I'm pleased to report that I've finally had success getting my Dreamcast to 
boot all the way to a shell. I'm going to be posting a revised HOWTO to this 
list for eventual publication at 
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/dreamcast/howto.html, assuming it's correct, 
once I've finished an English class term paper due tomorrow. 

Meanwhile, for anyone who's interested in how I did this, I follwed these 
steps: 

1. Burned a bootable CD using the image at http://www.roadsign.com/dc/
2. Used rtk0 as the root device and nfs as my method of booting, with my 
DHCP config looking as so: 

host dreamcast {
                       hardware ethernet 00:D0:F1:02:AE:B1;
                       fixed-address 192.168.2.42;
                       option host-name "dreamcast";
                       next-server 192.168.2.69;
                       option dhcp-max-message-size 1024;
                       option broadcast-address 192.168.2.255;
                       option domain-name-servers 66.92.159.2;
                       option domain-name "kirknet.net";
                       option root-path "/home/alex/dreamcast/2fs";
                       filename "/home/alex/big/dreamcast/2fs/netbsd";
               }
I'm not entirely sure if the filename option is necessary, but my OpenBSD 
man pages suggested that a file for the client to boot could be a good thing 
when trying BOOTP clients, and it doesn't seem to hurt. 

3. Used a combination of sources as suggested in the archives at: 
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-dreamcast/2002/01/28/0000.html 

4. Used the MAKEDEV from the above url, using source /dev from the older of 
the two source locations there. 

Hopefully that will be helpful for all of you out there still struggling to 
get to a shell prompt. 

In any case, I have one major hurdle remaining before I can really use the 
box the way I want to: SSH isn't working yet. Whenever I try to SSH into one 
of my boxes, it resolves the host, asks me if I trust the fingerprint, and 
then dumps back out with an error about a missing random device, suggesting 
that I consult the rand(4) manual. 

When I looked at the /dev the box is using, I find that random and urandom 
both exist as follows: 

cr--r--r--  1 root  alex   46,   0 Aug 23 17:47 random
crw-r--r--  1 root  alex   46,   1 Aug 23 17:47 urandom 

My functional OpenBSD box has a lot more random devices, but they appear to 
be about the same, and we all know OpenBSD is much more hardcore about 
cryptography and good random numbers, so I'd expect that. Of course, I don't 
have a working NetBSD installation anywhere to compare this to, so I don't 
know if it's right or not. 

Has anyone got SSH to work on their Dreamcast? Heck, can anyone give me an 
ls -l /dev/*random from their working NetBSD box to see what I'm missing? 
Might I be able to simply cp /dev/*random /home/alex/dreamcast/2fs/dev/ and 
use my OpenBSD devices? 

Thanks and enjoy,
Alex Kirk