>How can I be of assitance with the Dreamcast port? Can you provide me some 
>information on getting started and understanding the concept of whats happening?

Well, after the initial kernel boot, a few of us piped up in here about
helping out, but nothing happened. As far as I know, you're supposed to
download the -current source tree, build an sh3 generic kernel with the
cross-compilation environment, hook up to your Dreamcast with a modified
NeoGeo link cable (use mail-index.netbsd.org to find the old posts, it's
just the last couple months) -- and download the kernel via an S-record
downloader available from the website that has the serial cable instructions.

I've already bought two Dreamcasts in anticipation of further progress on
this, and I'm beginning to wonder what's going on myself.

> ps, doesn't SEGOS and WINCE (the two OS's currently used on dream cast) 
> are they not both Real Time, and if so, does NetBSD have any of being realtime?

SEGOS is realtime because it is very simple and lean, something that is
excellent for modern games but is not useful for general-purpose computing.
For example, consider the mediocre web browser provided with the Dreamcast.

WinCE's idea of realtime is a marketing ploy to compete with other
established realtime OS's; in actual benchmarks WinCE is a joke.

AFAIK NetBSD does not have any plans to integrate explicit support for
realtime applications; doing so can easily conflict with the process
protection and full-featured I/O that unix systems have as a standard
feature. Recent work for I/O performance and SMP has also improved the
general response time of the NetBSD kernel in general, so for many
applications you really don't get much benefit from the realtime OS.

In general, RTOS's are often not really needed, but...
	"when you _do_ need it, you _really_ need it."

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ best.com