Getting Started... AGAIN

[geem42]

Let's be blunt:

Okay, I COULD look through a bunch of stickies with broken links and "search" on a forum with only 12 posts from 2011, but I'd rather not waste my time.

I know a lot of forums give newbs flack for asking the same' ol, same' ol, but, here it goes again:

So around 7 years ago, I compiled & ran my first code on the Dreamcast, via Windows XP. I THINK I was using Visual Studio, but might have been code blocks. At the time, I was able to compile some NeHe tutorials and get them to run.

Recently, I just found my coders cable and made me nostalgia enough to want to dust off my DC.

These days, I'm on Windows 7 and it seems like either a lot or little has changed as far as DC development.

I understand you can now run / build Windows CE apps on DC?

I'm guessing dev kits have fragmented?

The problem is, I have no idea what work-flow I was using back then, but I'd like to get back into it. I don't want to program 2D apps, so WinCE sounds uninteresting. My OpenGL skills have grown considerably in the past 7 years, so I'd like to get back to where I was in DC coding.

Some questions about OpenGL on DC:
I remember following a Dreamcast coding tutorial with a tunnel you could fly through, had fog in the distance, and maybe changed color or something. I also remember a demo with a car or a tank in a square city block. I remember I pretty much relied on both of those tutorials to get up & running myself.

If anybody could link me to those, or knows what I'm talking about, that would be great I'd love to see those again.

Also, I don't know the name of the route I was taking to get me there, but does anyone know if that route has problems or been replaced by a better workflow / kit / etc?

What are the limitations of Home brew GL? Is it a full implementation (minus shaders) or something like OpenGL ES or is it a hybrid of "what works, works." ? I remember at the time, thinking it was full implementation, but I dunno.

Do display lists works? What is typical polygon count expected for a homebrew?

I recently played a version of Echo's Quest I had burned, and it doesn't seem to have lighting or large textures.

Textures are .. bitmaps? Typical size is 64x64 or ..

Anyway, I'd like some links that are working to get me back into the swing of OpenGL DC, including tutorials for setting up my IDE (preferably VS, but codeblocks is okay too)

I try to avoid linux like the plague, so is this even possible on Windows 7?

Anyway, I have ALOT of GL game ideas, and I'm at a point where I can write code in Java / C++ for both Android / PC / iPhone, and I'd like to make a game for DC as well. I just need to know my limitations on DC.

Thanks,
-Greg

[geem42]

Also: I just found boob.co.uk, and I think this may have been the site I followed before. Unfortunately, most of the links are broken, making it pretty much useless :/

[BlueCrab]

I understand you can now run / build Windows CE apps on DC?

Not legally, no. Simply put its probably not worth it to even try, as what is in there is somewhat limited and it requires the WinCE SDK for the Dreamcast, which you won't legally be able to get.

I'm guessing dev kits have fragmented?

There's pretty much only one widely used Dreamcast "SDK" for homebrew these days, namely KallistiOS. Basically the same as it has been for many years now. There are others out there still, but I'm not aware of any that are still actively developed other than KOS.

What are the limitations of Home brew GL? Is it a full implementation (minus shaders) or something like OpenGL ES or is it a hybrid of "what works, works." ? I remember at the time, thinking it was full implementation, but I dunno.

KGL is nowhere near a full implementation of OpenGL. There are several versions out there, but none of them are anywhere near complete.

Do display lists works? What is typical polygon count expected for a homebrew?

The base KGL doesn't support display lists, although I think one of the other forks of it did. No idea on the second part, as I usually just do 2D stuff.

Textures are .. bitmaps? Typical size is 64x64 or ..

Textures can be in whatever image format you want to write the code to read. KOS has code to read several formats in the kos-ports tree, including PNG and JPEG. Max texture size is 1024x1024, IIRC, and they can be any power-of-two size in each dimension from 8 up to 1024 (so: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 are all valid sizes in each dimension). Keep in mind you only have 8MB of total video RAM, of which about half is used for the framebuffer and various rendering buffers. A 1024x1024 texture will take up 2MB of that space, assuming you don't use VQ Encoding or the palleted texture support.

I try to avoid linux like the plague, so is this even possible on Windows 7?

Just curious, why avoid Linux so much? I can't really help with Windows related stuff, as I haven't actively used Windows in a long while now (I use Mac OS X for all my coding, pretty much). As far as I know, Cygwin should still work fine for getting everything set up, and it should still be possible to do it all with MinGW as well. No idea on IDE stuff, as I don't generally bother with that kind of stuff anyway for Dreamcast stuff.

Good luck with whatever you end up doing. You might also want to check out the forums at DCEmulation, as the Programming forum there is a bit more active, generally. Here's a link to that: http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=29

[geem42]

Keep in mind you only have 8MB of total video RAM, of which about half is used for the framebuffer and various rendering buffers. A 1024x1024 texture will take up 2MB of that space, assuming you don't use VQ Encoding or the palleted texture support.

fuuuuuuuuuuu

KGL is nowhere near a full implementation of OpenGL. There are several versions out there, but none of them are anywhere near complete.

Aww, darn

Just curious, why avoid Linux so much?

