What are the options to developing on the Dreamcast?

Hello all,

I know of the DC coder's cable and BBA. I have an SD adapter, but it's a big hassle. I am aware of just building my own DC coder's cable, but I'm not particularly up for opening up my Dreamcast.

What other options are there?

 

If the only thing stopping your from building your own coder's cable is opening the Dreamcast, then you could salvage the serial connector on a cheap DC sd-card adapter.

 

you could:
- buy a devkit, but that's the most expensive solution & not recommended if you want to sell your game later
- buy a Broadband Adapter
- buy a LAN adapter, but that's only 10mbit & not supported by the official games (official games support the BBA, which is 100mbit)
- buy a DC coders cable (current ebay price seems to be 50 USD ?)
- make your own coders cable

I'd suggest to save money for a BBA, it's much faster than the coders cable & a lot less hassle.
In the meanwhile, you can always begin by testing your code in an emulator

 

HIT-0300

You're right. I took a look at the inside of an SD adapter and it doesn't look at all too stable. for me to solder onto.

BBA/LAN? The default modem? With the LAN, my concern would be to be able to upload and execute my binary.

The BBA is about 150$ on eBay and it seems like it's the least hassle...

I genuinely regret selling my DC coder's cable...

Edit: I see, HIT-0300 is the LAN adapter and HIT-0400 is the BBA. Clearly, the BBA is much more expensive...

Edit: What about using a USB FTDI chip?

 

You probably figured it out already, but dc-load-ip supports both the BBA & the LAN adapter.
If you will only use it for programming, the LAN adapter is enough,
but if you want more than that (use it eg for Phantasy Star Online, make a BBA-compatible program, ...), you'll soon want a BBA.

seems to work also indeed, forgot to put it in the list as I never used that (yet).
If you can afford it / can gather the money in a short time, I'd recommend the BBA though.
Say for example that you want to use your pc as a fileserver, you'll be happy to have the fastest solution available for the dreamcast

I kept mine for a very very long period without using it (I bought it from lik-sang, so more than 8 years ago ), and now I'm glad I didn't sell it since I needed it a few months ago

 

I caved and bought a BBA for $150...

 

Excellent choice, you won't regret it