Well, with the recent price drop, I went ahead and got a
Dreamcast and even got a Unix-like clone running on it :-)

Now to me, a computer not connected to a network isn't very
useful, and I'm not quite willing to shell out $100+ for the
broadband adapter on Ebay when I bought the machine for $40.
Naturally, I can do a RS-232 PPP connection, but that would
tie up a serial port on my server for every dreamcast that I 
wanted to install.

So... I started thinking that there might be a way to build
a unidirectional serial ring network. Which really wouldn't
be too hard to build or write drivers for. But I'm guessing
that somebody had to have thought of this before for connecting
many machines in a *very* cheep manner. It would be a bit
'brittle' and require that all the dreamcasts be on at all
times (or have hardware to automatically drop them out of the
loop when turned off).

Anyway, am I totally out to lunch or have people seen stuff
like this before somewhere?

Thanks,

 - Mike Miller
   mikem@computer.org