Development
Please refer to the newer version of this page, located at Dreamcast.wiki!
Tutorials
Please request tutorials in this forum thread
For chat support join the IRC channel
Setup
General
- About the CPU (store queues, DMA)
- Dreamcast Memory Map
- Efficient usage of the Dreamcast RAM
- Gamepad input
- How to read and write data on the VMU
- Romdisk Swapping
Graphics
- About the DC graphics hardware
- PVR API vs OpenGL vs software rendering
- About PVR texture formats and compression
- Rendering geometry efficiently
PVR
- 2D rendering without using the PVR graphics chip
- How to load and display paletted textures
- Creating and loading KMG textures
- Spritesheet animation with PVR
OpenGL
Audio
Deployment
VMU and other accessories
FAQs
Official Development Tools (unsupported and not legal to use without a license from Sega)
Old documents before rewrite of this page (probably outdated)
Development
Free Development Tools
There are three free development libraries you can choose to start developing for the Dreamcast console.
- libdream (now replaced by its successor KallistiOS)
- libronin
- KallistiOS
Pre-compiled tools (outdated)
fackue has released a special pre-configured development ISO for Windows, known as the DC Dev ISO. However, this has not been updated in some time (since 2008), and is not recommended for current development.
In addition, he also released a pre-compiled version of the Code::Blocks IDE for Windows along with Dreamcast development tools. Like the DC Dev ISO above, this has not been updated since 2008 and should not be used for current development.
Documents and Tutorials
Tutorials
- Introduction to SDL 2D Graphics by reaper2k2
- PowerVR Introduction by BlueCrab
- Compiling KOS on Windows using Cygwin
Documents
Additional Libraries
Tools
Developers
A list of quite all independet/homebrew Dreamcast developers can be found here.