Old Vintage Computing Research: Dusting Off Dreamcast Linux
oldvcr.blogspot.com
oldvcr.blogspot.com
To my shock, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_block_device says
> The protocol was originally developed for Linux 2.1.55 and released in 1997.
so I wonder if you could use that? It's better suited to swap anyways.
Having read the article it makes more sense. They need additional capacity for the RAM disk.
Nobody does swap over things like NFS or NBD unless they have to.
(Even in the Dreamcast days, common home networks were vastly slower than local disk.)
here is the openbsd manual on setting up a diskless system(note the bootparams swap line), however it picked up it's netbooting sequence from bsd which if I had to guess picked it up from sun who invented nfs. I was curious if sunos also has it and it does. I choose sunos as a sort of early snapshot of a commercial bsd system. As netbooting was an important thing to Sun I would guess swap over nfs was a day one thing. Anyone know where to go for very early manuals to confirm this?
Interestingly, for a long time there were no publicly available tools for or docs on dumping GD-ROMs. New releases from Echelon and Kalisto would appear promptly, so there was obviously a way, but you could only partake in the rampant piracy by downloading the (occasionally-massaged to fit on a CD) disc images online.
A lot of discussion in the (tbf probably quite young and inexperienced) community was around how this was possible. A popular theory/rumor at the time was that they were using CD drives with modified firmware, for example.
This probably also helped keep the piracy amd homebrew scenes fairly well separated on the Dreamcast, as there was a lot of info and examples around running your own code. This is in contrast to eg. the Xbox scene, which was in many ways the equally vibrant successor to the DC scene, but where piracy and homebrew seemed much more intertwined. Not least because all the homebrew binaries were built using the off-limits Microsoft SDK, so you had to go to some shady FTP site via links found on IRC to download them.
Another alternative that was reasonably-priced for a short while was the Japan-exclusive "LAN Adapter", which was in lower demand because it was only officially supported by the Dreamcast web browser app and was only 10Mbps instead of 10/100.
There was even a preview version of the game I worked on that got leaked so either someone in our office was part of the cracking scene or someone at Sega/QA (they were our publisher) since AFAIK no-one else had any copies.
Originally they had though as a means to foster indie development, instead people got to use it for emulation, thus PS3 Linux Other OS no longer supported graphics acceleration, and then was completly dropped in a firmware upgrade.
On the PS2, we had official Linux CDs from Sony, a hard drive, connection cables, and a whole development environment, a GL like API, another more low level console like, both with hardware acceleration (although the actual one used on the devkit wasn't exposed).
I actually used it to write a small game to demonstrate the PS2 architecture in my CS undergrad capstone project.
It was slooooooooow even by the standards of the time.
Unfortunately not seen a use in years now.
Did you use PS2GL, or the low level one with what is now kind similar to what devs are exposed to on Metal, Vulkan, DX12?
An XBOX with 128MB of RAM would run Fluxbox or whatever light env with ease, and with Dillo and a PSP user agent you could even post into HN. Gemini and Gopher would do it fine, even with clients written in TCL/Tk. It would be a fine backup PC for either thinkering or rescueing.
With ZRAM you could almost mimic a 192MB of RAM based device, good for maybe a browser like Seamonkey/IceApe if it could be built without SSE2.
I remember some guy soldering additional memory as well. Can't recall if it was 64 to 128mb or 128 to 256mb.
He also streams the process live on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPWknjnQNOwSD15nNh4rhLg
XBMC4Xbox seems to be a spinoff but I guess it can't play HD.
Edit: And it seemed to have been running the original Xbox win32 interface, not Linux.
It lives on today as Kodi, including the GUI hacks, the weird flaky add-ons, browsing file shares on the LAN, and the strange piracy-adjacent community.
It's all there, and on all kinds of devices -- just not on OG Xbox hardware.
Yeah, that's really important advice. They'll get root, and then they'll... ummm... they'll... hmmmmm.... ahhh.... Be really confused? Start mining monero? Sideload Crazy Taxi and start playing it on your Dreamcast?
Good luck with that! Even Monero's "light mode" requires 16 times more memory than is available on the system.