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Wacky port of BSD to Dreamcast set top box 129

Posted by Hemos from the and-they-ported-to-my-pacemaker dept.
roadrash writes "So, if the hardware itself wasn't enough to get your sorry butt down to Toys 'r' Rus so you can get on the Dreamcast waiting list it appears now some guys with way too much time on their hands have ported BSD to the Super Hitachi chip that runs the thing. I wonder if they will bundle some games with that distro. " I have visions of my Dreamcast server farm.
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Wacky port of BSD to Dreamcast set top box More

Wacky port of BSD to Dreamcast set top box

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  • Cool! When can I see some KDE running on the Dreamcast? That would be impressive...

  • Re:first post (maybe) (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Weeellll, Linux (and probably BSD) now has support for read-only root filesystems and ramdisks, so it shouldn't be that much of a stretch?

    (I'm guessing romfs works OK on CDs, but maybe not...?)

  • agreed, this site is very linux-biased.

    i don't see the difference between this and microsoft's news, its all narrow-minded propoganda.

    doesn't linux run on the nintendo 64? the n64 will only ever be used for games, while the DC may one day be more than that. Porting linux to the n64 is "too much free time"

  • Sega and Nintendo have consistently lost ground to Sony. The playstation rocks, not because of its graphics, but because it has good games. I think, for the most part, people don't want to play games with goofy hedge-hogs and mario now that something closer to reality is possible.

    I have an N64 and the only good game: Zelda 64. Does anyone know of any others that are playable?


  • How about linux on Nintendo's current project dolphin (still under development). It's based on a modified PPC, and I heard that they were able to boot a modified beos kernel that they burnt onto a cdrom...

  • No, creating a web page with a doctored screen shot of an N64 running Linux as an April Fool's joke is "too much free time".

    OTOH, that many people are still falling for the joke, some three (?) years later, indicates that maybe it was worth the time invested ...

  • >people don't want to play games with goofy hedge-hogs and mario now that something closer to reality is possible.

    People who say things like that obviously haven't played VF3, Sega Rally2 and all the other, nearly photorealistic, high frame rate, no clipping, and no poly distorting games Dreamcast has to offer.

    Odd how you think people arn't happy with Sonic and Mario (which are both platformers basically) but they're happy enough with Tomb Raider++.

    I guess it's the chest. ;)
  • Well, granted I haven't had my mitts on an N64 for over a year (extened borrow from a friend :)
    But my favourites were Turok, Mario 64 and Mario Kart (yeah, shut up!) and GoldenEye.
    Bomberman 64 was OK, but the framerates in multiplayer were inexplicably BAD.
    The single-player adventure was kinda fun.
    Just my own take. I didn't own it so I wasn't about to buy any games for it.
    Though Ballbuster took enough from me in rentals, I coulda bought GoldenEye.
    I was addicted, I know :P

    pope

  • I ported Linux to my microwave oven. (Score:3)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Tuesday August 24, 1999 @04:34AM (#1728442) Homepage Journal
    I'm gonna buy 500 microwave ovens and play quake real fast d00d. Make loads of popcorn too. It will rule.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • If it weren't for the fact that (I believe) a form of Windows CE is being used as the Dreamcast's OS. One more place for Linux to try and compete, I suppose. :)

  • Storage (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can the Dreamcast talk to any storage devices or do I have to burn my root filesystem onto a CDR?
  • bout time a console machine could do something useful
    you can say what you want, but console games just suck with their lack of controls

    im gonna stick with my dynamic binds in q2 and all:P
    but now dreamcast is a cool option
  • Forget about the Dreamcast, what about Handheld PCs based on the SH4! The Compaq Aero 8000 comes to mind right away and many of the next generation CE machines will also run the SH4.

    Imagine being able to break free from Windows on your workstation, PDA, AND console game machine.

    How sweet it is.

