Re: Why Dreamcast? (Score 2)

The Dreamcast shares many of the same interface and resource limitations as set top boxes, embedded devices and palmtop devices (each to differing extents). NetBSD was ported to the arm32 based shark, which was DEC's reference network computer platform (later killed due to pressure from Microsoft), but Network computing and others released systems based both on the hardware and on the NetBSD distribution. If it helps you can think of the Dreamcast as a low cost reference platform on which to experiment with interfaces, limited resources and (to a very limited extent) unusual video acceleration, but its also a good way to show to many people that all the world is not a PC, and that they have hardware around the house that could run unix. It was also interesting to see how few Dreamcast specific changes were needed to the NetBSD tree in order to get it to this point. If I had a Dreamcast then I would probably get a keyboard and a CD with ssh, lynx, pppd and a bunch of other tools. If Sega come up with a easy way to add 10baseT to the system then NFS and another server turns it into a quite interesting X and web browsing terminal. I agree the playstation 2 makes a much more capable target, particularly with USB and PCMCIA.