Porting to Dreamcast

[drcode]

WJP and I were sent the following letter, but neither of us has the time or inclination to take the challenge. Perhaps somebody here? In any case, I think it would be fairly difficult due to the limited memory (and the fact that Exult is a bit of a memory hog).
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Hi Jeff, hey Willem!

My name is Max Scharl and I'm the C.E.O. of the non-commercial organisation Dreamcast-Scene (www.dreamcast-scene.com) which also has an online database based on the Wiki system.

Currently we're in the early stages of preparing a "Dreamcast porting competition". The goal is to port a game (in your case: your engine) to the Dreamcast and the best production and porting skills win. The winner receives prices worth approx. US$850 plus the 10 best productions will be added to the professional pressed CD "Dreamcast Demo Disc". 2.000 units will be produced (incl. case and all that stuff) and it's a free (!) giveaway.

Okay, my question now is if you and your team is interested in this competition. I'm giving you all that info in advance because it would be a shame if we would set up such a competition and nobody would participate, plus I think your project is a bit more complex and it's worth to give it some extra time.

If you like some short information about the Dreamcast system:

* The Dreamcast is the one and only (!) videogame console which has a free, open source development kit called KallistiOS: http://www.dreamcast-scene.com/index.ph ... KallistiOS
* Beside the normal controller, there's also an official keyboard (like a normal PC keyboard), mouse, broadband adapter and modem available.
* Specs: http://www.dreamcast-scene.com/index.ph ... MainSystem (scroll a bit down)
* There are SDL libraries for Dreamcast out there: http://sdl-dc.sourceforge.net/#SDL
* A Dreamcast system is available for 50 Euros / US$ 40 on eBay.com / eBay.co.uk / etc.

If you have any questions left, please mail me. I'm interested in your opinion on this.

Best regards,
-Max

[zosX]

This would probably be really hard. I mean you couldn't just cross compile with GCC to Dreamcast, you would have to port the engine to conform to their SDK (do they use GCC?) as well as work out the kinks that may arise in the SDL implementation on dreamcast. Since the code is already in C++ as well as being fairly portable, how hard would it be to have it compile into a Dreamcast binary? Are RAM constraints (12 megs) the big issue? I had no idea Exult even took up that much ram. Does it like cache all the tiles at once or something?

[Colourless]

Exult is really poor with memory management. It does cache all the tiles, loads all the shapes when used and never evicts.

[Dominus]

we did have lengthy discussion about porting to dreamcast about two years ago on #exult. Maybe wjp can find the date (or maybe me, later on)
We discussed all the things that would need to be done different.

[zosX]

Well, I really am not interested in doing the port, but I was curious as to how hard it would be. If Exult caches everything you would certainly need to manage that better to squeeze it down. Probably would involve a lot of rewriting of the tile engine, and considering how it already is, I imagine it would break a great deal of things.