Gavare's eXperimental Emulator:
Dreamcast emulation

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Dreamcast emulation


Introduction:

This page contains information about the Dreamcast emulation mode in GXemul. It's not a very long page, but I thought it would be best to gather everything Dreamcast-specific in one place.

My main goal with Dreamcast emulation is to let NetBSD/dreamcast run, similar to how it runs on a real machine. I am also experimenting with other programs, such as Linux and simple demo programs that use KOS, and Marcus Comstedt's tutorial programs. These sometimes work to a certain degree.

Games (especially commercial games) are very unlikely to run.


NetBSD/dreamcast GENERIC_MD:

It is possible to run NetBSD/dreamcast in GXemul. A NetBSD ramdisk kernel can reach userland, however, no network interface is emulated yet, so root-on-nfs is not possible.

            

(The photo on the right shows NetBSD/dreamcast running both on a real Dreamcast, and in the emulator.)

Download the 3.1 kernel here:

	ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-3.1/dreamcast/binary/kernel/netbsd-GENERIC_MD.gz

Start NetBSD/dreamcast using the following command line:

	gxemul -XEdreamcast netbsd-GENERIC_MD.gz


NetBSD/dreamcast Live CD:

According to http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-dreamcast/2005/04/25/0000.html, Rui Paulo has made available a NetBSD/dreamcast Live CD. It can run in GXemul:

            

The image is available here:

	http://netbsd.student.utwente.nl/rpaulo/

Only the ISO9660 filesystem image is needed:

	http://netbsd.student.utwente.nl/rpaulo/livecd.raw.bz2
Uncompress the CD image (using bunzip2), and type the following command to attempt to boot directly from the image:
	gxemul -XEdreamcast -d co23965696:livecd.raw
(The c disk image option is necessary to treat the raw file as a CDROM image, and the o part is needed because the ISO9660 filesystem in the image is offset by 11702 sectors, i.e. 2048 bytes each.)

At the root device: prompt, type gdrom0. For dump device, file system, and init path, just press Enter.

NOTE: This is not 100% stable yet; sometimes things bug out.


Linux/dreamcast Live CD:

A Linux/dreamcast Live CD ISO image can be found here:
	http://ftp.riken.go.jp/pub/misc/Japan/m17n.org/super-h/CD-R/lc2000.iso
Once you have downloaded the ISO image, type the following command to attempt to boot directly from the image:
	gxemul -XEdreamcast -d co23965696:lc2000.iso

2006-11-12: NOTE: This does not work yet.