4 ms·

The DC was doing well, but the bank account was already overdrawn. Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000

The DC was doing well, but the bank account was already overdrawn. Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000. The attach rate was reportedly better than average. And the MS thing was just the availability of middleware that a few games used.

MBCook 3y ago
As the console continued on, if we assume it lived a full five years or something, piracy would have gotten worse as more and more CD burners became commonplace. Didn’t they have to pay MS a small license fee for each unit? I’m assuming that was a drag too. Not one that killed it, but just another little kick.
- SpecialistK 3y ago
  The MilCD exploit was already patched in the last hardware revisions (VA2) so I imagine it would be a bit like the Switch (IIRC) where early models are vulnerable to exploits and more desirable on the second-hand market. I'm not sure what the agreement with Microsoft was, but it was probably on a per-game basis if the developers wanted to use Windows CE.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Oh I didn’t know it was patched in hardware. I knew it was per game whether the software actually used the windows CE stuff. I’m really not sure it was ever used much at all. I know the first version of Sega rally used it but it performed so poorly they had an updated version that didn’t that they put out later to fix the issues. And I’m not sure the bad version even came to the states.
    - SpecialistK 3y ago
      Technically I misspoke. Some VA2 DCs used the older BIOS with the exploit still there, but most did have it patched. One Reddit thread I see claims that Microsoft actually paid Sega for the Windows CE logo on the front of the system. But as you said, not many games used it.
- 486sx33 3y ago
  You COULD d/l a game on 56k, worked best if you had a dedicated phone line. It believe it was just under 48hrs for a large game… I had almost every game! I loved DC Railroad tycoon for the win as a WinCE game I also didn’t mind the web browser and some of the online stuff - I only had dial up on the Dreamcast - broadband adapters were extremely rare! Plus I didn’t have broadband anyway. Crazy taxi was a real favorite as well. I worked all summer in high school and my first purchase was a Dreamcast. I was the first person I knew in town that got the utopia boot disc, and then on from there. Discjuggler burns for self boots, manual patching - unlocked Japanese games. What a fun time!
  - SpecialistK 3y ago
    I also love DC - enough to be typing this with an arm with 2 DC tattoos :D But I've never taken it online. I'll be getting a DreamPi at some stage, but sadly shipping to where I am takes it out of "impulse buy" territory.
giantrobot 3y ago
> Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000. Piracy of CD based games in the late 90s most assuredly did not require broadband or personal ownership of a CD-R drive. A lot of piracy happened via SneakerNet. As long as you knew someone with games (legit or pirated copies) and a CD-R drive you could get your own copies for the cost of a CD-R disc. Every college had at least one person with a CD binder full of CD-Rs of pirated PC and console games. I suspect a majority of high schools at the time did as well. Dorm ResNets were also loaded down with FTPs and SMB shares filled with games, porn, and warez.
- SpecialistK 3y ago
  Maybe so. I had an Action Replay disc from the time that presumably used MilCD. But according to this link (sadly Fandom), the attach rate was good: https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio#Consoles https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio#Consoles So SneakerNet and dorm rooms may have been a factor, but not enough of one to kill the system.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    > but not enough of one to kill the system. Oh definitely no, IME piracy was a much better issue on the original PlayStation, very quickly every other friend had a cousin who would chip your console and had access to a CD-R. Plus didn’t the Dreamcast use some weirdo variant of CD?
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      > Plus didn’t the Dreamcast use some weirdo variant of CD? Yes, GD-ROM which through some tricks could fit something like 1GB on a disc. However what most pirated discs did was just stub out the FMV. Most games that used the full space on the disc did so because of FMV. Quite a few games would easily fit on a Mode-2 700MB CD-R with the FMV stubbed out. This was thanks to the MIL-CD functionality of the Dreamcast which was only removed in very late models.
