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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.

• about FFMPEG stream overlaying an object

  1er février 2014, par user3261087

  hello i have one question about blocking or overlaying an object in a live stream wich is working trough FFmpeg

  i have my own stream server installed and sofar running fine with FFMpeG ,
  but im stuck on a problem.

  the problem is when there is a soccer event on the channel i got serial nummer in my stream, i want to overlay this or block this can someone help me because i know that is possible

  the serial number is showing for 1 or 2 minutes and everytime in different place on the screen. so its not only default on one place

• Decoding VP8 On A Sega Dreamcast

  20 février 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Sega Dreamcast, VP8

  I got Google’s libvpx VP8 codec library to compile and run on the Sega Dreamcast with its Hitachi/Renesas SH-4 200 MHz CPU. So give Google/On2 their due credit for writing portable software. I’m not sure how best to illustrate this so please accept this still photo depicting my testbench Dreamcast console driving video to my monitor :

  
  
  

  Why ? Because I wanted to try my hand at porting some existing software to this console and because I tend to be most comfortable working with assorted multimedia software components. This seemed like it would be a good exercise.

  You may have observed that the video is blue. Shortest, simplest answer : Pure laziness. Short, technical answer : Path of least resistance for getting through this exercise. Longer answer follows.

  Update : I did eventually realize that the Dreamcast can work with YUV textures. Read more in my followup post.

  Process and Pitfalls
  libvpx comes with a number of little utilities including decode_to_md5.c. The first order of business was porting over enough source files to make the VP8 decoder compile along with the MD5 testbench utility.

  Again, I used the KallistiOS (KOS) console RTOS (aside : I’m still working to get modern Linux kernels compiled for the Dreamcast). I started by configuring and compiling libvpx on a regular desktop Linux system. From there, I was able to modify a number of configuration options to make the build more amenable to the embedded RTOS.
  
  I had to create a few shim header files that mapped various functions related to threading and synchronization to their KOS equivalents. For example, KOS has a threading library cleverly named kthreads which is mostly compatible with the more common pthread library functions. KOS apparently also predates stdint.h, so I had to contrive a file with those basic types.

  So I got everything compiled and then uploaded the binary along with a small VP8 IVF test vector. Imagine my surprise when an MD5 sum came out of the serial console. Further, visualize my utter speechlessness when I noticed that the MD5 sum matched what my desktop platform produced. It worked !

  Almost. When I tried to decode all frames in a test vector, the program would invariably crash. The problem was that the file that manages motion compensation (reconinter.c) needs to define MUST_BE_ALIGNED which compiles byte-wise block copy functions. This is necessary for CPUs like the SH-4 which can’t load unaligned data. Apparently, even ARM CPUs these days can handle unaligned memory accesses which is why this isn’t a configure-time option.

  Showing The Work
  I completed the first testbench application which ran the MD5 test on all 17 official IVF test vectors. The SH-4/Dreamcast version aces the whole suite.

  However, this is a video game console, so I had better be able to show the decoded video. The Dreamcast is strictly RGB— forget about displaying YUV data directly. I could take the performance hit to convert YUV -> RGB. Or, I could just display the intensity information (Y plane) rendered on a random color scale (I chose blue) on an RGB565 texture (the DC’s graphics hardware can also do paletted textures but those need to be rearranged/twiddled/swizzled).

  Results
  So, can the Dreamcast decode VP8 video in realtime ? Sure ! Well, I really need to qualify. In the test depicted in the picture, it seems to be realtime (though I wasn’t enforcing proper frame timings, just decoding and displaying as quickly as possible). Obviously, I wasn’t bothering to properly convert YUV -> RGB. Plus, that Big Buck Bunny test vector clip is only 176x144. Obviously, no audio decoding either.

  So, realtime playback, with a little fine print.

  On the plus side, it’s trivial to get the Dreamcast video hardware to upscale that little blue image to fullscreen.

  I was able to tally the total milliseconds’ worth of wall clock time required to decode the 17 VP8 test vectors. As you can probably work out from this list, when I try to play a 320x240 video, things start to break down.

  1. Processed 29 176x144 frames in 987 milliseconds.
  2. Processed 49 176x144 frames in 1809 milliseconds.
  3. Processed 49 176x144 frames in 704 milliseconds.
  4. Processed 29 176x144 frames in 255 milliseconds.
  5. Processed 49 176x144 frames in 339 milliseconds.
  6. Processed 48 175x143 frames in 2446 milliseconds.
  7. Processed 29 176x144 frames in 432 milliseconds.
  8. Processed 2 1432x888 frames in 2060 milliseconds.
  9. Processed 49 176x144 frames in 1884 milliseconds.
  10. Processed 57 320x240 frames in 5792 milliseconds.
  11. Processed 29 176x144 frames in 989 milliseconds.
  12. Processed 29 176x144 frames in 740 milliseconds.
  13. Processed 29 176x144 frames in 839 milliseconds.
  14. Processed 49 175x143 frames in 2849 milliseconds.
  15. Processed 260 320x240 frames in 29719 milliseconds.
  16. Processed 29 176x144 frames in 962 milliseconds.
  17. Processed 29 176x144 frames in 933 milliseconds.