DCEmulation

Would it be possible/simple to port a comic book archive reader to the Dreamcast?



One open source code I know of is the CDisplay offshoot, "CDisplayEx": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDisplayEx

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I've always used Comical for comic books, it's great as a standalone app with CBR/CBZ archives on portable media.

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There are two problems I can think of.
1) Solid compression things like rar or 7z would be difficult because their nature typically requires you to extract everything at once. This is fine for a save file or a rom for an emulator, but not for 100 pics or so. cbz would be fine though, as with zip you can extract individual files.
2) I've not tried much with the DC in the way of picture slideshow and comics, but it would seem to me that 640x480 would be too low to be able to read the images.

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It is, the picture art is fine but the text (or speech bubble) is problematic, you'd need to zoom-in to each page to read the text displayed. Although it doesn't have all the features of Slideshow, I've found DCViewer to be the best comic reader on the Dreamcast, you do need to have the CBR/CBZ archive extracted into it's own directory though.

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The beauty of Facebook, Twitter and all the other online media distractions is that those who have no place in real society are kept occupied. In the meantime we useful people will continue to experience real life without the unnecessary hindrance of imbecilic attention.

I take it then that this was infeasible, or would just be too time consuming?

Would zip/rar extraction along with jpeg rendering be possible within the limits of the DC's RAM?

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ZIP is reasonable, at least in principle. RAR is just a pain in the ass to deal with. The only reason anyone supports it is that RARLab provides a .DLL for decompressing it, and that's useless on Dreamcast. There's also source code, but it's packaged as a standalone utility (not a library) for Unix-like systems and is distributed under an obnoxious license. Even leaving that aside, RAR is a dictionary-based format that supports solid archives, which is not the best recipe for a RAM-limited platform with no standard mass storage.

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From what I remember, DC Slideshow already does what you'd expect from a comic book viewer: http://www.dcevolution.net/index.php?id=slideshow

Decompress your CBR/CBZ files into a directory, convert to JPG if necessary and burn your CD.

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Yeah, and me and a friend have already gotten the first issue of the US ODCM scanned and available on a CDI for you to read on your Dreamcast and TV. Such a great program too. There are 13 US ODCM mags that were made, and we have issue "0" released first, the other 12 magazines will get added when they are scanned.

http://www.dcisozone.com/downloads/2080 ... or-DC.html

Please leave comments.

I think if Dreamcast (i mean, KOS) have such type of libraries and sets of standarts functions, for example, reading or opening an 7z or zip files and\or read jpeg images i think there's no real problem. that's just needs work to do.

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How do I try to build a Dreamcast toolchain:

The main problem, that Quzar pointed out, is that solid archives are a big problem for a system with 16mb main ram.

I dont think the current port of 7z would work for anything useful. You could try to compile the latest c++ version of the lib7z...

Yeah, I've pointed that too.
But we can write the bigger, not needed to work part of this decompressed archive to the dev\null, can we? Then decompress it again and take the next part that we need to work too, throwing away all another. Maybe that's not a solution but maybe it is.
I don't believe that there's no suitable ways to arrange this situation (instead of increasing the RAM size, of course).

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How do I try to build a Dreamcast toolchain: