Burn Dreamcast Homebrew Discs
How to discover and boot the best DC homebrew stuff.
Why does the author have a Dreamcast fixation in this book? For starters, there’s a forward-looking, constructive homebrew coding scene for the console. Most importantly, it’s relatively easy to burn your own self-booting CDs for the console, saving you having to buy and install complicated, possibly less-than-legal modchips. This, in turn, has led to a real burgeoning of creative homebrew software for people to download and run on the DC.
To start exploring the marvellous world of Dreamcast homebrew software, make DCHomebrew (http://www.dchomebrew.org/) your first port of call. Formerly part of the DCEmulation.com site covered in other hacks, it’s seen a major revamp and is particularly useful due to their hosted and well-updated lists. The site also stores all the files it covers locally, so, in theory, there are no broken links.
Self-Booting DC Menu Systems for Homebrew Games
If you want to make the most of your Dreamcast, you need some way to burn your own self-booting CDs. I’ve dealt with the packaged CDI archives in a separate hack ( [Hack #56] ), but that won’t help much if you have lots of tiny programs you want to select, one by one, from a menu.
The basic approach is to burn a standalone CD with a menu system such as DemoMenu or (my favorite) DCHakker, then burn a separate CD with all your homebrew titles on it. The homebrew CD needs a specific directory structure, so use DiscJuggler or a ...
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