I came up with this idea about 3 to 4 months ago and have been researching in my spare time away from school.

This comes from the fact that we are unable to use anything created by the development community from the Dreamcast Dev kit (Katana) legally. I had the thought one day about using a very small stripped down version of linux and using that as an intermediary between the hardware and any games that are played. This wouldnt be a full implementation of Linux, just stripped down to the point where it would just act as a layer that games could run on top of. Much like the Windows CE that's used in the dreamcast itself, except we would be running linux in its place.

To my knowlege linux does have a driver for the NEC PowerVR which is the graphics chipset and netbsd has made some headway in creating drivers and such for many of the main components such as the Maple Bus and the GDRom drive (although I have been informed by the SH linux crew that the driver for that needs a rebuild.)

I'm just wondering if its possible that something like this could work. Its been an idea that's been bugging me for awhile and if this was something that could be built, i believe that it would make the development of applications for the Dreamcast easier by allowing people to pretty much drag and drop their programs into a cd, change the X11 configuration file and let it fly.

Might be too much work.. might be too ambitious, but thought it might be worth a shot.. anyone out there agree?