Amateurs Pushing the Dreamcast's Boundaries

Wraggster writes "The Sega Dreamcast console, which died an early commercial death, has recently seen some amazing new projects mainly aimed at emulation. Recently, a coder named Bluecrab released a port of the Saturn emulator called Yabause for the Dreamcast. Also, GPF (Troy Davis) has ported the excellent Visual Boy Advance (Game Boy Advance Emulator) to the Dreamcast. Finally, yesterday it was announced that Nincest (Nintendo 64 Emulator), an early N64 emulator that played demos only, has also been ported to the Dreamcast. All the projects are somewhat slow, but the achievement of the work is not to be discounted. Who says the Dreamcast is dead?"

Comments

Emulation

[dicepackage]

I bought a dreamcast about a year ago to run my games. It makes a great emulator. I have tons of NES, SNES, and GB games on it. In fact I only have one actual dreamcast game. The Xbox can be modded to do this sort of thing also but when it is priced at 150 dollars and there is a 30 dollar alternative the dreamcast is a much better system for emulation purposes. I also have it set up to play VCDs as well as being able to use it as an MP3 player.

Re:Here's A Real Brain Twister...

[Megane]

I don't see much progress being made in the Amiga world, just a bunch of Amiga fanboys who don't seem to realize that Amiga ceased years ago to be anything but a name.

These days, Dreamcast freaks are more likely to be emulator users rather than Sega fanboys. All it takes is a CD-ROM burner, a Dreamcast of the appropriate vintage, and you've got hundreds of games on a handful of disks.

The answer is obvious. It's hard to beat Amiga freaks for pathetic-ness. Unless you're a BeOS freak, anyhow.

Isn't this illegal?

[Sheetrock]

I was under the impression that at least some of these consoles require the display of a trademark as part of a program's startup or they will refuse to run said program.

Certainly this was the case with the Gameboy, although I've noticed a lot of games seem to carry a brand. Even if the Dreamcast is effectively dead, wouldn't there be some concern about any workaround for such a device?

Valuable Learning Experience

[The Vulture]

Dead or not, the Dreamcast is a full-featured system, with lots of potential for those who want to spend the time learning it.

Granted, somebody like me, who is employed full-time, and has very little time as it is, won't be spending too much time on it (I still have my Dreamcast, complete with broadband adaptor, keyboard and serial cable). But, for somebody who has some free time and wants to learn about the Dreamcast, there's a lot of knowledge that can be gained, and applied to other systems.

Never hurts to have it on the resume - as a matter of fact, I got my job interview at Sega in part due to the demos that I did on the Commodore 64 back in the early 1990's.

-- Joe

NINCEST 64: Get sis or get out.

[faraway]

Well, I never thought the source would be of any use to anyone (although the debugger was used in the dev of another emu). I was a Fresh/Soph in highschool when I wrote this. That was my last major project where I had the enthusiasm to code. I burned out after re-writing the part where I emulate the exception handling, and delay slots to be "proper" (to the R4x00 processor specs), I actually had a dirty hack in for the delay slot instructions. I rewrote that part of the code three times from scratch, and each time I would have the same problem; everything would break. I couldn't figure it out and eventually burned out. I keep my coding down to a minimum these days.

I hope only one thing, the porter, GPF?, puts the source back out again... I learned from other's source, and I hope others can learn from mine.

- marius
NINCEST 64: Get sis or get out.

Re:NetBSD project

[Cutriss]

Yeah, but is the project even still in development? I started looking around last summer for the tools necessary to burn the disc and get this going, but the links I remembered had started disappearing, and the only disc image anyone has is in that retarded DiscJuggler format. I'll be damned if I'm installing another CD recording app just to handle this. Plus, the last image compilation was done like three years ago, and most of the documentation has vanished.

To top it all off, DC-Linux on SourceForge is even deader than BSD.

So, if I'm just a noob to all this, how does one recommend that I get started? I already have a boot-capable Dreamcast and the Ethernet adapter, so I should be pretty much covered. I imagine that the keyboard and mouse would be easy enough to track down.

Dreamcast as a physical trojan

[graf0z]

Remember the stories (wired et altera) about turning a dreamcast into a inconspicuous sniffing device?

DC Phone Home (ppt, rtsp only).

Great. /graf0z.