A Dreamcast Homebrew Scene P2P Program?

[DCEmu_Newsposter]

The Dreamcast scene all around the world is full of brilliant coders, websites, fans and so much more. The other day we were talking in the chat room (efnet #dcemu) about the possibility of a fully legal P2P program where admin can make sure no illegal downloads occur but a program where the many thousands of Dreamcast fans can download the homebrew/emulators without killing sites with bandwidth.[br][br]Obviously it would need to be monitored and would need the co-operation of every Dreamcast scene site( which shouldnt be hard as we are all working towards keeping the Dreamcast scene alive)[br][br]Could it be feasible?[br][br]If it could be pulled off it would be fantastic for the scene and everyone would be contributing towards the cause.[br][br]Any thoughts, opinions etc?

[Darksaviour69]

do u mean using bit torrant then or a kazza type program ( i think it would be a great idea)

[LyonHrt]

Yeah, theres some open source bit torrent software, so it could be altered to only look for certain things (or disallow keywords).
Which then would be a more legal program to have on the site.

[Darksaviour69]

the good thing about bit torrent is that u have a main page which links to a torrent/tracker (what its called). that means that a game, emu etc thats submited can be checked by a admin or staff before its add to a main page. the problem with a kazza type program, some people could but roms/warez or change some released software etc. i thing a bit torrent is the best way to go. problem is that users would have to keep there torrents open after they download or it won't work. if people are greedy it will fail :-/

[BlackAura]

A central BitTorrent system would probably work best. Any of the DC sites could set up a BitTorrent for a file, then the other sites can all use the same torrent file for downloads.

[quzar]

bittorrent may be a bad idea because it would require multiple people to be downloading at the same time. Possibly the best idea would be to modify an opensource p2p program slightly and have relatively strict filters and plenty of moderators. that way, even if only one person is downloading something, then it can still be found. (this would also make it possible for people who dont have hosting [me] to release stuff whenever i want)

[wraggster]

Hosting is something i need to sort out very soon for a few coders who need it.

[BlackAura]

Actually, BitTorrent doesn't require that lots of people are downloading something. It just requires one or more seeds. I think (don't hold me to this though) that's it's possible to use a file on a website as a seed, provided you're using a client that supports it. You can have multiple seeds, so you could host the file on multiple sites, and the BT client will download it from those sites and from anyone else who can provide some of the data.