Did piracy really kill the Dreamcast? >A German hacker group, Team Utopia, discovered a back door inside the Dreamcast’s mask-ROM BIOS that allowed the Dreamcast to boot from a standard CD-ROM. Nominally, the Dreamcast uses a proprietary format called the “GD-ROM” for game distribution. The GD-ROM format cannot be copied using standard CD or DVD burners. However, the back door in the Dreamcast’s ROM BIOS enabled pirates to eventually create monolithic CD-ROM images of video games that were bootable without any need for hardware modification.
I remember playing so many bootleg Dreamcast games. At first you needed a launcher CD to boot them (anyone remember that? It was an ugly yellow screen)Then you'd just buy bootleg CDs at the park and they'd work without boot CD needed.Ironically by the time I played SA2 I did it on Gamecube and not DC
>>12726440no, the shadow of the PS2 did
>>12726447>buy bootleg CDs at the parkIt was a bowling alley parking lot and yahoo auctions for me.
>>12726458>yahoo auctionsWas that ever a thing in the west? To me it was always the japanese site
>>12726460It was around for a while but eBay drove them out of business
It wasn't good news, but it would've just killed off third party support. What really killed the DC was the lack of trust in Sega after how they quickly killed off their Genesis add-ons, their horrible handling of the Saturn outside of Japan and how they basically killed incentive to buy those games with PC ports, and the controller because of how much worse it was compared to the Saturn 3D Pad. The D-pad was straight up dogshit compared to the Saturn's.
>>12726440Utopia made the loading CD but it was a different guy (Swedish IIRC) who discovered the MIL-CD technique because he wanted to run homebrew on it.
idk if it exactly killed it, but it probably helped. My uncle owned a computer store in my town for a minute and when I got a dream cast and crazy taxi, he just straight up ripped other games for me and I never bought them other than crazy taxi. I can't even remember what he ripped me but I had a pretty big CD binder just filled with his bootlegs. Maybe 60% of them worked.
No, piracy doesn't kill hardware. If anything it bolsters it. Dreamcast didn't sell enough hardware to be viable.
>>12726510>piracy doesn't kill hardware. If anything it bolsters it.I tend to agree with this since it was the only reason I bought a PSP and original Xbox, except I'd put it more on the ability to run homebrew/emulators.
>>12726440Sega killed the DC. The company was shitting out of every orifice for years by the time they launched the dreamcast. It never stood a chance at success.
Honestly in the long run, it made the DC the only system of the 6th generation to have a continued legacy and new games being constantly made for it due to that back-door exploit. I can't think of anything after it that had no form of protection in place that would theoretically allow someone to make their own game and just have the system boot it up without any soft mod shenanigans, unless we count weird shit like the Nuon and HyperScan.
>>12726440you could play burned discs on the ps1 by opening the lid and swapping them.gonna hafta find another excuse for your shit consoles failure you sad obsessed sack
>>12726440People fail to realize that not everyone is poor and that paying $20 dollars for a game isn't expensive.Those who can afford to buy genuine copies and new releases will simply buy them at the nearest store.The PS2 sold over 1.5 billion games, despite being the most pirated console of all time.The PS1 received a harry potter game in November 2001, at a time when piracy for the console was already widespread. That game alone sold over 8 million copies, outselling games like MGS and Tomb Raider.For instance, nowadays it is possible to emulate practically any game for free and super easy even on a regular phone. Even so, the retro gaming market remains full of buyers and sellers. People who can afford to spend money will do so, regardless of piracy or emulation.
>>12726440The attach rate proves that piracy didn't kill the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast died because Sega ran out of money.
>>12726440No, the Dreamcast died because the Sega Dreamcast would have needed to sell like 40 million units within a year of its launch for Sega to crawl out of the financial hole they dug themselves. Most people don't realize the Dreamcast was doing well but not well enough for Sega to recover from...>the Saturn and all its associated baggage, including but not limited to its fumbled launch, the failure of Sonic X-Treme's development, and Bernie Stolar effectively giving up on the platform and declining to localize any Jap games or produce new games in established franchises like Streets of Rage>fucking around with expensive superfluous hardware like the 32X and Nomad which only served to cannibalize Saturn sales>producing insanely expensive Model 3 arcade games that used hardware based on state-of-the-art Lockheed Martin military simulation shit... Just for them to only find wide success in Japan>producing insanely expensive niche games like NiGHTS and Shenmue, which has the distinction of being the first video game with a $100+ million budget and the most expensive video game ever produced up to that pointSega's CEO had to basically give up all his money just to keep Sega from going bankrupt and dissolving. They would have buckled under the pressure even without the PS2 looming over the horizon because their years of financial recklessness had fast caught up to them.
>>12726783>insanely expensive niche games like NiGHTSWhat was the budget for tranny clown? A ham sandwich?
>>12726440If you are a game industry exec, and someone tells you that all of the Dreamcasts made up to that point can play pirated games with no mod chip necessary, are you ever going to allow your company to release another Dreamcast game? Oh sure, the Dreamcasts being made in the *future* will be fixed, but the ones already in people's homes, there's nothing Sega can do about it.
