IP Upload

A client for uploading homebrew programs to a Sega Dreamcast over Ethernet, with a serial-port console and a screenshot grabber bolted on the side.

Originally written in 2001 in VB6. It's gross.

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This is a museum piece

Published for historical interest only. Unsupported, unmaintained, and will not be fixed. No issues, no pull requests, no "have you considered .NET." It is here because it was fun to dig up.

What it did

The Dreamcast had no development story for regular people: you burned your program to a CD-R and rebooted, every time you changed a line. The workaround was a loader stub booted once from CD-R that then sat waiting for your code to arrive over the wire. This is the PC half of that arrangement.

1. Pick an ELF. KallistiOS, the open-source Dreamcast SDK, produced .elf binaries, which is why the file dialog filters on exactly that.
2. Send it. TCP to the Dreamcast's IP on port 4711, whole file in one SendData. The stub catches it, drops it in RAM, jumps to it.
3. Watch it run. The serial port carries printf output back at 57600 or 115200 baud, into the big Courier New text box.
4. Grab a screenshot. Also over serial.

Drag an .elf onto the window and it uploads immediately.

What we used it for

This was used as part of the dev loop on our very old Dreamcast projects, like Sarien DC, NeoPocott DC, DreamPac, and Project CMR. It allowed rapid deploy and test scenarios.

Why you can't just open this

This builds with VB6 and uses three licensed OCX controls -- MSCOMM32.OCX, MSWINSCK.OCX, COMDLG32.OCX -- two of which shipped only with VB6 Professional and carry design-time license keys in the registry, so copying the file is not enough. And other ugliness. It's also mostly useless at this point and could be rewritten in about 60 lines of Python today...

License

Copyright (C) 2001 Ganksoft Entertainment. Published as-is for historical purposes.