    PDA Buzz Guy [pdabuzz.com]
  • i've never seen it first hand..
    i'm just repeating what i heard in some linux channels.

    whatever.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Some Dreamcast Misconceptions (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 24, 1999 @06:41AM (#1728456)
    1) Dreamcast does not run WinCe as its default operating system. If a developer wishes to use WinCe for a game, it is included on the games GD-ROM. Hence new versions of the "OS" can be shipped without replacing any sort of ROM. When the game disk that uses WinCe is inserted, Dreamcast first loads WinCe then loads the game. Most games so far are written at a much lower level.

    2) Yes I said GD-ROM. Sega uses a propreity optical disk that is formatted to roughly 1GB. It can still read CD's.

    3) The internet option for Dreamcast can use any standard PPP dial-up account. And no you don't get AT&T ISP free, just a free keyboard if you sign up with them.
  • It's a place where old wait-staff persons go to die gracefully and with dignity.

  • I believe I heard that the playstation 2 uses unix for the development enviro, that should make it easy to port games to unix. I think everybody should wait for PSX2. I'm not giving M$ any money
  • I really only like games that you can play against another player. My favorite for N64 is Mace. Very cool fighting game.
  • The Dreamcast is fairly modular, including an easily removable 56k modem. Since alot of home users are switching to broadband access, you can bet Sega will release an Ethernet adapter you can pop into there in about 5 seconds.

    Sega also says that you'll eventually be able to upgrade their GD-ROM Drive (custom 1GB CDs) to an actual DVD-ROM drive, but I don't know how they would go about it.

  • Minus the bottlenecks.

    If you want to see the true graphical power of DC, have a look at these screens. All are generated by the DC at a constant 60fps.

    In-game character model [ign.com] from Soul Calibur. In-game effects include coloured lighting on the characters (both ambient and from weapon flashes), dynamic shadows, particle weather systems

    Dead or Alive 2 [tecmo.co.jp]; Full 3D backdrop, and note the clothing flowing around the bodies.

    Shenmue face demos [shenmue.com]; just wait till you see them animated (individual hair strands move, reflections in the eyeballs, skin streches realistically).
    --------------------------------- -----
  • dreamcast comes with a 56k modem, and a NIC will be coming soon (it is currently in testing).

    gameplay will be through a heat.net type client (developed by heat.net), and as far as i know it doesn't cost anything.

    you will need a standard internet connection for it to work (aol AFAIK will not work).
  • "and the toy-OS BSD ran great on the game machine".
  • The graphics hardware is very powerful, but the CPU lets it down. All transformations have to be done by the CPU, which I'd rate at between a P166 and a P200. (it does have some vector floating point operations, but they don't buy you as much as you'd hope - also, it has no L2 cache.)

    In practice we always found that the graphics card could easily handle all the polygons that the CPU could throw at it. However, both the games that I've worked on did involve a fair bit of physics calculations, which took away CPU bandwidth from the vertex transforms.

    The best thing about the graphics card is the texture compression, which is very similar to the stuff that S3 uses. It gives you a 4:1 compression ratio, and as long as you don't use it for loading screen etc. you can't tell the difference. Overall the DC has 8Mb of texture memory, and you might lose about 3-4Mb on framebuffers and vertex list scratch space, but that leaves you the equivalent of 16-20Mb of space, which allows you very high detail textures, especially in the kind game (like Soul Calibur) where you only have one smallish scene and a couple of characters.

    The graphics in PC's tend to be stunted by the fact that they have to be able to run on lower-spec systems.

    cheers,

    Tim


  • A lot of people have gotten the wrong idea about WinCE & DC.
  • a) Although the development environment uses UNIX, the PSX libraries themselves are not at all UNIX.

    b) WinCE is only used for some software (the internet access stuff I think & Sega rally II) as it's 3D performance is much worse than the Sega libraries, so I don't think you have to worry about putting bills into Bill's pocket.



  • I'm not sure about the rest of the palm/handheld PC world, it wouldn't take much of a shim on my Nino 510 to boot an alternate OS (since all you do is replace a few windows CE binaries in rom with files held in ram)

    The main problem would be the fact that it would have to run on top of the normal FS CE uses (fat?). Maybe someone will come up with a nice virtual FS for them so we can run BSD on the road (or linux for the less evolved :)
  • Funny, I've always seen things like "Hey, screw this expensive specially-made router that can handle up to a terabit per second, let's do it with x86s and make a beowulf, we'll show them" from Linux users.

