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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?"
i'm to say. it's dead, let it go.
Having BSD on Dreamcast made the system appealing to me. Granted, NetBSD has been ported to every electronic device that has enough memory to hold the kernel. But there is a certain geeky alure to using a video game console as a terminal, or, as some people have demonstrated, even as a webserver.
I guess it's just the "I can do this" aspect that draws me to it. Just having the ability to tinker with things makes them more interesting.
Wouldn't "known as" be more appropriate? At least I hope so, otherwise his parents gave him a very unhappy childhood.
No sig for you.
There's plenty of emulators available for the not-so-dead dreamcast
http://www.zophar.net/consoles/dreamcast.html
Best part about the Dreamcast is that it can be found for as low as $15. I recently picked one up at EB. It was a great decision as I can get all the games I want online. These kinds of projects just make me even happier to have bought it.
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.
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?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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
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.
The system itself could read CD-ROMs and GD-ROMs (Sega's special high-density format) perfectly. GD-ROMs had two tracks, a normal low-density track readable by normal CD-ROMs (PCs, etc) and a high-density Dreamcast-only track. The low-density track often had wallpapers and screensavers one could grab from them on a PC.
A Dreamcast disk requires a bit of special burning (two tracks, the first with at least 4 seconds of data, and other requirements) but the whole disk is accessible.
The reason CD reading was allowed was so that third parties could create unoffical products such as Action Replay, or so artists could have their music CDs have Dreamcast extras (a few CDs in Asia I believe actually did this, but I haven't heard of one in the west). Sega didn't expect the GD-ROM format to be read, but a way was found to read the GD-ROMs (by ripping them from the Dreamcast connected to a PC). The games were then cracked to work on a CD-ROM, and piracy followed. Homebrew developers then created thier own code.
Scorta futuere amo!
It's worth noting another recent breakthrough in the DC scene - a DC emulator for PC that works with real games at a playable rate.
:) I can now play rez on my PC.
Chankast is that piece of software, and it's a joy to see running
However, with DCs available at as low as 15GBP, it's silly not to pick it up. As a games writer, it's my favourite console I've owned, for the high quantity of top-notch games that were released in its short life. In fact, if you haven't explored the DC's back catalogue - I'd thoroughly recommend it. It's one of modern gaming's best kept secrets.
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
... now if only someone would build broadband adapters for the DC - it's really hard to get one and they're pretty expensive.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Me and my cohorts at S+F Software are getting a game published via the Goat Store, if they can get the pressing details worked out. It's a addictive four player puzzle game called Inhabitants, also available on Lik-Sang
The nice thing about the DC is that it is quite easy to code for using open tools. The KallistOS library gives you easy access to the hardware. It even has a openGL library that does a decent job for simple 3d stuff, and a badass object oriented 2d library.