{"id":2915,"date":"2010-09-15T22:31:49","date_gmt":"2010-09-16T05:31:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/?p=2915"},"modified":"2010-10-15T10:59:21","modified_gmt":"2010-10-15T17:59:21","slug":"dreamcast-operating-systems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/dreamcast-operating-systems\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreamcast Operating Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sega Dreamcast was famously emblazoned with a logo proudly announcing that it was compatible with Windows CE:<\/p>\n


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It’s quite confusing. The console certainly doesn’t boot into some version of Windows to launch games. Apparently, there was a special version of CE developed for the DC and game companies had the option to leverage it. I do recall that some game startup screens would similarly advertise Windows CE.<\/p>\n

Once the homebrew community got ahold of the device, the sky was the limit. I think NetBSD was the first alternative OS to support the Dreamcast<\/a>. Meanwhile, I have recollections of DC Linux<\/a> and LinuxDC<\/a> projects along with more generic Linux-SH<\/a> and SH-Linux<\/a> projects.<\/p>\n


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DC Evolution hosts a disc image available for download with an unofficial version of DC Linux<\/a>, assembled by one Adrian O’Grady. I figured out how to burn the disc (burning DC discs is a blog post of its own) and got it working in the console.<\/p>\n

It’s possible to log in directly via the physical keyboard or through a serial terminal provided that you have a coder’s cable. That reminds me– my local Fry’s had a selection of USB-to-serial cables. I think this is another area that is sufficiently commoditized that just about any cable ought to work with Linux out of the box. Or maybe I’m just extrapolating from the experience of having the cheapest cable in the selection (made by io connect) plug and play with Linux.<\/p>\n


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Look! No messy converter box in the middle as in the Belkin case<\/a>. The reason I went with this cable is that the packaging claimed it was capable of up to 500 Kbits\/sec. Most of the cables advertised a max of 115200 bps. I distinctly recall being able to use the DC coder’s cable at 230400 bps a long time ago. Alas, 115200 seems to be the speed limit, even with this new USB cable.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the distribution is based on a 2.4.5 kernel circa 2001. I tried to make PPP work over the serial cable but the kernel doesn’t have support. If you’re interested, here is some basic information about the machine from Linux’s perspective, gleaned from some simple commands. This helps remind us of a simpler time when Linux was able to run comfortably on a computer with 16 MB of RAM.<\/p>\n

\r\nDebian GNU\/Linux testing\/unstable dreamcast ttsc\/1\r\n\r\ndreamcast login: root\r\nLinux dreamcast 2.4.5 #27 Thu May 31 07:06:51 JST 2001 sh4 unknown\r\n\r\nMost of the programs included with the Debian GNU\/Linux system are\r\nfreely redistributable; the exact distribution terms for each program\r\nare described in the individual files in \/usr\/share\/doc\/*\/copyright\r\n\r\nDebian GNU\/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent\r\npermitted by applicable law.\r\n\r\ndreamcast:~# uname -a\r\nLinux dreamcast 2.4.5 #27 Thu May 31 07:06:51 JST 2001 sh4 unknown\r\n\r\ndreamcast:~# cat \/proc\/cpuinfo \r\ncpu family      : SH-4\r\ncache size      : 8K-byte\/16K-byte\r\nbogomips        : 199.47\r\n\r\nMachine: dreamcast\r\nCPU clock: 200.00MHz\r\nBus clock: 100.00MHz\r\nPeripheral module clock: 50.00MHz\r\n\r\ndreamcast:~# top -b\r\n\r\n\r\n 09:14:54 up 14 min,  1 user,  load average: 0.04, 0.03, 0.03\r\n15 processes: 14 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped\r\nCPU states:   1.1% user,   5.8% system,   0.0% nice,  93.1% idle\r\nMem:     14616K total,    11316K used,     3300K free,     2296K buffers\r\nSwap:        0K total,        0K used,        0K free,     5556K cached\r\n\r\n  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND\r\n  219 root      18   0  1072 1068   868 R     5.6  7.3   0:00 top\r\n    1 root       9   0   596  596   512 S     0.0  4.0   0:01 init\r\n    2 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 keventd\r\n    3 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kswapd\r\n    4 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kreclaimd\r\n    5 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 bdflush\r\n    6 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kupdated\r\n    7 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kmapled\r\n   39 root       9   0   900  900   668 S     0.0  6.1   0:00 devfsd\r\n   91 root       8   0   652  652   556 S     0.0  4.4   0:00 pump\r\n   96 daemon     9   0   524  524   420 S     0.0  3.5   0:00 portmap\r\n  149 root       9   0   944  944   796 S     0.0  6.4   0:00 syslogd\r\n  152 root       9   0   604  604   456 S     0.0  4.1   0:00 klogd\r\n  187 root       9   0   540  540   456 S     0.0  3.6   0:00 getty\r\n  201 root       9   0  1380 1376  1112 S     0.0  9.4   0:01 bash\r\n<\/pre>\n
Note that at this point I had shutdown both gpm and inetd. The rest of the processes, save for bash, are default. The above stats only report about 14 MB of RAM; where are the other 2 MB?<\/em><\/p>\n
\r\ndreamcast:~# df -h\r\nFilesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on\r\n\/dev\/rd\/1             2.0M  560k  1.4M  28% \/\r\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Running an ancient version of the Linux operating system on the Sega Dreamcast<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[221],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sega-dreamcast"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2915"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2963,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2915\/revisions\/2963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}