I hope someone has some experience with homebrew development on the DC using the freely available toolchain (gcc/kos). I decided to get back to Dreamcast development after quite some time (4 years) and try out some fancy stuff. Setting up the dev environment turned out to be pretty easy (way easier than a few years ago). My IDE (codeblocks) works, cygwin works and the KOS examples compile fine. Now i want to run the KOS examples via nullDC ("File->Open bin/elf") and thats where i'm stuck. When i try to load an elf nullDC does nothing and spits out the following error message: "not implemented opcode : 0 : Unknown opcode @ 8C008300". Does someone know what the problem might be?
I would say that either the binary you created is in the wrong format or the nulldc loader is bugged. That would be my first guess, although it could be that the compiler is generating some weird code. You could do with finding a bin or elf that works and then compare it to the file you've created.
Use DCLoad I prefer DCLoad to nulldc since you can run it form the command line. You will probably be able to use it in your IDE to upload the game automatically after a build. http://adk.napalm-x.com/dc/dcload-serial/
I changed my build process so that i get a cd image after compiling. Also i'm using lxdream now for emulating my binaries, because it works way more accurate for homebrew stuff than nullDC. @Barret7sc: I'm already using dc-load with my coders cable, but the transfer time for bigger programs is really frustrating. Anyways, thanks for you answers guys.
D'oh, I don't know what I was thinking, you are meaning nullDC the emulator. I don't know what was going through my head. I ended up dumping my art assets onto a cd with dcload on it to minimize the time to upload the binary. It still takes a while, just not as long as having to copy several megs of graphics as well. If I remember right, nulldc does need something special done to the binary. Or you could just have your makefile generate an iso real quick and load that. Since the last time I did any DC dev work was before nullDC was around, I ended up writing a DLL that emulated a small portion of KOS and would let the program run in windows. It only had a small subset of the functionality, and since I was just using the TA as a fancy 2d accelerator, I never added in anything that would allow 3d stuff to run in windows. The level priorites are also different than on the DC, but, it worked well enough to allow me to see what was happening without having to load it onto the DC.