While I appreciate the underlying functionality of the OS, such as unix / file system / user permissions / etc, I typically find the software / driver support to be lackluster. I love to code, and be productive, but I don't find joy by hacking for hours just to make a basic necessity work. For example, GIMP is nowhere near being "on par" with Photoshop, it's quiet literally 10 years behind. While it has a lot of basic functionality down, I'd rather use PS. I feel like this is true for almost all free OS software. Right now, I'm running dual screens on my gfx card and one off of usb. It's a nightmare to get all three to behave in linux. It's just little things that make it an unproductive work environment for me. I don't hate linux, I think it has it's purposes (servers, large scale processing, network clusters, etc) but as a personal OS it falls short of my needs.

I have nothing against OS, either, I LOVE blender and use it for all my 3D modeling. I just feel like, a lot of the professional tools (pretty much everything adobe) aren't available on Linux, and I wouldn't trust wine to be stable. Maybe it is now, dunno.

You might also want to check out the forums at DCEmulation, as the Programming forum there is a bit more active, generally.

Thanks! I knew the locals would know where to look...

[StryfeDc]

Although probably not optimal, Libronin is supposedly still being incrementally updated by Marcus Comstedt.

He uses it for the Dreamcast 'ScummVM' port. And as of about a year ago, someone mentioned that he personally works on it for his latest releases.

[geem42]

Can someone link me to, the actual .zip, or .rar file containing kallisiti OS?

Here's my problem: I tried 3 versions of "subversion" for windows, none of them work.
One "installs" but don't provide any clues on how to use it. Even the read me doesn't have a usage section. Bah. One can't install because windows 7 permissions are garbage (it goes 90% of the way, then fails because it can't create a start menu shortcut WTF ). I forget why the other version doesn't work.

Long story short, I'd rather not use subversion and I am against the idea of download managers / programs anyway:

"Yo dawg, I herd u like to download, so we made a downloader you can download, so you download before you download." BAH, no subversion.

All I want is a link to get the newest (or most usable) version.

Anyways, I installed cygwin, so, where do I go from there? The official kallisti tutorial assumes I'll be using subversion, so I guess I deviate after step 1.

Thanks
-Greg

[JLF65]

If you have too much trouble, you could always just use the R4 Dev ISO. It's a bit old, but it's all-in-one.
http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=96802

Did you already try following this tutorial?
http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtop...?f=29&t=100843

[BlueCrab]

There hasn't been a proper release of KOS in a long time, and there likely won't be one for a while either. Everyone just lives out of the subversion repository, pretty much. I strongly recommend that you follow suit at least until there's a proper release at some point in the future. The last real release of KOS that wasn't in the SVN was 1.2.0 back in 2003.

That said, subversion is a revision control system, not a download manager. Its a tool designed for developers to easily manage the versions of code that they use. You should be able to get subversion inside cygwin, so I'd suggest doing that (look in the cygwin installer for svn or subversion and install it).

The fact that there hasn't been a proper KOS release is probably mostly my fault. I'm one of the few people left working on it these days, it seems, and I barely have any time to do that. Actually, I think I'm the only person left actively working on it that would even have the permissions necessary to do a release.

[geem42]

you could always just use the R4 Dev ISO

I don't... actually see the dl link?

http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtop...?f=29&t=100843

We'll I've already started by installing cygwin. But at least through that tutorial I was able to dl kos and kos-ports.

[geem42]

Well let's see,

when I got this working 7 years ago, I have NO idea how I did it. My memory is very blurry and all I remember is having a visual studio plugin that compiled and did everything. I also burnt an image of dc-serial loader (which I still have the original CD from years ago.)

I just remember my workflow was something like:

code in VS
compile
connect Dreamcast coders cable
turn on Dreamcast with serial-loader cd
dc-tool blahblah.elf
*magic*

I found a couple forum posts about that visual-studio plugin, but all the links are dead... anyway to get this now? If not, anything similar? Like, easy-as-pie plugin for CodeBlocks?

However, when it comes to comand lines and a terminals, I'm a complete idiot. Honestly, I have no idea what BASH is, or how to use it. My *NIX knowledge goes as far as learning it in principal, then quickly forgetting it all as it has never applied to my daily life. I remember installing cygwin years ago, but I don't remember all this moving around stuff, dl's of a million different files, etc. SVN (which works now, both in command.exe and cygwin BASH thingy) but I have now idea how to use SVN. What exactly do I type (err copy & paste) to get it to DL what I need?

Even if I was able to compile KOS or DC-Chain, I wouldn't know what to do with it.

Also when I run Cygwin (shortcut) and type make, it says "bash: make: command not found." Idk but this seems like it might be important in the near future.

I don't remember setting up all this stuff, so maybe back in the day I downloaded some kind of all-in-one dc-chain thing, but right now I feel like this is all over my head. My coding experience is: open visual studio, new windows project, write code, run. Either that, or Java in Eclipse or PHP in Dreamweaver.

I don't understand a thing about the linux (unix?) development process, but it seems very weird at the moment.

I will definitely need to take the short bus, getting KOS set up so I can write code...