Anyone know about the history of DC homebrew?

Hi,

For the third issue of my fanzine I am doing a piece about DC emualtion and homebrew, talking about the amazing games ported over to the machine as well as emulation via the DC.

For the preface I am talking about the DCs history as a console and was hoping to get some information regarding how the homebrew scene started up.

Alas to no avail. Â* Spent many an hour on the net looking, but I guess I am looking in the wrong place.

Does anyone here know of a link or would be willing to inform me of how DC homebrew all came about? Â*I need as much information as possible really.

Your help is appreciated.

Regards
Simon

Retro Revival
www.retrorevival.co.uk

you can go through the www.boob.co.uk news archive, it goes back to the very begining, but it all news posts.

there were a few posts in consolevision before it was hacked, about how it all started....

where is old man (dan) potter, he was here for it all.....

good luck

Many thanks for your help.

It is appreciated.

Aeons ago when the earth was still cooling there was a Dream. This Dream was alone on the earth with nothing to do. Then the sun came up over the new planet, and in the brilliance of the light, the Dream was cast aside. This Dreamcast fell into a deep cave, unable to find the light.

One day, many years later, the Dreamcast was stirred, someone had begun to explore it's cave. It was a man named Dan. Dan picked up the Dreamcast and held it up in the light, for all to see. "I HAVE A DREAM!!!"

that concludes the first chapter of Dreamcast homebrew history.

:P

OK - here's the rundown of what I can remember:
November 1998 - The Dreamcast was released in Japan.
1999 - MilCD enhanced music CDs released in Japan. These were music CDs on regular CD-ROM that were "enhanced" with liner notes, pictures, videos, etc.
April 2000 - Skywalker of the demo group Hitmen released a demo called the "A.G.E-Demo" running on CD-R on a Dreamcast created using a PC to DC interface called the "DreamCast Debug Handler" at the Mekka & Symposium 2000.
May 2000 - Bleem for Dreamcast Gran Turismo 2 and Gameshark CDX were previewed at E3 2000 - they both used the MilCD format to boot independent code on CD-ROM media instead of the enhanced music CD data
May 2000 - Marcus Comstedt started documenting the MilCD format. He released his findings on his webpage, as well as several utilities and code to assist independent devlopers in creating their own CDs, and schematics for a DC to PC serial cable using the NGPC link cable as a base.
June 2000 - Utopia releases Dreamcast warez and "Utopia Boot Disc" - a hack of the teapot demo from the Katana devkit (they like to take credit for creating the Dreamcast "scene" - but I'd say that honor would go to Hitmen for first demonstrating a Dreamcast booting independent code and for the Bleem and Gameshark for first using the MilCD and inspiring the Dreamcast freeware community, then Marcus Comstedt documenting the process for all to use, wouldn't you? The hackers of Utopia surely weren't the "pioneers" that first booted code from CD-R like they'd have you believe, that's for sure. )
June 2000 - Dan Potter begins experimenting with using GCC as a means of compiling code written in C (as opposed to the ASM examples thus far written my Marcus Comstedt) not using official devkits on the Dreamcast
July 2000 - Dan Potter releases his freeware independent Dreamcast library, libdream.
July 2000 - WinCE development kit is "leaked". Boob.co.uk begins experimenting with it. Early programs such as the mediaplayer Boobplay are released as a result.
August 2000 - TheGypsy's WinCE media player, GypPlay, is released
August 2000 - the first emulator for the Dreamcast was released, Chuck Mason's NES emulator Gleem, written using libdream. (as a side note from what I just remembered - I was the one who used Echelon's selfboot program which had the IP.bin ripped from a commercial game instead of one created by Marcus Comstedt's program and sent the CDI to Chuck - which got him into the infamous fight over him stealing Utopia/Echelon's "work". whoops - I guess I totally repressed that. That's definately one that goes under the stupid things I wish I never did category).
August 2000 - Sintendo, Sin's SNES emulator written with WinCE is released
September 2000 - Boob!boy, CyRUS64's Gameboy emulator written with WinCE is released
September 2000 - Tubooboo releases Snes9x - Ngine, which was an SNES9x port on top of his Ngine shell environment, coded using libdream.
October 2000 - DreamSNES the SNES9x port by Marcus Comstedt and Peter Bortas written using libronin was released
November 2000 - AndrewK releases dcload, a program which eases the uploading of code to the Dreamcast over the serial port.
December 2000 - Win32 port of dcload
December 2000 - libdream becomes KallistiOS
December 2000 - Ganksoft's Brian Peek releases his port of the NGPC emulator NeoPoccott to Dreamcast using libdream
December 2000 - Bigboy releases his DreamSpec ZX-Spectrum emulator written using WinCE

That should cover the history of the Dreamcast independent development community - if you want me to dig deeper for later releases let me know. :P

Hey - thanks for that Meta. I've posted that as our first article in the Homebrew Knowledge Base over at DCHelp.

A million thanks Metafox, just what i was after.

Had a nice email from Dan Potter himself outlining his involvement too in the scene.

Once again, thank you to everyone.

Regards
Simon

I mainly took things other people did and regurgitated them into a more easily usable form. At least until the PVR stuff, and then KOS.

Ok, the article is going well but I have come to another stumbling block.

I understand that the MIL-CD format allowed the use of unconventional code due to the fact that it would allow booting from a cdrom. Â*I also understand that Sega removed cdrom support for the MIL-cd format in DC production in October 2000.

What I am at a loss with is how unconventional code was made to boot on a machine after this date. Â*Surely the likes of the Utopia boot disc and selfbooting games used the flaw in the MIL-cd support? Â*If this is so, how do these programs still work on machines that were manufactured after October 2000?

I am assuming that there is something in the code (IP.bin / bootfile.bin?) that amends the DC bios at runtime, thus allowing the cdrom to boot.

Or am i missing something here?

A plain old english explination would be good here gents, im not looking for a technical explination as such :-)

Once again, many thanks for your help.

Regards
Simon

[quote author=RetroRevival link=board=homebrew;num=1102703283;start=0#8 date=12/17/04 at 20:27:30]What I am at a loss with is how unconventional code was made to boot on a machine after this date[/quote]

To put it quite simply, it doesn't. However, you have to understand that it was only certain units that were manufactured after that date, and all of those units were NTSC machines. If you happen to come across one of the machines that doesn't boot CD-R's, there is no way to get it to boot CD-R's. There are a lot of theories out there about getting it to work, and there are even quite a few tutorials, but a lot of respected members of the scene (MetaFox included) try with a small gleam of hope each time we come across one of these theories, and always find out that those DC's still will not boot CD-R's.