Hi,

I am new to this list, and I have been following the Dreamcast development scene for only a few days.  So excuse me if I state the obvious.

I am not a total dev newbie, though.  I have six years of professional C/C++ programming (not at the Unix systems level, though,) and three years of Java.  I am not a kernel hacker, just a programmer wanting to learn to make pretty graphics and cool sounds on the Dreamcast.

I downloaded several tools today, from the various DC dev sites, and will be trying to burn my first CD.  I don't have a serial cable nor the ability to make one :-(  so DreamsSNES is the only thing I can try to boot that will give some feedback (so I can tell whether it worked!)

Unfortunately, I just bought my Dreamcast a few days ago, so I don't know if it will even boot from CD.  (Please, please, please!!! With sugar on top, please!)

And then, I just thought of something.  It came like a flash of lightning.  Actually, I was debugging an applet when I though of this (read on and you'll see the connection.)

What if I were to use a PC to upload a DC program I or someone else developed (like a kernel bootloader) to a webserver, and download it with the DC browser?  The DC browser could then take the place of the serial or IP loaders.

With the DC broadband adapter, you could network the non-CD-booting Dreamcast to your dev PC, and use the PC to serve up the DC software through Apache and NFS.

Does anyone know what format the browser expects downloaded DC games to be in?  Could we still use ELF executables?

Later,
Pedro

PS - Of course, my DC could still be one of those that boot from a CD, I just haven't tried it yet. ;-)  But for those afflicted with a "broken" DC, this might be the solution.