Connecting IDE disks & ISA (network) card to Dreamcast

[abs]

My apologies for posting in English, but my German is limited to counting to ten or saying "he, she or it"

Some time ago Kiyoshi IKEHARA designed a DCEXT board for which allowed connecting an IDE drive and an ISA card (ie network card) to the Dreamcast, complete with code to run under NetBSD.

I wonder does anyone have or know of anyone with such a board?

I've just updated the a patch to support the DCEXT under NetBSD to the HEAD of the NetBSD tree (-current) : http://sync.absd.org/dreamcast/dcext-cu ... 07-29.diff

To build a version of NetBSD with this patch on a POSIX host (NetBSD, Linux, etc)

• Download NetBSD source. Easiest would be tarfiles which include anoncvs setup
• Apply the patch "patch < dcext-current-2012-07-29.diff"
• Build tools. Run "./build.sh -m dreamcast tools". This builds a complete cross compiler & any other tools needed to build NetBSD. The first 20 lines of output will list targets dirs
• Build kernel. Run "./build.sh -m dreamcast kernel=DCEXT". This will leave a netbsd.bin in .../sys/arch/dreamcast/compile/DCEXT/netbsd.bin

I don't have a DCEXT board, but I've built a sample kernel which anyone should be able to boot at: http://sync.absd.org/dreamcast/netbsd-D ... EXT.iso.7z

Currently the code will unconditionally try to attach the dcext, so it at least makes it very obvious the driver is present...

Booting without the hardware should give you output similar to (image from gxemul):


I'm also experimenting with creating live NetBSD/dreamcast bootable CDs which will potentially be running X and some (arguably) useful apps