Dreamcast Thought: Using Dreamcast as a PC. How far can you get?

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's icon TamagotchiTamaHero24 TamagotchiTamaHero24]

I legitimately wonder, if you ran DOS-Box on the Dreamcast, how far would you get? How functional would the system be as a really crappy 90’s era computer?

My guess is that you can run some lower power applications, I imagine you’d probably have it crash if you tried to run many games on it. It’s possible that the system would ask for RAM that isn’t there and the whole thing would just freeze.

 

[Bonkers225]

Probably as far as driving a 1920's Model T Ford on today's highway.

 

[Sorion]

considering it's got 16MB of ram and a 200MHz CPU that's not even x86, probably not so far, it would probably perform like a decent windows 95 era PC, the CPU in particular should be faster than anything from the pentium 1 era, but without any compatible software and a limited I/O due to it's console nature, I'd say it's not worth it to use it as a PC

 

[RETRO-VETRO RETRO-VETRO]

The Dreamcast’s 200MHz SH-4 CPU and 16MB of RAM make it a terrible host for DOSBox, which is already a heavy emulator. You might get away with some early text-based DOS apps or CGA games, but anything that needs VGA graphics, Sound Blaster audio, or extended memory will likely crash or crawl. No hard drive, slow I/O, and minimal RAM means you're essentially emulating a 90s PC on hardware that was never meant to handle general-purpose computing.

 

[TamagotchiTamaHero24's icon TamagotchiTamaHero24 TamagotchiTamaHero24]

I wonder, secondly, how far you’d get with Linux? I’m sure a Linux extension has been made for it.

 

[RETRO-VETRO RETRO-VETRO]

I wonder, secondly, how far you’d get with Linux? I’m sure a Linux extension has been made for it.

There are indeed Linux ports for the Dreamcast, some based on KallistiOS and others on stripped-down Debian builds, but they are extremely limited. With only 16MB of RAM, no native hard drive, and a modest 200MHz CPU, the system struggles with anything beyond the most basic tasks.You might manage to boot into a framebuffer terminal and run a few ultra-lightweight utilities, perhaps even compile small programs if you're persistent. However, graphical environments, modern networking stacks, or package managers expecting a full Linux environment are effectively out of reach.

 

[PacGuy]

All the way