>>12726763>The attach rate proves that piracy didn't kill the Dreamcast.The attach rate happened before it was possible to put a CD-R in almost any Dreamcast and play pirated games. At first you needed specific Dreamcast models and a boot disc, then some models could boot CD-Rs alone and some still needed a boot disc, and then eventually almost every Dreamcast made (except for some of the very last ones) could play CD-Rs without a boot disc. And I think even those last batches eventually got cracked. The person who bought a Dreamcast in 1999, and had amassed a collection of retail games for it was never going to buy another game after about late 2001.
>>12726783Don't forget their famous console launch date fuckup which led to them being blacklisted by the best games studios!Which directly led to them losing access to those studios permanently, as Sony and Nintendo scooped up the business and locked them into exclusivity contracts just to further fuel Sega's demise.
>>12726440It wasn't that, it was simply having to make american dreamcast with american made hardware which increased the cost of the dreamcast but they had to sell it at same price as japanese ones even at loss.For one side they made money while losing money from the american branch (selling console at loss, executives passing house expenses as company expenses, big private parties at company expense and so on).
>>12726440It wasn't piracy, piracy just damaged publishers and game devs.
>>12726440I downloaded dozens of games... On dialup. I paid for those games, just not with money
>>12726440>copy AI slop>paste into reply>steal picture from a reddit thread>reply to yourselfstill not able to fool anybody with your cringe bait and spam threads, loser? terrible shame.
>>12726493OP the lolcow uses ai engine to generate slop to post on 4chan. he doesn't understand a word of what he posts. it's just random bullshit
>>12726510>If anything it bolsters it.Come to think of it, PS2 killing off the DC makes a lot of sense when you view it that way. Thirdies still use it as their primary piracy device.
>>12726440Sega's retardation killed the Dreamcast.And Saturn.And 32X.And Sega CD.And after the Dreamcast, Sonic the motherfucking Hedgehog.If anything, those cucks deserve getting their stuff pirated.
>>12726846Is there any truth to this or is this anon completely full of shit? As far as I can tell the only difference is the orange color scheme instead of blue for NA Dreamcast stuff. The orange looks better btw.
>>12726975OP annihilated
>>12727649There's some truth, but anon's only half correct. There was an American-made DC prototype called "Project Blackbelt" that used 3Dfx hardware, but SoJ went with PowerVR instead.
>>12727678I knew about the 3Dfx thing, but yeah, that was abandoned way before it launched in Japan. The North American consoles are the exact same hardware so I have no idea what he’s on about.
>>12726510Correct. North America accounts for over half of the Dreamcast’s total worldwide hardware sales. Japan and Europe were firmly PlayStation territories and largely ignored it.
Piracy never killed anything, it's just a usual scapegoat to avoid talking about actual failures and weakness by talking about something the industry can rally behind.
The Dreamcast died because it had no fucking games.
>>12726447I remember my boot disc had an image of a cartoon reindeer, I've never seen this yellow screen.
>>12726440>Did piracy really kill the Dreamcast?There are anecdotes from people working in stores, mentioning that once the boot discs came out, their software sales dropped dramatically but hardware sales remained the same.If that's not what you consider killing the platform then I don't know what is.
>>12726440can you burn sega saturn games too or does that require a modded saturn?
>>12726978>OP the lolcow uses ai engine to generate slop to post on 4chan. he doesn't understand a word of what he posts. it's just random bullshitI'm actually curious on seeing the poster statistics on this, it's entirely possible that rapeape is now hiring dedicated shitposters to make new threads to make the site look more active (keep in mind posting numbers are down to 2007 levels on most boards).
>>12727823saturn requires a hardware mod to play backups, either a cheat cart, a modchip, or taping down the lid so you can swap discs. when I got my first one, 15 minutes later I was playing burnt discs on it.
>>12727832It honestly wouldn't surprise me at all. I've been seeing this happen across different boards for a while now.
>>12726447If you search youtube for "Utopia boot disc" you can find most variations. I had the one with the reindeer.
>>12726493It's incredible how little is known about people from that era, or perhaps how little information about them survived to this day. We have no idea who developed those early modchips, copiers, etc.Every hacker working on console hacks past the PSP is basically immortalized.
>>12726802>And I think even those last batches eventually got cracked.Not true. You need to flash a bios that restores mil-cd.
>>12726440Despite what everyone here wants to believe, it definitely had an impact on it, however the main cause was the PS2’s success
>>12726510Care to show an example of this being true?
>>12726440>Did piracy really kill the Dreamcast? No it didn't.Stop watching that fag segaCucklard.PS2 was easier to pirate on.Didn't release with a hdd.Didn't release with a dvd drive.Didn't listen to developers on focusing on dvds.Messed up online due to Microsoft.For the love of God stop watching that fat piece of shit on yt just copy paste he reads of Wikipedia
>>12728393That would be a "crack" anon.
>>12728498>PS2 was easier to pirate on.lol?Are you mistaking 2 for 1?
>>12728510PS2 was extremely easy to pirate on AND you could do it via any gaming store.All you needed to do was walk into any store like walmart and buy an action replay 2. You then inserted the card into slot 2, used the disk to boot to main menu and then simply swapped out your copied ps2 game
