But if you have a Dreamcast already and you'd like to hook it up and play with NetBSD on it you shouldn't be able to?
You may jest about watches, but if they progress to the level of power needed to run NetBSD, it will be ported. NetBSD already runs on a wide range of mips based windows CE devices, and that gives mobile unix with exceptional battery life.
What is impressive is not that it runs on the Dreamcast, but how little Dreamcast specific changes were needed to the NetBSD tree to get it to this point.
Just curious - but why not run OpenGL and SDL directly under NetBSD? I've run Mesa-GLX on a couple of NetBSD boxes. (Apologies for now being particularly familar with the OpenGL world)
Given that NetBSD is pretty much assured to be ported to just about any platform, its investing in a system that will have the widest hardware coverage from a single source tree.
Being able to reliably swap over NFS would give you the option to run more VM hungry apps during development (assuming you have some form of reasonably fast IP running I/O:)
The Dreamcast shares many of the same interface and resource limitations as set top boxes, embedded devices and palmtop devices (each to differing extents).
NetBSD was ported to the arm32 based shark, which was DEC's reference network computer platform (later killed due to pressure from Microsoft), but Network computing and others released systems based both on the hardware and on the NetBSD distribution.
If it helps you can think of the Dreamcast as a low cost reference platform on which to experiment with interfaces, limited resources and (to a very limited extent) unusual video acceleration, but its also a good way to show to many people that all the world is not a PC, and that they have hardware around the house that could run unix.
It was also interesting to see how few Dreamcast specific changes were needed to the NetBSD tree in order to get it to this point.
If I had a Dreamcast then I would probably get a keyboard and a CD with ssh, lynx, pppd and a bunch of other tools. If Sega come up with a easy way to add 10baseT to the system then NFS and another server turns it into a quite interesting X and web browsing terminal.
I agree the playstation 2 makes a much more capable target, particularly with USB and PCMCIA.
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But if you have a Dreamcast already and you'd like to hook it up and play with NetBSD on it you shouldn't be able to?
:)
You may jest about watches, but if they progress to the level of power needed to run NetBSD, it will be ported. NetBSD already runs on a wide range of mips based windows CE devices, and that gives mobile unix with exceptional battery life.
What is impressive is not that it runs on the Dreamcast, but how little Dreamcast specific changes were needed to the NetBSD tree to get it to this point.
Besides, some people find it cool
Given that NetBSD is pretty much assured to be ported to just about any platform, its investing in a system that will have the widest hardware coverage from a single source tree.
Being able to reliably swap over NFS would give you the option to run more VM hungry apps during development (assuming you have some form of reasonably fast IP running I/O :)
Would you have any references to SDL?
The Dreamcast shares many of the same interface and resource limitations as set top boxes, embedded devices and palmtop devices (each to differing extents). NetBSD was ported to the arm32 based shark, which was DEC's reference network computer platform (later killed due to pressure from Microsoft), but Network computing and others released systems based both on the hardware and on the NetBSD distribution. If it helps you can think of the Dreamcast as a low cost reference platform on which to experiment with interfaces, limited resources and (to a very limited extent) unusual video acceleration, but its also a good way to show to many people that all the world is not a PC, and that they have hardware around the house that could run unix. It was also interesting to see how few Dreamcast specific changes were needed to the NetBSD tree in order to get it to this point. If I had a Dreamcast then I would probably get a keyboard and a CD with ssh, lynx, pppd and a bunch of other tools. If Sega come up with a easy way to add 10baseT to the system then NFS and another server turns it into a quite interesting X and web browsing terminal. I agree the playstation 2 makes a much more capable target, particularly with USB and PCMCIA.