> 
> On Tue, 8 Jan 2002, Jack Twilley wrote:
> 
> > The archives did seem to be more active and informative than the
> > current state.  I wonder if it's because the project has lost its
> > allure as it's nearly functional now -- no more sexy accomplishments
> > that can be reasonably accomplished in a short amount of time.
> 
> 
>   I don't know about the "short time" part, but using my Dreamcast as an
> embedded controller is only half of the reason I wanted to load a *NIX on
> to it - the other reason being to write games and other graphical
> applications I could burn for my friends.
> 
>   An X server or even a dumb frame-buffer driver would be wonderful. I
> haven't heard a peep about that for BSD.
> 
	I believe Jason mentioned a good course of action would be to get
	the gtk librarys working down on the bare metal rather than having
	X in the way.

	The dreamcast doesn't have enough memory to use a memory pig like X
	as the graphics system, 16M and X just don't get along well...

	The best course would be to ditch X and use something like gtk(+)
	as the programming API with some minimal graphics wedge underneath.

	Other places for research would be audio, I haven't seen any
	references to diddling with the audio system on a Dreamcast. This
	would probably require some reverse engineering of the MP3 package
	for the Dreamcast as I doubt Sega would release the docs for the
	hardware even though they've ditched it!

	Anybody have any deep Sega connected buddies? We had a Sega
	Q&A guy post a few times, 3 days before Sega layed them all off and
	canceled the hardware... B^(.

	Anyways, the most immediate projects would probably be:

	1: NetBSD/Dreamcast for non-wintel dummies in the arch area of
	   ftp.netbsd.org so us wintel free types don't have to scratch
	   our heads over IP.BIN, 1st_READ.BIN, scramble; OH MY!

           The 3 or 4 pieces in 1 place, ftp.netbsd.org Dreamcast arch area
	   would be best plus a cookbook on how to feed the pieces to
	   mkisofs/cdrecord to get a working boot CDROM.

	   Example configs for DHCP server to
	   host the dreamcast in a NFS R/W situation would be good to; self
 	   hosting would be cool to do even if cross-compiling is faster...

	2: Some low level graphics wedge to put under GTK or some other
	   commonly used opensource graphics API.

	3: audio hacker to reverse engineer an audio device.

	4: Beg/borrow/aquire detail hardware docs from Sega or elsewhere so
	   we don't have to waste time reverse engineering stuff; a strong
	   advocate on the inside is usually needed for this.

	   Are there any hardware people left at Sega that would be
	   sympathetic to the opensource cause?

	I'll shut up now since I don't have the time/talent to do any of the
	above. B^(.

	-Rob