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Dreamcast Broadband Adapters

Posted by michael on from the lpb dept.

JayBonci writes "Dust off the old Dreamcast. If you're one of the many like myself who still enjoy their Dreamcast or are aspiring DC hackers, then you may want to pay attention to a quiet announcement by CSI, the Japanese manufacturer of the Dreamcast Broadband Adapter (flaky, but understandable translation provided by the fish). If you have no idea what the BBA is, the official page here. If CSI gets 1000 pre-orders for the unit, they will be willing to make another production run. Keep in mind that these units are very useful for the Dreamcast Linux efforts and NetBSD/Dreamcast, and that Japanese units work on US systems."

5 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Slowly into that good night by packeteer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    oh it brings a tear to my eye to hear you say that... i agree with you very much and you pointed out just a few of the many features the dreamcast has... it has TWICE as much video ram as the ps2 while the ps2 has twice as FAST video ram which means that programmers must waste their time coding swapping functions and worrying about management...

    also the 128 bit (xbox has nothing on the dreamcast here with its 32 bit p3) 200 mhz risc processor just kicks ass... its easy to compile linux for risc so practically any software can be burned onto a cdr and the dreamcast can read it...

    i am very glad and i will be pre-ordering possibly 2 or 3 of these... i wanted to hack my dc more but $200 for the nic was too much...

    --
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  2. how to pre-order? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How could I preorder a BBA? I cannot read Japanese :)

  3. How many pre-orders needed for more Dreamcasts? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Just out of interest, how many pre-orders would be needed to get another production run of Dreamcasts made?

    Maybe I am being over optimistic, but who would have said that Blender would be open-sourced a couple of years ago?

  4. Details? by Megane · · Score: 3, Interesting

    How do we make the reservations? How much do we have to pay? What about international orders?

    --
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  5. Re:Am I the only one by autechre · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Probably because the manufacturer is a business and likes to sell things. As you pointed out, most of their target audience (home gamers) will better be able to identify the function of an item called "Broadband Adaptor" than one called "NIC". Sorry if they don't feel that people should learn basic networking terms before giving them money :)

    Remember, this wasn't named for the benefit of a bunch of geeks wanting to run Linux on the Dreamcast, it was named when the Dreamcast was still an unabandoned (by the manufacturer) gaming platform. In fact, my brother and myselves (who'll get _that_ reference?) would use this adaptor to play PSO (hopefully, this is still possible with the Dreamcast).

    (IIRC, DSL/Cable is actually narrowband or wideband according to the Bell Atlantic services chart, which I think is what you're referencing).

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