacy technology and legacy design are the same in most instances. Look at the way PCs still handle those interrupts. There's still nothing close to UMA in a PC either. Thus, it is laden with legacy hardware and design as well as technology.

Re:Jobs for Dreamcasts

[Fishstick]

Really? Can you put two adapters on this? I got the impression there was only one port on which to connect the 'broadband adapter'. Wouldn't you need two?

Re:MAME!

[slim]

Who moderated this as "funny"? I'd *love* a MAME port on Dreamcast. I think it's eminently doable, too. Maybe 1500 games is a little ambitious: an initial Dreamcast port would not be as fast as MAME on the equivalent PC (because it would use C emulation cores instead of the faster x86 ASM cores), meaning only older games would work, and in addition many of the newer MAME games have enormous ROM images which would not fit in a Dreamcast's RAM.

Nonetheless, all those Pac Man / Invaders / Galaga / Q-Bert era games should work a treat, and I really hope someone does the port.
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Jobs for Dreamcasts

[h2odragon]

Name server. Even with the high possibility of future BIND exploits, who will go to the trouble of creating shellcode for a Dreamcast? "I can't find the mailserver?" ... "Oh, sorry, I was playing games"

Considering that the reliability and durability of these boxes is going to be far better than the average bits of PC hardware, I think they'd be very well suited to be credit card processors. Even if you can't hook up a modem to them directly they could make use of a terminal server and a seperate network segment. In that application the lack of disk will be a plus, "extra security" and all.

The thought of businesses across the nation depending on $99 video game consoles and really cool hacks for their income just appeals, somehow...

Re:Jobs for Dreamcasts

[bugg]

Well, the Dreamcast architecture was designed recently. The "PC" architecture contains throwbacks to the original 8086, released in 1978.

PCs are filled with legacy hardware. Not saying that this directly causes them to be less stable, as I have no real proof of it, but there's plently of anedoctal evidence to back that up.

Now, your argument "why don't people use game consoles over PCs?" is certainly valid. The answer is that when the PC architecture (ia32, x86, whatever you want to call it- you can be a pendant and argue against any one of those terms) doesn't cut it for a user, they get hardware that's generally considered to be nicer. Like a Sun machine. Or an Alpha.

Re:Jobs for Dreamcasts

[Emil Brink]

Um, yeah, but if you connect the modem, you have to remove the ethernet adapter, since they share the same connector... Kind of makes it difficult to do much, unless you mean that the Dreamcast should act as a self-contained dial-in server...

Dreamcast boot sector

[yerricde]

they don't have binaries available for this dreamcast port.

And they won't. The BIOS checks the boot sector against a copy in ROM, and if it isn't bit-for-bit identical, it won't boot the disc. "So just copy the boot sector in the ISO!" Sorry, the Dreamcast boot sector is copyright SEGA.

Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?

Re:NetBSD first?

[bugg]

I think you're filled with stereotypes.

There's a huge difference between "Do everything right" and "Don't be the first" - Don't believe all of the propoganda that everyone tells you. (OpenBSD is the secure one, FreeBSD is the fast one, and NetBSD is the portable one that's always the last to get new toys) -- heck, NetBSD has _always_ blazed trails!

MAME!

[jfedor]

We need a Dreamcast port of MAME. This would mean over 1500 new games for the dying console. :)

-jfedor

Re:NetBSD is dying

[Z4rd0Z]

NetBSD faces a bleak future at best. In fact there may be no future for NetBSD. NetBSD is dying. Things are looking bad for *BSD in general. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share; red ink flows like a river of blood. NetBSD is perhaps the most in endangered. Let's look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts. Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Major marketing surveys show that BSD has steadily declined in market share. BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyists (i.e. those who dabble with Minix, Xinu, etc). *BSD continue to falter. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, NetBSD is dead.

I love you for the way you warm up each and every BSD thread. We can always count on you, no matter what else comes along. Keep up the good work.
Cheers.