A keyboard, mouse, a NIC, VGA output, 16MB of RAM and a whole gig (you wish) of read-only optical drive space with a 200MHz Hitachi SuperH SH-4 CPU faulting its paltry 8K of I-cache and 16K of D-cache non-stop. Now freshly refurbished, its cooling fan runs louder than my Power Mac Quad G5 at idle and the drive makes more disk seeking noise than when I can’t find a lost floppy. And since the buzzword with Linux distros today is immutability, what could be more immutable than an ephemeral, desperately undersized RAM disk overlaid on a live CD?
i want a DreamCast.
> i want a DreamCast.
It was awesome back in the day. PSO, Crazy Taxi, RE, etc… A console I never regretted buying.
> i want a DreamCast.
Then, buy one. Pricing is hefty, but not yet too ludicrous.
I dug mine out a few months ago after 20 years in storage and apart from having to re-calibrate the laser lens ( tiny screw next to the lens) it works fine.
Just add CRT, light gun and House of the dead 2 for large doses of nostalgia.
All I need is a NIC and I can follow this interesting project.
Even better: Keyboard and Typing Of The Dead
I miss my Dreamcast to this day, and replacing it today with all the components I had at the time (keyboard/mouse, broadband adapter, VGA adapter) would cost more than all of that did when I bought it all new 23 years ago.
I never ran Linux on mine but I did run NetBSD on it, it was actually my first experience with a BSD OS and while it was fairly limited, it showed me the potential of a UNIX-like OS that wasn’t Linux or BeOS.
BSD is not unix-like, it’s literally unix 🙂
I bought dreamcast when it was cheap. Sadly it died a few years after while I had it in storage, and at the time didn’t care enough to restore it. The linux version on it was pretty limited as was netbsd. It was a cool thing to do, but I was more interested in the time with more powerful machines with BeOs, Mac OSX, Gentoo, etc.
The Dreamcast ended up being one of the best platforms to play Quake3 on, at least when it first came out. It wasn’t the most powerful, but it had a keyboard and mouse, and the DC version of Quake3 introduced multiplayer network protocol changes that significantly reduced the bandwidth needed to play Q3, making it much more reasonable to play over a modem, when playing on servers that were recently updated.