    Please point me to articles where people say "DAH WHY DON'T YOU JUST MAKE IT BSD".

    On your point that BSD users whine when people say things about BSD -- read what they're responding to specifically some time.

    "BSD is DEAD!!!"

    "No, BSD is not dead ... "

    "Stop whining, typical BSD user"
  • Actually, the OS is stored on the CD and loads when the machine boots. There is a version of WinCE game companies can use, but as someone else has pointed out, Sega has it's own OS that can be used and developers could really use whatever OS somebody makes a port of.

    There is a sticker on the Dreamcast that says "Powered by WindowsCE," or some other kind of marketing drivel, but it's really up to the game developer what he wants to use.

  • AGREE (Score:1)

    by Alejo ( 69447 )
    YES INDEED!!!!!

    Some moderators are sooo biased.

    They even go against GNU!!!!

    All this was one of the causes of me dropping
    linux, and switching to OpenBSD

    BTW they say *BSD instead of OpenBSD
    when they are so specific about linux distros

  • I sure am glad you're not a big part of the FreeBSD community!

    Your comments are childish and are not representative of any BSD community.
  • If we're going to stereotype, let's make it fair. The "typicaly[sic]" Linux user, judging from posts on Slashdot, cannot spell -- nor can he use the English language correctly.



    For instance:

    "...with someone and by doing so, prove their point?"


    I do believe you mean "his" instead of "their." Of course, since political correctness is such an issue in this day in age, you might've said "his or her." Either way, someone is singular and their is plural.


    Oh, and

    "'Nuff said."


    Since the apostrophe denotes omission of letters in a word or contraction, and since I'm not familiar with a word such as "enuff," I'll assume you mean "'Nough said."


    Hey -- I'm just trying to be fair.

    -Sam
  • It would be cool to get the various distributed computing initiatives (d.net's RC5 [distributed.net], SETI [berkeley.edu], OGR [aol.com], etc.) together onto one CD image to burn and run on Dreamcasts. Just pop the disc in when you're done playing and let it crack/spook/compute... It might be a good first step before tackling getting to the onboard 3D.
  • (1)OK... is there a port of bleem or a similar Playstation emulator to BSD? Could one be written? Hell! Could one be written for CE? Imagine how cool the Dreamcast would be if it could be made to play Playstation CD's and its own native games.

    (2), this is what I expect to have rocks thrown at me for... how tough would it be to boot Darwin/ MacOS X on this? :-)
  • The DC can output to vga via optional hardware, if the game supports it.... -K
  • CE itself is in ROM. Can some wizard comment on the feasibility of replacing the ROM with EPROMs? (No chance of them being socketed, I'd venture.) Maybe they already are EPROMs? I would imagine that some WinCE device mfrs want to preserve their configuration options, if only to upgrade to a later patch level of WinCE. This would open the doors to embedding a certain other more appealing OS.

  • Re:um (Score:1)

    by BerndR ( 64237 )
    > Tux is the sexiest penguin

    I agree - the sexiest penguin.

    However, the daemon is much cuter ;-)

    (Doesn't that remind me of some userfriendly cartoon???)
  • The problem here is that the BSD community is just as friendly and helpful (and far more knowledgable) than the Linux user community. People who say that BSD users are snobs, bastards, etc are merely spreading FUD to keep people from trying BSD.
  • porting an operating system to a different platform takes a little more then plugging a zip drive into it. besides, the n64 isn't hardly as powerful as the dreamcast.
    ...
  • Unless you have never made a typo in your life, I suggest you relax on me accidentally hitting a Y.
    Oh sure, I've made typos. But my point still stands: the average English Linux user can't spell, nor does he use his "mother tongue" correctly. You decided to stereotype BSD users, so I responded.

    I thought mature people were above making fun of typoes.
    I wasn't making fun of you in any sense of the phrase. Again, I was merely responding to your assumptions.

