Getting back into DC development
It’s been several hot minutes. And I don’t know if it’s the nostalgia or something else, but I’ve always meant to get back to it. I’ve been lurking and trolling a few of the Dreamcast discords.
Hooking up the hardware
There’s been some issues here. I have two Dreamcast consoles that both read burned discs. But now one seems to be out of commission and the other is touchy. I had to boot from an actual GD-ROM before it would read the DC-Load disc I had.
I was able to replace the GDROM drive with the GDEMU SD card mod. It was fairly easy. It was so easy I wound up doing it three times. As the hardware kit did not come with instructions and the online instructions I was basing things off of was not for the particular model I had. So I would put something in place only to find out that I needed to take it out to assemble something else first. Eventually we got there. Everything works and how there’s no need for me to burn CDs.
Building toolchain
I’m trying to get this built and running solely on an M3 Mac. It’s going mostly ok. The ARM sound processor bits will not build, but the SH4 cross compiler builds. I can build running binaries.
What’s new
Well, dc-load-ip is on ver. 2.0.2 and KOS is far ahead of where I last used it.
Difficulties so far
Burning a new dcload-ip disc from my Mac has been an adventure to say the least. I’ve only been able to dedicate an hour here or there over the past few weeks. It’s made progress slow and spotty. But since I’ve installed the GDEMU, I’ve discovered all new problems.