I need some help.  I went out and bought a Dreamcast yesterday specifically to
use for development.  It is the Smash Pack version and I got it at Best Buy. 
I ordered the broadband adapter and a keyboard, but won't have them for at
least a week.  In the meantime, I thought I would try to burn a bootable CD to
make sure that I could.  I followed the very well put together instructions at
http://mc.pp.se/dc/ as I have only Linux on the machines I use for
development.

So far, I have made three coasters.  Or at least they seem to be useless. 
Once I reset the Dreamcast with any of these CDs in the drive, it drops into
the CD player on track 2.

I have checked each of them and they seem fine.  The first session is an audio
track and the second is an ISO filesystem which can be mounted under Linux. 
The first 32KB of the filesystem are bitwise identical to the IP.BIN used for
each of them.  The first two were from the binary distribution of the Stars
demo and the third was DreamSNES.

I've dug through various mailing list archives and I keep seeing references to
possible versions of the Dreamcast that will not boot of off a CD-R.  Is it
possible that mine is one of these?  It has a serial number of DU086762861. 
Is there any way to tell?

On the machine doing the burning, I am running version 1.8 of cdrecord and
version 1.8 of mkisofs.  The machine is running Linux kernel 2.2.9.  The drive
is a SCSI TEAC CD-R55S.

Any clues would be appreciated.

Is there any active IRC channel for people messing with Dreamcast development?

-- 
Gene McCulley            http://enki.org/~mcculley/