Elysian Shadows

As the title states, is the Dreamcast powerful enough to run an emulator to play android games on it, if such an a program did exist?

My reason for asking this strange question, is while i'm excited for ES more than anything, I was thinking about picking up RPG MAKER MV, the newest in the series.
The site states that in this version you can port your game to android/IOS/HTML 5. My Dream has always been to create a console rpg, so I figured if i port it to droid, and use an emulator to run it on a Dreamcast, if you follow what i'm trying to say.

Please keep in mind, i'm not the most technically suave person there is, so please be gentle if i'm wayyy off

Edit: I forgot about html5. Would that mean I could run the game on a browser on a ps4 for wii u?

Honestly you'd be better off porting RPG maker directly to Dreamcast as the console has vastly limited resources compared to the telephones of today. 16 megabytes (iirc) of RAM isn't going to cut it for a droid emulator. Even then it could be such a huge pain in the ass to port RPG Maker that you might as well just write your own engine, tailored to the system, from scratch. Sorry if I've crushed your hopes, but If you are really interested in learning to program and interested in making your own stuff for a pretty-easy-to-program-for console like the dreamcast I can recommend you some resources:

Learning C is a must: http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/c-tutorial.html
KOS and the sh-elf toolchain is a must: https://github.com/ljsebald/KallistiOS
Being a member of/Reading this forum is also a great idea: http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/

When developing for DC with KOS having a Linux system makes it a hell of a lot easier, however it is possible to develop on windows using Cygwin although its a bit of a pain in the ass to get working and can be discouraging for optimistic beginners.

You should wait for ESTk to be released and use it to develop your game

K-Bal wrote:You should wait for ESTk to be released and use it to develop your game

Also a very good idea if you don't want to write your own engine and tools!

I mean, it's theoretically possible, sure, but there are a couple of problems. Currently I don't know that we have a JVM running on Dreamcast, although I find it hard to believe there is no SH4 java implementation. Could just be a matter of nobody has taken the time to compile it for themselves.

The other problem is that Java and a JVM have a pretty high memory footprint. Even if Java was running on Dreamcast, with only 16MB of RAM, not sure how much you would be able to do with it. Would be a neat little project. Might not be so bad... We do have Lua, a fully interpreted language, running fine, after all...

Falco Girgis wrote: The other problem is that Java and a JVM have a pretty high memory footprint. Even if Java was running on Dreamcast, with only 16MB of RAM, not sure how much you would be able to do with it. Would be a neat little project. Might not be so bad... We do have Lua, a fully interpreted language, running fine, after all...

Based on my experience with C#, you'd likely have to be extremely careful with what standard libraries you included. Even the most elementary Console.Write commands are slow as fuck, have a ton of system-specific dependencies, and rape your memory pool. It's not uncommon to see a 50-line "guess the number" console application using 150 MB of RAM.

Would be an interesting project indeed. I always enjoy solving interesting problems with strict resource limitations.

dandymcgee wrote:

Falco Girgis wrote: The other problem is that Java and a JVM have a pretty high memory footprint. Even if Java was running on Dreamcast, with only 16MB of RAM, not sure how much you would be able to do with it. Would be a neat little project. Might not be so bad... We do have Lua, a fully interpreted language, running fine, after all...

Based on my experience with C#, you'd likely have to be extremely careful with what standard libraries you included. Even the most elementary Console.Write commands are slow as fuck, have a ton of system-specific dependencies, and rape your memory pool. It's not uncommon to see a 50-line "guess the number" console application using 150 MB of RAM.

Would be an interesting project indeed. I always enjoy solving interesting problems with strict resource limitations.

Oh yeah, forgot about the standard libraries... I'm sure Java.Dick.Lang.Swing is probably huge. I bet you would definitely not be including all of the standard libraries in Java.

It would be a really cool project for someone to attempt compiling the JVM for Dreamcast and do a small KOS wrapper. KOS provides debug logging and file system functionality, which should hopefully be adequate for not including all the bullshit bloat with Java.

Also, fairly certain this proves OpenJDK runs on SH4, which proves it's theoretically possible:
https://packages.debian.org/sid/sh4/ope ... k/filelist