Post#15 » Thu Jan 13, 2022 6:59 pm
My dream Dreamcast hardware would be a modem-emulating-wi-fi adapter.
I need my BBA's fast transfer rate for development, but I don't want to have to constantly swap between the modem and BBA, wearing out the expansion port, for online games. Something that could work as both at once would be great.
You would have an FPGA pretending to be a modem, talking to a Raspberry Pi Zero W, running DreamPi. The Pi 0 W can be easily updated when new games get added to DreamPi. By writing to an extra register, it would be possible to disable the modem emulation and get high speed wi-fi transfers. It doesn't need to emulate a BBA, I'm fine with using a custom wi-fi version of dcload.
I think extra RAM would but useful, even if it's slower than main RAM. Even if it's a few MB per second, you could still load a couple sprites from it per frame, or have it function as a swap region for Linux/BSD, or store debugging information. Maybe the RAM could be bankswappable, so the Raspberry Pi and Dreamcast can use it at the same time. You could have the Raspberry Pi write a screenshot of a web browser to one bank, while the Dreamcast displays another frame from the other bank. If the port is fast enough, you might be able to stream video this way.
USB ports would be nice, too.
My second dream hardware would be a way to use physical discs and an ODE in the same console.