Dreamcast-Talk.com

http://www.os2museum.com/wp/surfing-modern-web-with-ancient-browsers/

I haven't done a ton of reading on this yet, but it looks promising. It's called Web Rendering Proxy, and it looks to be python-based. The rough process seems to take an image of a website, render it in a gif, and generate an HTML imagemap while stripping out unsupported features. The site features images of modern websites running in "ancient browsers" like Mosaic and IBM WebBrowser for OS/2. If this could be implemented on a DreamPi setup, that would potentially re-open the web to the PlanetWeb-based browsers. That is, assuming of course that the Pi could handle both DreamPi and this rendering setup concurrently, and that someone more knowledgeable than myself could get it running on the Pi.

https://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/2014/03/11/web-rendering-proxy-update/

Super interesting!!

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Yes this is a very cool concept

The only thing is you can only download about 8mb~ of web content (images, sounds, i'm not sure if html itself is stored), after you go beyond that threshold the browser freezes. I'm not sure if that's the case on Dreamkey or Dream Passport. But as long as the images are compressed enough it would be pretty awesome to see this working

IMO it would make more sense to just port a more modern browser to DC with KOS or something. The problem is that the DC's CPU is so slow and its RAM is so small that you'd be hard pressed to make a bloated modern website render in a reasonable amount of time, assuming you could get it to work within the DC's RAM constraints at all.

Aleron Ives wrote:IMO it would make more sense to just port a more modern browser to DC with KOS or something. The problem is that the DC's CPU is so slow and its RAM is so small that you'd be hard pressed to make a bloated modern website render in a reasonable amount of time, assuming you could get it to work within the DC's RAM constraints at all.

Conversely, that's why it would seem to make more sense to me to have the Raspberry Pi do the heavy lifting since it is several orders of magnitude more powerful and memory-rich than the Dreamcast. Also, the Pi is already in the loop as the server providing web access in the first place. I would be hard pressed to think of a suitably lightweight browser that's both open source and could theoretically work on the meager system specs of the DC; other than maybe a text-based browser like Links.

There really is little practical application for this other than being an academic exercise and possibly a fun homebrew challenge, but I would dig the novelty of using PlanetWeb to browse the internet as it is in 2017.

This would be great to see working, but I would prefer an email forwarding server in the dreampi setup first.

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I fear that using such a setup would strip away so much functionality that the websites wouldn't work properly, though. The web uses a lot more than plain HTML now.

As somebody that's seen sites such as Google being slightly mangled through PlanetWeb (1.0, If I'm not mistaken), that's super legit. (It also may or may not be mangled through XDP's set, custom PW or XDP...)

Aleron Ives wrote:I fear that using such a setup would strip away so much functionality that the websites wouldn't work properly, though. The web uses a lot more than plain HTML now.

Yeah, that's actually a pretty good point. It was mentioned that it stripped out unsupported features, so I assume it'll keep anything compatible. If so: What does Dreamcast support? I believe Javascript was supported, albeit mostly on later browsers (I think). I honestly can't remember, it's been about a year or so since I successfully used the Internet on my Dreamcast. It feels like it was compatible with more than just HTML.

I may not know what I'm talking about. It's still interesting to see this, though... even if it's about something that I don't think people know too much about when it comes to Dreamcast (but then again, a fair bit of people in my area haven't even really heard of Dreamcast too much, let alone it having online capabilities). If this does go through, it's probably even more initiative for me to hurry up and get a Raspberry Pi and whatever else is needed.

Aleron Ives wrote:The problem is that the DC's CPU is so slow and its RAM is so small

Is this why a Genesis emulator is doomed to failure most of the time? I know that's highly off-topic, but I didn't even really know about that until I read these posts. Even then, it sounds a bit off-the-wall to say a console released in 1998 can't run a console released in 1989, about 11 years apart.

EDIT: Sorry for the unnecessary bump, I shoulda looked at the date before posting this. I'll still try to keep it here in case someone wants to continue this; this does legitimately intrigue me.

sonikkublue wrote:Even then, it sounds a bit off-the-wall to say a console released in 1998 can't run a console released in 1989, about 11 years apart.

You're probably the millionth person to make that (or similar) comment. Recreating hardware in software is neither easy nor efficient. Not that I would know of course, I'm not a programmer, but just going off the responses that always come up to that comment

SEGA RPG FAN wrote:

sonikkublue wrote:Even then, it sounds a bit off-the-wall to say a console released in 1998 can't run a console released in 1989, about 11 years apart.

You're probably the millionth person to make that (or similar) comment. Recreating hardware in software is neither easy nor efficient. Not that I would know of course, I'm not a programmer, but just going off the responses that always come up to that comment

True; I wasn't really thinking about the fact that recreating hardware in software for different hardware is not exactly easy, even if the new hardware is much more powerful than the original hardware you're porting (hence why emulators are extremely diverse in their accuracy, I guess)... in fact, I don't even think Sega's official re-releases of Genesis games can still get the sound emulation down (probably because the sound is different in all the models, I believe even in models of the models, so there's probably no "accurate sound" unless you're going for the first first model), so that was likely just my ignorance talking when I said that. Muh bad either way, thanks for reminding me.