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• Dreamcast Anniversary Programming

  10 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  This day last year saw a lot of nostalgia posts on the internet regarding the Sega Dreamcast, launched 10 years prior to that day (on 9/9/99). Regrettably, none of the retrospectives that I read really seemed to mention the homebrew potential, which is the aspect that interested me. On the occasion of the DC’s 11th anniversary, I wanted to remind myself how to build something for the unit and do so using modern equipment and build tools.

  
  
  

  Background
  Like many other programmers, I initially gained interest in programming because I desired to program video games. Not content to just plunk out games on a PC, I always had a deep, abiding ambition to program actual video game hardware. That is, I wanted to program a purpose-built video game console. The Sega Dreamcast might be the most ideal candidate to ever emerge for that task. All that was required to run your own software on the unit was the console, a PC, some free software tools, and a special connectivity measure.

  The Equipment
  Here is the hardware required (ideally) to build software for the DC :

  • The console itself (I happen to have 3 of them laying around, as pictured above)
  • Some peripherals : Such as the basic DC controller, the DC keyboard (flagship title : Typing of the Dead), and the visual memory unit (VMU)
    
    
    
  • VGA box : The DC supported 480p gaming via a device that allowed you to connect the console straight to a VGA monitor via 15-pin D-sub. Not required for development, but very useful. I happen to have 3 of them from different third parties :
    
    
    
  • Finally, the connectivity measure for hooking the DC to the PC.
    There are 2 options here. The first is rare, expensive and relatively fast : A DC broadband adapter. The second is slower but much less expensive and relatively easy to come by– the DC coder’s cable. This was a DB-9 adapter on one end and a DC serial adapter on the other, and a circuit in the middle to monkey with voltage levels or some such ; I’m no electrical engineer. I procured this model from the notorious Lik Sang, well before that outfit was sued out of business.
    
    
    

  Dealing With Legacy
  Take a look at that coder’s cable again. DB-9 ? When was the last time you owned a computer with one of those ? And then think farther back to the last time to had occasion to plug something into one of those ports (likely a serial mouse).

  
  
  

  A few years ago, someone was about to toss out this Belkin USB to DB-9 serial converter when I intervened. I foresaw the day when I would dust off the coder’s cable. So now I can connect a USB serial cable to my Eee PC, which then connects via converter to a different serial cable, one which has its own conversion circuit that alters the connection to yet another type of serial cable.

  Bits is bits is bits as far as I’m concerned.

  
  
  

  Putting It All Together
  Now to assemble all the pieces (plus a monitor) into one development desktop :

  
  
  

  The monitor says “dcload 1.0.3, idle…”. That’s a custom boot CD-ROM that is patiently waiting to receive commands, code and data via the serial port.

  Getting The Software
  Back in the day, homebrew software development on the DC revolved around these components :

  • GNU binutils : for building base toolchains for the Hitachi SH-4 main CPU as well as the ARM7-based audio coprocessor
  • GNU gcc/g++ : for building compilers on top of binutils for the 2 CPUs
  • Newlib : a C library intended for embedded systems
  • KallistiOS : an open source, real-time OS developed for the DC

  The DC was my first exposure to building cross compilers. I developed some software for the DC in the earlier part of the decade. Now, I am trying to figure out how I did it, especially since I think I came up with a few interesting ideas at the time.

  Struggling With the Software Legacy
  The source for KallistiOS has gone untouched since about 2004 but is still around thanks to Sourceforge. The instructions for properly building the toolchain have been lost to time, or would be were it not for the Internet Archive’s copy of a site called Hangar Eleven. Also, KallistiOS makes reference to a program called ‘dc-tool’ which is needed on the client side for communicating with dcload. I was able to find this binary at the Boob ! site (well-known in DC circles).

  I was able to build the toolchain using binutils 2.20.1, gcc 4.5.1 and newlib 1.18.0. Building the toolchain is an odd process as it requires building the binutils, then building the C compiler, then newlib, and then building the C compiler again along with the C++ compiler because the C++ compiler depends on newlib.

