I remember when the Dreamcast was released some 20 years ago. If I recall, it took surprisingly little time before someone ran NetBSD successfully on it. I never owned a Dreamcast but a lot of people were very excited about this. I believe it was possible because someone had ported NetBSD to the SH-4 CPU well before the Dreamcast was released but I couldn’t tell you now what other hardware that would have been.
With the fact that an Ethernet adapter was available for it, I think a lot of people were hoping it could be a dirt-cheap (for the time) *nix server platform. Although I’m not sure you could connect a hard drive up to it. Those hope were pretty much irrelevant when the XBox came out a year or two later and filled that need. Although it didn’t take long before its P3-733 and 64 MB of RAM weren’t worth bothering with unless someone gave it to you for free.
As the Dreamcast gets older and older the number of hardware projects for it increase, like a DIY broadband adapter or a CF/IDE adapter to replace the failing laser in the optical drives which are becoming increasingly common. Far more interesting way of support a CPU architecture in my opinion than some boring single board computer that amass and plague the bottom of a draw.
Betteridge strikes again… but what a dull world it would be if we only did “useful” things.
:D
I remember when the Dreamcast was released some 20 years ago. If I recall, it took surprisingly little time before someone ran NetBSD successfully on it. I never owned a Dreamcast but a lot of people were very excited about this. I believe it was possible because someone had ported NetBSD to the SH-4 CPU well before the Dreamcast was released but I couldn’t tell you now what other hardware that would have been.
With the fact that an Ethernet adapter was available for it, I think a lot of people were hoping it could be a dirt-cheap (for the time) *nix server platform. Although I’m not sure you could connect a hard drive up to it. Those hope were pretty much irrelevant when the XBox came out a year or two later and filled that need. Although it didn’t take long before its P3-733 and 64 MB of RAM weren’t worth bothering with unless someone gave it to you for free.
As the Dreamcast gets older and older the number of hardware projects for it increase, like a DIY broadband adapter or a CF/IDE adapter to replace the failing laser in the optical drives which are becoming increasingly common. Far more interesting way of support a CPU architecture in my opinion than some boring single board computer that amass and plague the bottom of a draw.
The reverse engineering of the Sega Saturn was really interesting.
Useful for getting more entries on https://dmesgd.nycbug.org for sure :D