Cameron Kaiser's Dusted-off Dreamcast Linux Brings Some Neat Tweaks to Sega's Ill-Fated Console

Vintage computing enthusiast Cameron Kaiser has turned a modern eye on an unusual operating system for a beloved but somewhat rare gadget: Dreamcast Linux, running on Sega's ill-fated — and final — 1998 games console.

"Dreamcast Linux has something to teach later Johnny-come-latelies with a distro surprisingly well-adapted to its target platform," Kaiser writes of his love for the operating system, "support for many peripherals, and an all-in-one batteries-included philosophy. Plus, it was one of the earliest Un*xy things for game consoles circa 2001, predating PlayStation 2 Linux by about a year or so, though PS2 Linux was at least Sony-official. (While at least one Linux purports to run on an O.G. PlayStation, this was a later development.)"

As Kaiser points out, Dreamcast Linux is not a Sega product. Instead, it's a piece of homebrew software that came about thanks to Sega's desire to turn the Dreamcast — which came with a dial-up modem fitted and the option to swap it out for an Ethernet network card — into an all-singing all-dancing multimedia device, including support for its in-house Music Interactive Live CD (MIL-CD) format.

"Sega devised MIL-CD so that enhanced music CDs could feature menus, videos and Internet linkages, something like an Enhanced CD Bluebook format specific to the Dreamcast," Kaiser explains. "Unfortunately for Sega, not only was MIL-CD very unsuccessful and only eight actual titles ultimately produced (let alone anything else that could play them), but it also allowed the Dreamcast to be booted from ordinary CD and CD-Rs instead of requiring all titles to be the more expensive GD-ROMs."

While the MIL-CD system should, supposedly, allow only for selected music discs to run, a flaw in its implementation means that it is possible to use a burned CD-R to load a second-stage bootloader from disc — specifically, an Red Hat/Cygnus eCos bootloader which has been pre-scrambled so as not to be rejected by the Dreamcast's copy protection system, released back in 2001.

Kaiser's experiments with Dreamcast Linux include fixes for the display being cut-off when using a TV as a display device, an NFS mounting system to provide enough space to compile software on-device and to offer network-connected swap space to reduce out-of-memory errors — and, of course, some time spent playing around with Id Software's Doom, in the form of open-source port prBoom. "Performance isn't great," Kaiser admits, "because it's totally rendered in software, and there's no support for the Dreamcast sound hardware either."

Kaiser's full write-up is available on his blog; he has also released his tweaked version of Dreamcast Linux, dubbed Dusted-off Dreamcast Linux (DODCL), on GitHub, which includes the improvements mentioned above.