Connecting IDE disks & ISA (network) card to Dreamcast

[abs]

I noticed a post on the Hardware section of this forum.

Unfortunately I do not speak Russian, though google translate helps me understand it sometimes, so I thought it would be best to post a comment here and add a link on the other forum for anyone interested.

The original posting discussed the DCEXT board which allows connecting an IDE drive and an ISA card (ie network card) to the Dreamcast, complete with code to run under NetBSD.

Obviously if the hardware can be driven by NetBSD then code can be written to drive it under other Operating Systems, but since I'm mainly a NetBSD-head and the code there is already written and works I'll cover that in this post

The patch to add support for the DCEXT board to NetBSD 5 is at: http://www.ceres.dti.ne.jp/tsutsui/netbs...t-5.0.diff

I've just updated it to apply against the HEAD of the NetBSD tree (-current) and the updated version is at: http://sync.absd.org/dreamcast/dcext-cur...07-29.diff

To build a version of NetBSD with this patch on a POSIX host (NetBSD, Linux, etc)

• Download NetBSD source. Easiest would be tarfiles which include anoncvs setup
• Apply the patch "patch < dcext-current-2012-07-29.diff"
• Build tools. Run "./build.sh -m dreamcast tools". This builds a complete cross compiler & any other tools needed to build NetBSD. The first 20 lines of output will list targets dirs
• Build kernel. Run "./build.sh -m dreamcast kernel=DCEXT". This will leave a netbsd.bin in .../sys/arch/dreamcast/compile/DCEXT/netbsd.bin
  

I don't have a DCEXT board (would love one tho , but I've built a sample kernel which anyone should be able to boot at: http://sync.absd.org/dreamcast/netbsd-DCEXT.bin.gz and a full iso image with root on gdrom at http://sync.absd.org/dreamcast/netbsd-dr...EXT.iso.7z

Currently the code will unconditionally try to attach the dcext, so it at least makes it very obvious the driver is present

Booting without the hardware should give you output similar to (image from gxemul):


If anyone has made a board and would be willing to test boot the above image, please let me know how it goes!

Thanks