In the KallistiOS ecosystem, there are basically two ways to build Dreamcast programs - use the CMake toolchain support, or use the compiler wrapper scripts from the KallistiOS source tree. I was interested in the latter, but they end up depending on a large number of environment variables, which are traditionally sourced through $KOS_BASE/environ.sh. Although it’s not really a big issue to have all those environment variables, I wondered whether there was a cleaner approach.

I’ve spent some time working on a Homebrew tap for Dreamcast development tooling, and wanted to write a little about the tricks I used in creating formula to install the Dreamcast compilation toolchain. First, the Dreamcast toolchain is actually build and installed by the dc-chain package from the KallistiOS repository. dc-chain has 3 phases - download, unpack and build. The download phase is done by the download.sh script, which downloads the source archives of the toolchain components (gcc, binutils, newlib, gdb) for SH4 and ARM architectures.

Way back in the last century, I bought a Sega Dreamcast. One of the reasons that I like it (apart from some great games), was that there was a burgeoning homebrew development scene for it. I went and bought the various bits of hardware I thought I needed to get going, but ended up never doing anything, and it all sat in storage for 20 years. Recently, I unpacked everythying and decided to figure it all out.