    Either you have lived in a bomb shelter all your life (and thus been denied access to any sort of slang, verbal or written) or you are just an immature brat.
    Perhaps I'm an immature brat -- I'm only 15. Of course I know and use slang; I was nitpicking to, again, make a counterpoint.

    Try that one, English major :)
    I'll take that as a compliment. Not many students my age are referred to as English majors by their superiors.

    You shouldn't even take my comments seriously. My comments are posted to give hypocritical Linux users a view of just how overzealous they can sometimes be. After all, shouldn't you just shrug it off and refer to me as another "typical BSD user?" :)

    -Sam
  • people who correct grammar always irk me -- language follows usage. really, saying 'his' is more confusing if anything. in a sentence like:

    The stewardess saw everyone before the devil noticed him.

    using him 'correctly' to agree with the singular everyone is nonsensical to my ears.

    The stewardess saw everyone before the devil noticed them.
    is much clearer

    i've often found that text-book like 'corrected' grammar is usually far less meaningful and precise than the uncorrected orginal, which had strictly adhered to a sort-of unspoken grammar of far greater complexity.

  • How comparable is the hardware in a Dreamcast to a new PC with a good 3D card?

    I mean sure, the thing costs very little money compared to a PC, but if you were to buy one of those little sub-400 jobs and add a TNT2...

    Most of those "little sub-400 jobs" won't take a TNT2...at least, not one of the AGP variety (is there even such a thing as a PCI TNT2?). These machines often lack an AGP slot because either (1) they've got some kind of integrated AGP graphics (most Emachines boxen use the ATI Rage IIC, for instance) or (2) they use a chipset (such as the SiS 5598 or (in the near future) Intel 810) that includes (low-end) graphics functionality in the chipset itself. Usually the best you can do with these machines in the way of a graphics upgrade is a Voodoo2, or maybe two of 'em in SLI mode if you have enough PCI slots. (There's also stuff like the Obsidian that did dual-Voodoo2 SLI on one card, but who's gonna stick a $500 card in a $400 computer?)

  • Can you get a Windows refund if you buy a machine shipped with CE, and then wipe CE off of the machine?

    ----

  • lex/yacc, flex/bison (Score:3)

    by cje ( 33931 ) on Tuesday August 24, 1999 @04:57AM (#1728516) Homepage
    Congratulations! You now own the only Linux box in the world that can be used to build Bison, and then cook it!

    Viva la buffalo burgers!
  • I think WinCE is an optional runtime environment that might be used by games developers, and then ships on their boot CD. Probably more likely to be used for a browser than a game. And not in ROM.
  • Sure. When the BSD guys make headway into virgin territory, they have too much time on their hands. If this was a Linux story, everybody would be screaming "Way to go! Linux Rules! We support another platform! Woohoo!"

    Sheesh.

  • I suspect that the H64's instruction set is similar to Motorola's 68000 only better.


    Not quite. The 68k series was still a bit CISCian, while IIRC the SH4 had a smaller, more RISC-like instruction set with a few specialty FP instructions added. [Before this starts another Holy War, let me point out that both RISC and CISC can be used efficiently; CISC is just more difficult to optimize hardware for.] The page referenced in the article contains a link to the SH4 reference manuals; among other things, these contain the instruction set.

  • Why do you insist on posting that damn Beowulf cluster comment (with very little variation) every time there's a story about some cool new hardware?


    I agree that it gets redundant, but this time it might actually be appropriate. A dreamcast makes a relatively cheap and relatively powerful node.


    OTOH, it was correctly pointed out that most people don't have any _use_ for a cluster, but it would still be a neat toy if you have the budget.

  • How comparable is the hardware in a Dreamcast to a new PC with a good 3D card?


    Comparable. The Dreamcast uses the PowerVR 2 graphics chipset, which is also available as a PC card (go to Sharkey Extreme's archives for the article). The PVR2 card benchmarked at about two thirds the speed of a high-end consumer card, which suggests that the Dreamcast is slightly worse than a PC, but a friend who works in the console gaming industry insists that optimizations in the Dreamcast make up for that.


