After two years of development, Dreamcast development tool DreamSDK has received an update.
The news was broken by team member @falco_girgis, who described it as "a HUGE day for the Sega Dreamcast homebrew community."
The world of Dreamcast homebrew has been pretty active recently, with projects such as GTA III, GTA: Vice City and WipEout triggering a wave of interest in developing for the defunct platform. That is likely to increase with the launch of DreamSDK R4 (4.0.11.2508).
"Everything that you ever needed to begin developing for the Sega Dreamcast and get set up with the KallistiOS SDK, its tools, its examples, and a bleeding-edge GCC15 toolchain with C23 and C++23 support for the SuperH architecture is right here, ready to go," adds @falco_girgis, who then goes on to personally thank developer @sizious "for all of his hard work."
@falco_girgis adds:
It's not easy to get all of these Linux-y tools building under Windows, and it's especially not easy to create user-friendly UIs and tools around them in a ready-to-go installable package.
The truth is that Dreamcast homebrew SUCKED for Windows developers for many, many years before his hard work and dedication fixed it all... I grew up having to install Cygwin and go through hell to manually compile my own toolchains from scratch...
It was a total PITA, but thanks to DreamSDK, Windows is now a first-party platform that we can support with KOS, allowing developers to focus on developing games and apps for Dreamcast, without having to build toolchains from scratch and get lost in the weeds.
DreamSDK's GitHub page contains the following message about the update:
This release is the result of a 2-year wait, sorry about that. However, this is an important release because it brings very important structural changes, including the ability to choose between the MinGW/MSYS environment (the legacy one) and the modern MinGW-w64/MSYS2 environment. The built-in toolchains have been recompiled recently and many profiles are provided. Windows XP is still supported using the MinGW/MSYS foundation.