Dreamcast-Talk.com

The Dreamcast has made a lot of advancements in the last couple of years like getting online with a raspberry pi and having a website/app to see who's online playing the Dreamcast right now and the game there playing, raspberry pi and Dreamcast Now made that possible for that to happen. The only thing is Dreamcast Now is just dial up players that use raspberry pi to connect and what about the players that use regular dial up or bba, PC, or other methods to connect online would it be possible for those users to be able to some how use the services?

I would like to know if its possible too.

Strik3r91 wrote:I would like to know if its possible too.

Yeah if it is possible it would let you see all the other Dreamcast players out there

You need custom software to report the player status to the DC Now server. That being said, it's not possible with other connection methods since there's no device to install the software on.

pcwzrd13 wrote:You need custom software to report the player status to the DC Now server. That being said, it's not possible with other connection methods since there's no device to install the software on.

Could it if it was connected to the Pi?

Sonic1994DC wrote:Could it if it was connected to the Pi?

Theoretically but you need a Pi with Wi-Fi and you'll need to configure it to work as a bridge so that the broadband adapter could connect to the internet through it. In addition you'll need software to examine the packets coming from the broadband adapter to determine the game and if the player is online or not.

In short, it would be quite a bit of work and I really don't think it would be worth it considering how few broadband adapter users there are.

pcwzrd13 wrote:

Sonic1994DC wrote:Could it if it was connected to the Pi?

Theoretically but you need a Pi with Wi-Fi and you'll need to configure it to work as a bridge so that the broadband adapter could connect to the internet through it. In addition you'll need software to examine the packets coming from the broadband adapter to determine the game and if the player is online or not.

In short, it would be quite a bit of work and I really don't think it would be worth it considering how few broadband adapter users there are.

Yeah your right and that does sound like a big project there, I could maybe see this happening when someone discovers a new way of connecting or when the bba goes down in price/more games use by the bba. Well its just a dream right now

Correct me if I'm wrong but Shuouma and DC-Live are hosting most of the game server, so technically they must get "requests" or some sort of packet when someone is connecting. Isn't it possible to make some script that get this data, then turn it into a .JSON or .XML in order to know who connected? Of course we wont get any names (or maybe for some games? since other game client can see them) but we could atleast get a number of people connected based on their IP adress? Again, we don,t need the IP adress themselves, but more of a count?

lerabot wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong but Shuouma and DC-Live are hosting most of the game server, so technically they must get "requests" or some sort of packet when someone is connecting. Isn't it possible to make some script that get this data, then turn it into a .JSON or .XML in order to know who connected?

Shuouma and Dreamcast-Talk host the bulk of the servers. I just host Toy Racer. While it would certainly be possible to do something like this, it's really a question of "is it worth it?". 99% of players are using DreamPi now. Anyone using a broadband adapter would be playing PSO or Quake and we already have player counts for those. Sure, some play Toy Racer but it's not nearly as popular as the other two games.

I can't really speak for Shuouma of course but I'm sure his priority at the moment is reviving more games. If one day we have every game back online (and in turn more games that support the BBA) then it might be worth looking at something like this.

I am not sure about Toy Racer but DreamPi relies on DNS queries to determine if a person is playing PSO or Quake. It would seem like a person could host a DNS server on their Pi and have their Dreamcast use the local DNS server address. The DreamcastNowService python class can be used outside of the main program so you could have that running to parse the syslog file and find logged DNS queries. I don't think there should be a need to have a bridged connection to make Dreamcast Now work for BBA users.

If nothing else, you could always make a program to fake the requests and force Dreamcast Now to see your user as playing a certain game.