  With some effort, I got the toolchain to build KallistiOS and most of its example programs. I documented most of the tweaks I had to make, several of them exactly the same as this one that I recently discovered while resurrecting a 10-year-old C program (common construct in C programming of old ?).

  Moment of Truth
  So I had some example programs built as ELF files. I told dc-tool to upload and run them on the waiting console. Unfortunately, the tool would just sort of stall, though some communication had evidently taken place. It has been many years since I have seen this in action but I recall that something more ought to be happening.

  Plan B (Hardware)
  This is the point that I remember that I have been holding onto one rather old little machine that still has a DB-9 serial port. It’s not especially ergonomic to set up. I have to run it on my floor because, to connect it to my network, I need to run a 25′ ethernet cable that just barely reaches from the other room. The machine doesn’t seem to like USB keyboards, which is a shame since I have long since ditched any PS/2 keyboards. Fortunately, the box still has an old Gentoo distro and is running sshd, a holdover from its former life as a headless box.

  
  
  

  Now when I run dc-tool, both the PC and DC report the upload progress while pretty overscan bars oscillate on the DC’s monitor. Now I’m back in business, until…

  Plan C (Software)
  None of these KallistiOS example programs are working. Some are even reporting catastrophic failures (register dumps) via the serial console. That’s when I remember that gcc can be a bit fickle on CPU architectures that are not, shall we say, first-class citizens. Back in the day, gcc 2.95 was a certified no-go for SH-4 development. 3.0.3 or 3.0.4 was called upon at the time. As I’m hosting this toolchain on x86_64 right now, gcc 3.0.4 can’t even be built (predates the architecture).

  One last option : As I searched through my old DC project directories, I found that I still have a lot of the resulting binaries, the ones I built 7-8 years ago. I upload a few of those and I finally see homebrew programming at work again, including this old program (described in detail here).

  Next Steps
  If I ever feel like revisiting this again, I suppose I can try some of the older 4.x series to see if they build valid programs. Alternatively, try building an x86_32-hosted 3.0.4 toolchain which ought to be a known good. And if that fails, search a little bit more to find that there are still active Dreamcast communities out there on the internet which probably have development toolchain binaries ready for download.

• Dreamcast Operating Systems

  16 septembre 2010, par Multimedia Mike — Sega Dreamcast

  The Sega Dreamcast was famously emblazoned with a logo proudly announcing that it was compatible with Windows CE :

  
  
  

  It’s quite confusing. The console certainly doesn’t boot into some version of Windows to launch games. Apparently, there was a special version of CE developed for the DC and game companies had the option to leverage it. I do recall that some game startup screens would similarly advertise Windows CE.

  Once the homebrew community got ahold of the device, the sky was the limit. I think NetBSD was the first alternative OS to support the Dreamcast. Meanwhile, I have recollections of DC Linux and LinuxDC projects along with more generic Linux-SH and SH-Linux projects.

  
  
  

  DC Evolution hosts a disc image available for download with an unofficial version of DC Linux, assembled by one Adrian O’Grady. I figured out how to burn the disc (burning DC discs is a blog post of its own) and got it working in the console.

  It’s possible to log in directly via the physical keyboard or through a serial terminal provided that you have a coder’s cable. That reminds me– my local Fry’s had a selection of USB-to-serial cables. I think this is another area that is sufficiently commoditized that just about any cable ought to work with Linux out of the box. Or maybe I’m just extrapolating from the experience of having the cheapest cable in the selection (made by io connect) plug and play with Linux.

  
  
  

  Look ! No messy converter box in the middle as in the Belkin case. The reason I went with this cable is that the packaging claimed it was capable of up to 500 Kbits/sec. Most of the cables advertised a max of 115200 bps. I distinctly recall being able to use the DC coder’s cable at 230400 bps a long time ago. Alas, 115200 seems to be the speed limit, even with this new USB cable.

  Anyway, the distribution is based on a 2.4.5 kernel circa 2001. I tried to make PPP work over the serial cable but the kernel doesn’t have support. If you’re interested, here is some basic information about the machine from Linux’s perspective, gleaned from some simple commands. This helps remind us of a simpler time when Linux was able to run comfortably on a computer with 16 MB of RAM.

