"WebTV for Dreamcast" Awareness Thread

[Ro Magnus Larsson]

WebTV translation demo:
[Youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ1w8AxH0Fo[/Youtube]

[wtv-411]

I already put this on the original thread but I'll say this here anyway just because it feels right to do so:

Hello. I haven't posted here in a long while but I have some important news on the whole WebTV project I've started a year ago. Long story short, I have no more interest in actively participating in it anymore and I want to focus on more engaging and important things in my life. So I'm just leaving this here to say that I'm no longer looking for any WebTV DC TellyScripts or anything else regarding WebTV for Dreamcast. You all may feel free to archive and share that stuff yourselves on your own terms, but I won't be putting any more information on my wiki or upload it myself elsewhere.

[wtv-411]

Hey people. Just bumping this thread to let the community know that the WebTV Wiki is going strong once again under new management. I have officially left as a contributor for the wiki, but the new owner (JarHead) has fully started things back up again and has been hard at work doing his own things with WebTV as well (namely, a server). More information on the OP.

[DarkSynbios]

I believe in next 2 years the whole online stuff for Dreamcast will be back online for sure

[wtv-411]

Hey people. Yes, I know I said I've moved on from the WebTV stuff last time, and for the most part, I have. But I really don't mind doing some stuff with it sometimes in the background. That led me to discovering some new info about WebTV for Dreamcast that I think should be shared. Hope you all find this useful or mildly interesting.

So I got around to messing with DC homebrew a few days ago and got the idea to try making a tool that'd extract data from the area in flash where WebTV stores TellyScripts. Here's what I found during my research:

• WebTV for Dreamcast actually uses the "reserved" partition in system flash (partition 1) to store most of its data, alongside using the usual game partition. As far as I can tell, most games and software just don't use this partition at all, so it appears that WebTV is the only known Dreamcast title as of writing to utilize this partition.

• In that partition, at least in my dumps, the first few blocks contain data for the downloaded TellyScript WebTV uses to dial into the WebTV service from the user's local area. Data for other things WebTV uses is stored in further blocks as well. WebTV for Dreamcast actually writes a logical block with an ID of 0 for what I assume is the start of the TellyScript data and some other data preceding it (probably a header). KallistiOS actually errors out on reading from that block for some reason, but reads data from logical blocks after it just fine.

Right now, I just got to grips with KallistiOS after searching for any sort of useful documentation, and my C skills are very subpar, so I can't guarantee that I'll even go through with making a tool to extract TellyScripts. The information is out there now, though.

[wtv-411]

Making some headway with the TellyScript tool I talked about in my last post. Was able to make a custom version of the flashrom_get_block KOS function to make it read the first block of TellyScript data, and now my program's up to a point where it can detect if the TellyScript is present and get the size of the script. The hard part might be actually getting the data and saving it somewhere other than internal memory, and that means learning things about C that I'm unfamiliar with, so I'm still not sure if I can finish this. Just thought it'd be nice to share my adventures with this so far to you all.

[colgate]

Making some headway with the TellyScript tool I talked about in my last post. Was able to make a custom version of the flashrom_get_block KOS function to make it read the first block of TellyScript data, and now my program's up to a point where it can detect if the TellyScript is present and get the size of the script. The hard part might be actually getting the data and saving it somewhere other than internal memory, and that means learning things about C that I'm unfamiliar with, so I'm still not sure if I can finish this. Just thought it'd be nice to share my adventures with this so far to you all.

Here's a pic of what my program looks like at the moment:

wtvdctelly.png

Is not hard to use Kos to save to the vmu or sd card, there are plenty of examples on Google.

[wtv-411]

Making some headway with the TellyScript tool I talked about in my last post. Was able to make a custom version of the flashrom_get_block KOS function to make it read the first block of TellyScript data, and now my program's up to a point where it can detect if the TellyScript is present and get the size of the script. The hard part might be actually getting the data and saving it somewhere other than internal memory, and that means learning things about C that I'm unfamiliar with, so I'm still not sure if I can finish this. Just thought it'd be nice to share my adventures with this so far to you all.

Here's a pic of what my program looks like at the moment:

wtvdctelly.png

Is not hard to use Kos to save to the vmu or sd card, there are plenty of examples on Google.

Oh, that's not what I meant at all lol. Should've worded that better. What I meant was that I don't know how to get the data I'm looking for in memory before saving it as it's split into multiple blocks in flash and I don't know enough C to do that correctly. Once I feel like I've properly understood that language I might seriously consider finishing this project. :p

[wtv-411]

OK so as per usual I immediately found out the solution to my previous issue was easier than I expected. Now I have a working proof of concept that can detect the WebTV data in the right flash ROM partition and extract the TellyScript data from it. Now to briefly talk about the problem of finding a way to save that in a way that'll allow people to ultimately get the TellyScripts onto their PCs and do something useful with it. To put a long story short, I tried to find a way to make my tool write the script to the SD card, but I don't want to limit people to ext2 and finding a FAT library that'd work with KallistiOS was a project and a half, and I eventually went nowhere with that.

What I'm thinking of doing instead is to just make the tool write the TellyScript to the VMU (I imagine most TellyScripts aren't bigger than 1 KB anyway), and the user can then find a way to connect their VMU to their PC and extract the TellyScript save from there. Then you can either archive that yourself or send it over to the guys running the WebTV Wiki to get them to preserve it. Sounds weird, but after talking to someone in the scene about it I think it'd be the most accessible way for people to pitch in.

More updates will come soon.

[megavolt85]

and finding a FAT library that'd work with KallistiOS

libkosfat included to KallistiOS
https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiO ... /libkosfat