    The same friend insists that the Dreamcast has more than enough processing power to handle all geometry for the card, and I'm inclined to agree. For general-purpose, the SH4 isn't that great, and for double-precision floating-point, it's pretty horrid, but it works amazingly well for single-precision floating-point and vector/matrix computations, due to a specialized instruction set and specialized floating-point hardware heavily optimized for that specific purpose. You can find more information in the spec sheets for it, which are linked from the SH4/BSD article referred to above.


    So, I can believe that the Dreamcast would make as good a game machine as a present high-end PC. The main problem is that the PCs will be twice as powerful by Christmas (when 0.18 micron technology has matured), while the Dreamcast will be waiting a while for a successor.


    As with the original Playstation, what will make or break it will be the quality of its games, though. The Playstation renders like a first-generation 3D card, but it's still fun.

  • This might be common knowledge but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The DC has a keyboard that you can buy, it sells for $25 at electronic's boutique(sp?) I would assume that it would be difficult to get the machine to read the cd and boot it without information from sega itself. How about a small unix kernel running say mpg123 on a cd full of 600mb of mp3s to play using a $200 console. If somthing like this happens, the DC will be sitting under my christmas tree this december.

    --Celery464(innercircle13@yahoo.com)
    I pull the celery from the stalk, give it arms and legs, make it walk.
  • It's a place where a new breed of agricultural technology is practiced. A woody vine plant (Autopatternalia Siliconus) was interbred with a temperate succulent fruit tree (Systemus Operandium). The resultant hybrid grows in a symbiotic relationship with a nutrient-providing ground fungus (Boot Lotus), and produces fully grown server system at various stages in the growing season.

    Picked early, the fruit of this hybrid can be used as a console game systems and handhelds. Although the young, vigorous processing power of this spring harvest is impressive, the display capabilities are frequently of lower resolution due to lack of early-season sunlight. Certain strains of the hybrid produce fruit with gene deficiencies that bear a striking resemblance to the accelerated aging "Werner Syndrome" that occurs in humans. These fruit are typically labeled as Windows CE systems and shipped quickly so as to reduce the risk of the imminent spoilage or failure occurring while still in the vendor's stock. In contrast, however, other early-season fruit can be quite nice. The pea-pod-like UcLinux system (Homunculum Simmsocketii) is surprisingly edible and leaves a sweet aftertaste. Later versions have more well-developed visual processing, and are frequently marketed as 3com "Palm" and sometimes IBM products (Geekus Necessitatium).

    When fully-grown, early summer servers show the distinctive markings resembling a black-tristed hydra logo, and are primarliy marketed by Microsoft, a Pacific Northwest grower that makes good use of the fertile valleys of Redmond. However, overproduction and lack of quality control in the Windows NT (Rebootus Idiotboxen) gardens over many years have led some to speculate that the soil lacks the proper nutrients, and that no amount of fertilizer will bring the product up to par.

    In the opinion of many, the better options are the more mature mid-season products of organically-grown Linux (Pervasive Torvaldis), xBSD (Stabilus Unappreciatorum), and other related varieties. Widely regarded for their versatility and consistent quality, these products have only market difficulties to overcome. Organically-grown products frequently have visible blemishes that may turn away potential customers, but the quality and nutritional value of the fruit are rarely compromised.

    Late-season harvests include the dark-greyish skinned Starfire system (Herkinprocessor Megagbuckus), which shows a distinctive 16-pointed Solaris bloom, and various (Monolithicus Neccesiconsultivus) of the IBM farms. Varietals are available from Hitachi, Fujitsu, SGI/Cray, NEC, and a host of others. Of particular note is the late-harvest Beowolf (Centiprocessorus Gnubiquitous) that can be made into an excellent ice wine.

    Hope this helps.

