Development

This section is currently undergoing a rewrite. Feel free to help writing tutorials. Old documentation is at the bottom

Tutorials

Please request tutorials in this forum thread

General

• IRC channel
• Compiling KOS on Windows
• Compiling KOS on OS X
• Compiling KOS on Linux
• About the CPU (store queues, DMA)
• Dreamcast Memory Map
• Gamepad input
• How to read and write data (romdisk, CD, VMU)

Graphics

• About the DC graphics hardware
• PVR API vs OpenGL vs software rendering
• About PVR texture formats and compression
• Rendering geometry efficiently
• 2D rendering without using the PVR graphics chip
• How to load and display paletted textures

Audio

• About the DC audio hardware
• How to play sounds
• How to stream music

Deployment

• About IP.bin, 1st.bin and scrambling
• Burning discs
• Transfer over serial, modem or BBA

VMU

• Writing programs for the VMU
• Making the VMU beep

FAQs

• Porting FAQs

Official Development Tools

• SEGA Katana SDK
• Microsoft WinCE SDK

Old documents before rewrite of this page (probably outdated)

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

fackue has released a special pre-configured development ISO for Windows. Check out his DC Dev ISO.

He also released a pre-compiled version of the Code::Blocks IDE for Windows. Check it out!

Documents and Tutorials

Tutorials

• Introduction to SDL 2D Graphics by reaper2k2
• PowerVR Introduction by BlueCrab

Documents

• About the IP.BIN

Additional Libraries

• AllegroDC
• SDL-DC

Tools

• dc-load
• 1ST READ.BIN Checker

Developers

A list of quite all independet/homebrew Dreamcast developers can be found here.