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Well the porting section has been moved im sure this is a good area for posting developing ideas. Awhile back Dosbox for Dreamcast was released by GPF and today is hard to find unless of course you look hard. So i found the download at http://web.archive.org/web/200605021...dcdoxbox.shtml and i was wondering if there is anyway we can get this to work with the SD adapter this might also improve performance.
You need to unscramble the binary. That's the main thing. Given how old that version of dosbox is, it might be better to update it first.
In any case, "improved performance" would depend... the CD can read faster than the SD on the DC, but has much worse seek time. So anything doing sequential reads will be faster from the CD, while anything doing random reads will be faster from the SD.
The "Make ISO" package that comes with Dreamshell automatically unscrambles the 1ST_READ.bin. For performance yeah in some cases it would be faster on CD but seen as how DOS Box is for playing old games i dont really think performance would have an issue over SD. The main issue is that somethings are being written to unnecessary places so it'll work on CD which slows things down of course im not totally sure but this what i believe would solve the performance issue. I believe that if SD got the "write" feature that may speed things up a bit. Things Chui has coded have had issues loading properly loading on SD of course cause the Bin's are to small so he made his own little software so you can load his emulators/homebrew. But some of these things dont work on Dreamshell. The main thing here is i believe the bin for Dosbox needs to be hacked and i dont know how to do that.
I'm swamped or I would work on updating dosbox for the DC. Too many brands in the fire right now. :)
A new version that allowed dosbox to directly use the SD (as a hard drive) would be awesome.
Yeah that would be totally awesome i understand business lol i myself am having tough times being able to do the stuff i want to these days.