    Jon
    Fertilizer Consultant
    Xenobiotica's Olde-Tyme Server Farms
  • They dont have the connectivity required, ie no 100bT ethernet. To try and run a beowulf system over a null-modem would be utterly insane.
  • as far as i know, the bsd kernel has no support for vaporware.
  • Using "their" with "someone" conincides with the gradual replacement of the first-person masculine pronoun "he" with the third-person plural pronoun "they" as the generic neuter pronoun in spoken english.

    "'Nuff said" is an allusion to Stan Lee's famous signoff line in Marvel Comics, which itself is probably an allusion to something older.

    Don't do this kind of thing online, okay? It's really a waste of time. I'm wasting time right now. But I'm the exception to the rule. :-P

    This posting brought to you
    by the number pi and
    the letter gamma

  • I don't know why it keeps getting posted, but I've got a suspiscion.. maybe because you keep responding to it!
  • I always tought that OpenBSD is the most x86-centered of the xBSD trinity and that the NetBSD crew where the one boldly porting their OS on platform nobody dare to port to before. Just surprising that the port is based on OpenBSD.

    Also, the processor spec talk about 32 bit general-purpose register. Can a 64 bit CPU have 32 bit register ? I always tough that data path widht was directly related to register size. Anyway, I don't know much about processor design, maybe I am just misleaded.
  • Folks,

    The OS in on the CD, and is only an option to assist PC savy programmers in porting to the console. There is also an old-school bare metal SEGA OS that most serious games will (are) use(ing). Each CD is different. There are no licencing fees to be refunded.

    ---
    Joseph Foley
    InCert Software Corp.
  • The other poster is indeed correct. WinCE is not
    stored in rom anywhere on the machine. Every Dreamcast game ships with it's own OS on the CD.

    In addition to WinCE developers have the choice of using the SegaOS or developing their own OS to do things... there won't be many games developed using the CE stuph for a bit. Its just there to help people do PC ports.
    ---
    Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...
  • Not currently. Every PDA shipped with CE, has it in ROM right now. Updates and patches actually waste your owns storage space. I don't expect this to change any time soon either since PDA's need the OS in ROM for a number of reasons.

    ---
    Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Solaris/FreeBSD/Linux/ultrix/OSF /...

  • Re:"...too much time on their hands..." (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You have forgotten the Rule of Slashdot: Linux is Good; Not-Linux is Bad.

    I swear, this place makes me want to learn Visual Basic more and more...
  • I think calling Dreamcast a set top box is a little rough. It conjours up images of webTV and 3DO.

    My dreamcast fits just perfectly underneath my television thank you. ;)
  • i have seen the future and it is a blue a hedgehog

    correction:

    I have seen the future and it is a blue a hedgehog on the end of a little red devil's trident
  • Having worked with the H8 and 63701 I can say that Hitachi makes some very nice embedded processors. I suspect that the H64's instruction set is similar to Motorola's 68000 only better. Hitachi was also very good about giving out samples with just a call to their sales office. A good start for a true homebuilt BSD computer.
  • Does anyone know how the internet connection is going to work?

    I have heard that AT&T was in talks with Sega to provide free connection to the Dreamcasts, but I am not sure if it happened.

    Is it something you are going to have to add on to later?

    I think this is the most exciting thing about the new consoles coming out.
  • I have found it very much depends on context and so it should. Language shouldn't be so static as to demand that a paticular pronoun is used in favour of another the entire time in a situation such as this.
  • ...both being crushed like a brick by Sony's next mascotless console...
  • It wouldn't be much even it were technically feasible. MS license fees for CE are much much less than 98, and as a result MS is kinda worried about sub notebooks running CE to save on license costs.

    matt

  • How comparable is the hardware in a Dreamcast to a new PC with a good 3D card?

    I mean sure, the thing costs very little money compared to a PC, but if you were to buy one of those little sub-400 jobs and add a TNT2...

    Maybe I've been spoiled, but games on console boxes don't look as good as PC games.

    --
  • See Linux CE [linuxce.org] website.

    And search a bit around.. You'll find among other things ftp://ftp.m17n.org/pub/super-h/ and a few other Linux ports to these chips.

    Someone should proofread Slashdot for tech comments.. Or at least learn to use altavista.

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