  Debian GNU/Linux testing/unstable dreamcast ttsc/1
  dreamcast login : root
  
  Linux dreamcast 2.4.5 #27 Thu May 31 07:06:51 JST 2001 sh4 unknown
  Most of the programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are
  
  freely redistributable ; the exact distribution terms for each program
  
  are described in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright
  Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
  
  permitted by applicable law.
  dreamcast : # uname -a
  
  Linux dreamcast 2.4.5 #27 Thu May 31 07:06:51 JST 2001 sh4 unknown
  dreamcast : # cat /proc/cpuinfo 
  
  cpu family : SH-4
  
  cache size : 8K-byte/16K-byte
  
  bogomips : 199.47
  Machine : dreamcast
  
  CPU clock : 200.00MHz
  
  Bus clock : 100.00MHz
  
  Peripheral module clock : 50.00MHz
  dreamcast : # top -b
   09:14:54 up 14 min,  1 user,  load average : 0.04, 0.03, 0.03
  
  15 processes : 14 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
  
  CPU states :   1.1% user,   5.8% system,   0.0% nice,  93.1% idle
  
  Mem :     14616K total,    11316K used,     3300K free,     2296K buffers
  
  Swap :        0K total,        0K used,        0K free,     5556K cached
    PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
  
    219 root      18   0  1072 1068   868 R     5.6  7.3   0:00 top
  
      1 root       9   0   596  596   512 S     0.0  4.0   0:01 init
  
      2 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 keventd
  
      3 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kswapd
  
      4 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kreclaimd
  
      5 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 bdflush
  
      6 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kupdated
  
      7 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00 kmapled
  
     39 root       9   0   900  900   668 S     0.0  6.1   0:00 devfsd
  
     91 root       8   0   652  652   556 S     0.0  4.4   0:00 pump
  
     96 daemon     9   0   524  524   420 S     0.0  3.5   0:00 portmap
  
    149 root       9   0   944  944   796 S     0.0  6.4   0:00 syslogd
  
    152 root       9   0   604  604   456 S     0.0  4.1   0:00 klogd
  
    187 root       9   0   540  540   456 S     0.0  3.6   0:00 getty
  
    201 root       9   0  1380 1376  1112 S     0.0  9.4   0:01 bash
  

  Note that at this point I had shutdown both gpm and inetd. The rest of the processes, save for bash, are default. The above stats only report about 14 MB of RAM ; where are the other 2 MB ?

  dreamcast : # df -h
  Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/rd/1             2.0M  560k  1.4M  28% /
  

• lavc/vvc : Ensure subpictures don't overlap

  22 février, par Frank Plowman

  lavc/vvc : Ensure subpictures don't overlap
  This is essentially a re-implementation of
  
  https://patchwork.ffmpeg.org/project/ffmpeg/patch/20241005223955.54158-1-post@frankplowman.com/
  That patch was not applied last time.  Instead we opted to identify
  
  issues which could be caused by invalid subpicture layouts and remedy
  
  those issues where they manifest, either through error detection or code
  
  hardening.  This was primarily implemented in the set
  
  https://patchwork.ffmpeg.org/project/ffmpeg/list/?series=13381.
  This has worked to some degree, however issues with subpicture layouts
  
  continue to crop up from the fuzzer and I've fixed a number of bugs
  
  related to subpicture layouts since then.  I think it's best to return
  
  to the initial plan and simply check if the subpicture layout is valid
  
  initially.
  This implementation is also lighter than the first time — by doing a
  
  bit more logic in pps_subpic_less_than_one_tile_slice, we are able to
  
  store a tile_in_subpic map rather than a ctu_in_subpic map.  This
  
  reduces the size of the map to the point it becomes possible to allocate
  
  it on the stack.  Similar to 8bd66a8c9587af61c7b46558be3c4ee317c1af5a,
  
  the layout is also validated in the slice map construction code, rather
  
  than in the CBS, which avoids duplicating some logic.
  Signed-off-by : Frank Plowman <post@frankplowman.com>
  

  • [DH] libavcodec/vvc/ps.c