Slashdot Mirror
Dreamcast Modem Is Reverse Engineered
00_NOP writes "The hobbyist's favourite console - the Dreamcast - comes with one of those braindead Winmodems that have made it very difficult for those on the active DC development scene to use. But now all that is about to change. Thanks to a find on the internet and some heavy duty hacking - real modem support is almost here. This is fantastic news for the Linux and the NetBSD teams and for *nix advocates everywhere - as immediately millions more people could access these OSes and use them in a meaningful way to get online etc. Don't forget - four million plus of these things were sold in North America alone!"
But any kernel hackers interested in Linux on the DC are more than welcome at the #linuxdc channel on freenode/openprojects - irc.openprojects.net. Maybe you know about modems and you'd like to write us the driver?
Wow, you mean you can hax0r one of these puppies for 56K dialup access? What's that sound? It's the sound of third-worlders cheering.
"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq"
-- Paul Wolfowitz, 7/21/2003
But wouldn't it be smarter to develop the driver in a clean-room environment? That is without any reverse engineering or especially the use of documents that you probably aren't supposed to have? Frankly, it just seems like you're looking for a lawsuit.
"Thanks to a find on the internet and some heavy duty hacking"
Since when is DOWNLOADING A DATA SHEET considered a hack (or even reverse engineering)?
They reverse engineered the DC modem?!
Soon, hack attacks from Dreamcasts will bring every network in the world to their very knees, society will break down, and World War III/Armageddon will erupt, leaving 6 billion dead in its wake, save for the 144,000 virgins (many of them slashdot users) who will be saved by Jesus Christ on judgement day!
You can find better stuff in other peoples garbage. Recently I found a PB 705 in some guy's garbage pile -- 2 gig disk, cd rom, Lucent win modem, 64M, S3 SVGA video, Win 98, and Cyrix PR 300. Run Linux, BSD, Windows, whatever. Why would I want an odd ball Dreamcast? You can find better stuff in the garbage.
OK, so 4 million dereamcast consoles were sold in the US alone. Ang I have to say, it's cool that you can now use CD linux and FreeBSD to get online with this hardware, but where does the contributor of this article get the notion that this will significantly increase the userbase Linux of FreeBSD. Somehow I seriously doubt that any new adopters of Linux or FreeBSD will be so balzy as to choose to do their first installation on a DC console just because they have one. Certainly, logic dicates that the vast extreme majority of DC *nix users were already *nix hobbyists.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Actually, would be more accurate to say 'is capable of' running a version of WinCE. It's a title by title basis; the hardware itself doesn't run an OS, only a bootstrapper and a few hard-coded utils to play CDs, change the clock, and futz with the memory cards.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
My first thought was "who cares", but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was the right reaction. Yes, the DC may be "the hobbyist's favorite console" but it isn't going to get millions more people to try Linux or BSD. Millions more people will try Linux by buying Lindows PCs, or buying RH 8.0 in a store (with a bit of luck on their HW platform during the install).
I mean, coolness points for reverse-engineering the modem, but this won't open some Open Source floodgate.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
as previosly mentioned here, you can pre-order an ethernet adapter for the dreamcast at ncsx.org for 50 bucks!
--scroll down about 1/2 way.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I know people here hate patents, but everyone should note that any modem driver written for this thing is going to infringe on a rather large number of patents. You've never seen such a mess of patents until you've looked at all the compression and error correction routines needed for a full software modem.
as immediately millions more people could access these OSes and use them in a meaningful way to get online etc. Don't forget - four million plus of these things were sold in North America alone!"
/. and the DC box burnt to a crisp.
Let's make some basic assumptions that the Dreamcast owners with the desire and/or technical expertise to setup Linux on the console comprise about 0.01% of the DC owners. 4,000,000 * 0.0001 = 400. Given that the market for basic Internet appliances consists of Christmas/birthday presents for mothers/grandmothers, and that they require the simplest and most basic of functionality, and that no ISPs are going to support the boxes, there will probably be about 4 of these modified DC systems to ever be utilized and will belong to EE students and be used for a final project.
The only exception will be an MIT or Berkeley student that will cram it into a stuffed animal and use it as a webserver/router, thus getting the story posted on
...the light gun for the original "Nintendo" entertainment system has been reverse-engineered for use as a pointing device by the Linux-On-Useless-Crap team! Way to go, fellas!
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
According to the site, pre-orders have closed. Bummer, right? Well, i mailed them about this a week or so ago, and was told:
Hello, the production will proceed and we will update our website and customers once we have more news on the ship date. Thanks.
If this means that there will be plenty to go around, i do not know - but i hope so, seeing as i didn't get a pre-order in on time. I'm betting that major resalers ordered quite a few, though.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Nope.
The Dreamcast is not inherently tied to Windows CE in anyway.
I can't really comment on the non-Sega projects for the Dreamcast, since I honestly haven't really followed them, but there are three official IP stacks for the Dreamcast.
1. Windows CE - This one isn't really used that much. Windows CE was meant mainly as a quick port of existing Windows games. From what I recall hearing, there was a plan to have Windows CE exclusively as the Dreamcast OS (much like the original Dreamcast was supposed to use 3dfx chips, instead of PowerVR), but I think the execs at SOJ (Sega of Japsn) didn't like that idea, hence the SegaOS was made.
2. PlanetWeb - The web browser that shipped with every Dreamcast, and was available in magazines, was called PlanetWeb, and I believe the company that made it was also known as PlanetWeb. They had the "official" Dreamcast IP stack if you were using the SegaOS - Windows CE was not required for IP connectivity.
3. I can't remember the name of the third stack, but it was used mainly for broadband related titles. It was developed by a third party, and paid for by Sega of America and Sega of Europe, as an alternative to the PlanetWeb stack (because we wanted source code, and an optimized stack, and PlanetWeb didn't seem to care about that).
Note that Windows CE, last time I checked (well, while I was working at Sega anyway, and I don't think that they released a new toolkit since then) NEVER supported the broadband adapter, they supported the modem only.
-- Joe
No
Since another person has kindly derailed your WindowsCE argument, let me derail you on the hardware side.
The Dreamcast uses a something along the lines of a hardware-accelerated software modem. The Hitachi SH4 that the dreamcast uses has a couple of registers and, IIRC, a couple of instructions specifically for working with the modem so that you don't have to fuck around when you're trying to work with the hardware.
It's a software modem but not software in the sense that we're used to.