Hold on now. Swap over NFS? I’m amazed this is viable. I guess the difference between line and device speed wasn’t as vast as it is now.

Having read the article it makes more sense. They need additional capacity for the RAM disk.

No swap on nfs is strange. Mainly because as far as I can tell swap over nfs has always been a thing on bsd.

here is the openbsd manual on setting up a diskless system(note the bootparams swap line), however it picked up it's netbooting sequence from bsd which if I had to guess picked it up from sun who invented nfs. I was curious if sunos also has it and it does. I choose sunos as a sort of early snapshot of a commercial bsd system. As netbooting was an important thing to Sun I would guess swap over nfs was a day one thing. Anyone know where to go for very early manuals to confirm this?

http://man.openbsd.org/diskless

Yes, NBD works. I use it to give my 256Mb Pi a swap off the sdcard. You could also use iSCSI now.

Yes, or via the (very slow) built-in serial port. The broadband adapters are quite rare.

Interestingly, for a long time there were no publicly available tools for or docs on dumping GD-ROMs. New releases from Echelon and Kalisto would appear promptly, so there was obviously a way, but you could only partake in the rampant piracy by downloading the (occasionally-massaged to fit on a CD) disc images online.

A lot of discussion in the (tbf probably quite young and inexperienced) community was around how this was possible. A popular theory/rumor at the time was that they were using CD drives with modified firmware, for example.

This probably also helped keep the piracy amd homebrew scenes fairly well separated on the Dreamcast, as there was a lot of info and examples around running your own code. This is in contrast to eg. the Xbox scene, which was in many ways the equally vibrant successor to the DC scene, but where piracy and homebrew seemed much more intertwined. Not least because all the homebrew binaries were built using the off-limits Microsoft SDK, so you had to go to some shady FTP site via links found on IRC to download them.

I had that kit and it was really good.

I actually used it to write a small game to demonstrate the PS2 architecture in my CS undergrad capstone project.

It was slooooooooow even by the standards of the time.

XBMC was so good at the time. Haven't been superseded yet in UX. Locate the movie in some network folder and go.

XBMC4Xbox seems to be a spinoff but I guess it can't play HD.

Edit: And it seemed to have been running the original Xbox win32 interface, not Linux.

oh the days of xbox-linux, the cromwell bios and stuff.

I remember some guy soldering additional memory as well. Can't recall if it was 64 to 128mb or 128 to 256mb.

Well, a known problem with pre v4 NFS is that it uses and trusts client side UIDs I believe, In fact I believe even v4 does this by default. So if I understand correctly, it treats root on the client like root on the server, and since NFS gives direct access to the block device this is even worse than it initially sounds.

start mining monero is the most likely outcome. I had a server get hit with this recently through a vulnerability I was never able to track down

Join a botnet, and use your node to log into other devices and/or deliver attack payloads.

It's called Flycast and it's very good.