The fact this was broken by stealing a developer's SDK is disappointing. Real hackers would have disassembled the machine to reverse engineer it, rather than using black market/social engineering tricks.
No true Scotsman in full play here.
How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
11–20 of 169 posts
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#12The fact this was broken by stealing a developer's SDK is disappointing. Real hackers would have disassembled the machine to reverse engineer it, rather than using black market/social engineering tricks.
No true Scotsman in full play here.
I feel like "gatekeeping" is a more appropriate term, but yeah.
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#13Sad story. Steal. And bring down the shop.
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#14Did the breaking of the copy protection on the Dreamcast really play a big part in Sega's downfall? If so, it would be one of the only cases I know of where IP piracy led to financial ruin of the content creator.
Well the hack had a really low entry barrier. As in; no hardware modifications needed. You could just download an ISO from the net and you were good to go with your unmodified Dreamcast. In contrast the other consoles in that era Xbox, PlayStation, etc. all needed hardware modifications in order to run copied content.
But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners?
Also, and again only from vague memory, wasn't the dreamcast itself underselling drastically. If it was game sales that broke the manufacturer then maybe - but I recall the console itself being a bit of a flop?
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#15Semi-related, there's a piece of hardware being made (some parts 3D printed even) called GDEmu that replaces the optical drive components with an SD card reader, allowing people to play (backups of legally owned games) on their original hardware without wearing out the drive mechanism.
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the hack had a really low entry barrier. As in; no hardware modifications needed. You could just download an ISO from the net and you were good to go with your unmodified Dreamcast. In contrast the other consoles in that era Xbox, PlayStation, etc. all needed hardware modifications in order to run copied content.
But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners? Also, and again only from vague memory, wasn't the dreamcast itself underselling drastically. If it was game sales that broke the manufacturer then mayb…
> But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO?
Does it matter? You only need a few people to download and burn the CDs, and sell them in stalls or out of a backpack. From what I remember from that era, physical distribution of warez through burned CDs was very common.
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the hack had a really low entry barrier. As in; no hardware modifications needed. You could just download an ISO from the net and you were good to go with your unmodified Dreamcast. In contrast the other consoles in that era Xbox, PlayStation, etc. all needed hardware modifications in order to run copied content.
But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners? Also, and again only from vague memory, wasn't the dreamcast itself underselling drastically. If it was game sales that broke the manufacturer then mayb…
At this point in history, at least in the U.K., you could go round the back of your local car boot sale on a Saturday to find someone selling unauthorised copies of console games.
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the hack had a really low entry barrier. As in; no hardware modifications needed. You could just download an ISO from the net and you were good to go with your unmodified Dreamcast. In contrast the other consoles in that era Xbox, PlayStation, etc. all needed hardware modifications in order to run copied content.
But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners? Also, and again only from vague memory, wasn't the dreamcast itself underselling drastically. If it was game sales that broke the manufacturer then mayb…
> But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners?
As I remember from my high school days, there were lots of people who were downloading ISOs (i.e. in their work or university, where they had access to fat 1Mb/s pipes), burning them and selling at a significant profit. Of course it was illegal, but still they managed to sell them through their friends or from improvised stalls on the weekend computer market, etc.
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#19Semi-related, there's a piece of hardware being made (some parts 3D printed even) called GDEmu that replaces the optical drive components with an SD card reader, allowing people to play (backups of legally owned games) on their original hardware without wearing out the drive mechanism.
In my case I got fed up of replacing drive mechanisms after about the third one so I invested in one of these. It has the side benefits of much faster loading times and a much quieter console all round, too.
I won't deny that there is also a piracy aspect to it - I have a fairly large collection of boxed original Dreamcast games but there are a few on my GDEmu that couldn't be classed as "backups". The unreleased Half-Life beta is well worth checking out, for example.
Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
#20There are two points to note.
The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. They didn’t sell many of the consoles... if it was a piracy issue then you’d expect they’d sell many consoles, but few games (the line up of games was really good).
The article mentions Ikaruga a lot. It worth noting that Ikaruga for the Dreamcast was released a year after the Dreamcast was cancelled. They probably weren’t hugely concerned about piracy at this point.
From memory it was an easy port for them, because the arcade board that Ikaruga ran on is also the same as the Dreamcast.