And this is how GD-ROMs got ripped. Broadband adapter and the shoot out the data over Ethernet
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To my shock, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_block_device says
> The protocol was originally developed for Linux 2.1.55 and released in 1997.
so I wonder if you could use that? It's better suited to swap anyways.
Interestingly, for a long time there were no publicly available tools for or docs on dumping GD-ROMs. New releases from Echelon and Kalisto would appear promptly, so there was obviously a way, but you could only partake in the rampant piracy by downloading the (occasionally-massaged to fit on a CD) disc images online.
A lot of discussion in the (tbf probably quite young and inexperienced) community was around how this was possible. A popular theory/rumor at the time was that they were using CD drives with modified firmware, for example.
This probably also helped keep the piracy amd homebrew scenes fairly well separated on the Dreamcast, as there was a lot of info and examples around running your own code. This is in contrast to eg. the Xbox scene, which was in many ways the equally vibrant successor to the DC scene, but where piracy and homebrew seemed much more intertwined. Not least because all the homebrew binaries were built using the off-limits Microsoft SDK, so you had to go to some shady FTP site via links found on IRC to download them.
Having read the article it makes more sense. They need additional capacity for the RAM disk.
An XBOX with 128MB of RAM would run Fluxbox or whatever light env with ease, and with Dillo and a PSP user agent you could even post into HN. Gemini and Gopher would do it fine, even with clients written in TCL/Tk. It would be a fine backup PC for either thinkering or rescueing.
With ZRAM you could almost mimic a 192MB of RAM based device, good for maybe a browser like Seamonkey/IceApe if it could be built without SSE2.
He also streams the process live on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPWknjnQNOwSD15nNh4rhLg
XBMC4Xbox seems to be a spinoff but I guess it can't play HD.
Edit: And it seemed to have been running the original Xbox win32 interface, not Linux.
Yeah, that's really important advice. They'll get root, and then they'll... ummm... they'll... hmmmmm.... ahhh.... Be really confused? Start mining monero? Sideload Crazy Taxi and start playing it on your Dreamcast?
Another alternative that was reasonably-priced for a short while was the Japan-exclusive "LAN Adapter", which was in lower demand because it was only officially supported by the Dreamcast web browser app and was only 10Mbps instead of 10/100.
Originally they had though as a means to foster indie development, instead people got to use it for emulation, thus PS3 Linux Other OS no longer supported graphics acceleration, and then was completly dropped in a firmware upgrade.
On the PS2, we had official Linux CDs from Sony, a hard drive, connection cables, and a whole development environment, a GL like API, another more low level console like, both with hardware acceleration (although the actual one used on the devkit wasn't exposed).
I actually used it to write a small game to demonstrate the PS2 architecture in my CS undergrad capstone project.
It was slooooooooow even by the standards of the time.
There was even a preview version of the game I worked on that got leaked so either someone in our office was part of the cracking scene or someone at Sega/QA (they were our publisher) since AFAIK no-one else had any copies.
Nobody does swap over things like NFS or NBD unless they have to.
(Even in the Dreamcast days, common home networks were vastly slower than local disk.)
It lives on today as Kodi, including the GUI hacks, the weird flaky add-ons, browsing file shares on the LAN, and the strange piracy-adjacent community.
It's all there, and on all kinds of devices -- just not on OG Xbox hardware.
here is the openbsd manual on setting up a diskless system(note the bootparams swap line), however it picked up it's netbooting sequence from bsd which if I had to guess picked it up from sun who invented nfs. I was curious if sunos also has it and it does. I choose sunos as a sort of early snapshot of a commercial bsd system. As netbooting was an important thing to Sun I would guess swap over nfs was a day one thing. Anyone know where to go for very early manuals to confirm this?