Can a program be made for pc-dc?

[DoctorN]

For people who have no idea of reading 1's and 0's, do you think someone can create a program that edits all that out for you so you can just plug in your dreamcast and you are ready to go? for XP/Vista/7? thanks

[Gary_b]

if you are asking if it is possible, then yes it is indeed possible. the chances that someone is going to do this is very slim. i heard of one guy doing that for win 95 to vista, but nothing ever came of it.

[brourke228]

I don't think this would be possible without a phone line simulator. Since you cannot use your modem's auto-answer command with blind dial. So whether you are using the win98/me setup or linux you still need user input when connecting to tell your modem when it should negotiate with your dreamcast's modem. On linux you need to type sudo killall -USR1 mgetty and on win98/me i believe you need to click allow caller access. You do this about 3 seconds after you hit dial on dreamcast. Unfortunately there is no way for your computer to know what is happening on Dreamcast without some sort of user input.

The other issue is that no one here knows of a way to get a win7/vista dial-in server working natively and the winXP guide doesn't appear to work. THe guide I wrote shows how to do it on linux through vmware. There are differences on how you set that up depending on your modem type though. So it wouldn't really be possible to make a ready-made setup for it.

It would probably be possible to create a ready-made win98 PC-DC OS. It would still require user input when connecting though. Like "click this button 3 seconds after you hit dial on dreamcast". However even with this you have hardware issues. SATA hdd's don't work properly in windows 98/ME in addition to other driver issues you will run into, so if you tried using this on a newer computer you would have trouble even installing the OS.

You also need to build a line voltage inducer if you have a Model B Dreamcast modem. With certain games you also need to swap lines for a dial tone.

So it would be nice to have a "ready-made" PC-DC server setup for everyone to download, but it's just not really a viable option.

[Favrenation]

I have thought of this but your best bet would be to make a portable vmware OS file with everything setup. You could then just make a bash script that would search for the right modem name and put that into all the mgetty and pppd files. Also use that bash script ryochan talked about to just double click per say to start the commands. If you're good with actual programming then you could just make it into a gui. Having it into just a vmware file though would make installing the os and the programs unecesaary and would simplify it to just configuring it to you modem name which most likely is the same if its pci.

Of course you would still have to make sure pci ports would be forwarded but that would probably be part of the vmware file.

[Kingbuzzo]

I've seen a mod where someone used the serial modem option in dream passport and was able to surf over it.

Patching games to look for a serial connection instead might be an interesting route to take. Just daydreaming though.

The finnicky nature of the modems, and the expansion slot seem to hold back a lot the work with pc-dc servers. but I would bet that we'd have an easier time if there was more documentation on the serial connectivity of the Dreamcast. Maybe something like this would be useful in that case.