yellowapple 3y ago
> Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000. In those days the piracy threat was less "players with broadband and CD-R drives are downloading games for free" and more "flea marketeers with CD-R burners are copying games and selling them to players for a fraction of MSRP".
ssl-3 3y ago
Perhaps things were different in my neck of the woods, but my recollection is different: By the turn of the century, CD recorders were pretty common amongst even some of the non-geek computer users I knew. Most of the extant drives were not very good, but by then there were also examples of absolutely stellar drives (some of which are still considered good for burning a proper CD-R, even though they're a ~quarter-century old, like the Plextor PR-820). I don't recall any particular difficulty in downloading games over 56k dialup around Y2K with a modem, though it was certainly a good bit faster with ISDN (and a couple of years later, 2Mbps-ish DOCSIS). It was not fast with dialup -- it took a day or so, or longer if slowed it down to avoid what we now call buffer bloat -- but some of us had time, and a ye olde Linux box that was going to be dialed-in ~24/7 anyway. But usually, the route to piracy that I recall being most-utilized back then involved renting a game from the video store for a few dollars and making a copy (or a few, for friends).
- SpecialistK 3y ago
  I can only speak from my own experience, but I was on dialup until 2002 and had 1 friend with both broadband and a CD-R drive around the DC's lifespan. We burned many DivX files to Video CDs, but no games (his dad brought back a chipped PS1 and lots of burned games from Kosovo though) Perhaps the availability of burning games wasn't the right lens for me to look at it, but if the attach rate of 8 games per system is true (as I linked to in another reply) then that's similar to the NES and SNES and not at all a factor in the system's demise. Because the DC's games were on Yamaha 1GB CDs ("GD-ROM") I doubt popping the disc in a PC and running Nero would have been possible. Most dumps were probably made using chipped consoles and a coder's cable or BBA.
  - ssl-3 3y ago
    And I can only speak for myself, too, but: By Y2K, I had dual-B channel [128kbps] ISDN dialup with a local ISP. (As housing situations changed, it ebbed and flowed a bit after that for me at home -- at one point after ISDN, I was doing MLPPP with three 33.6k modems and hating every minute of it. But by 2001, I had unfettered access to 860/160kbps ADSL at a music studio I helped build that I could drive to in about 20 minutes, any time of day or night -- by then, "broadband" was common in my old turf. And by mid-2002, I had DOCSIS at home. Changes were happening fast back then, for me.) The Dreamcast did use GD-ROM, which did hold up to around 1GB, and the usual way to rip those was to connect the [rooted/hacked/jailbroke/whatever-the-term-was] DC to the PC, so the Dreamcast could do all of the reading and transfer that data to the PC for processing and burning. But even though GD-ROM could hold 1GB, a lot of DC games were (often quite a lot) less than ~650MB or ~700MB of actual-data, so they often fit well onto mostly-kinda-standard CD-R blanks of the day without loss of game data. There were also release groups -- because of course there were -- that specialized partly in shrinking a larger (>650 or >700MB) DC title down to a size that would fit onto a CD-R, or sometimes onto two of them. (That involved Deep Magic, for the time, and implicitly involved a download stage.) And my friends and family? I had one sibling who danced around with computers, and she had a (flaky AF, but existing) CD burner a year or two before I did, and most of my computer-geek friends were burning discs before Y2K as well -- even if it meant using a communal CD burner at a mutual friend's house. But again, that's just my story -- which I've simplified to remove some stages from. I don't doubt your own story even a little bit. Gaming for high-speed internet access, even in properly-large cities, was kind of the wild west around that time, and I agree that CD burning was unusual around that time. I was a bit early for getting things done fast in my own area of small-town Ohio, and I think I was generally good at exploiting available options. (Not all ideas were good ideas: I once helped negotiate and implement a deal to run some Ethernet cable overhead across a parking lot to a small ISP next door, so we could have access to a T1 at the shop I was working at, for $40/month. The money was right according to all parties, and we didn't abuse it too bad or too often...until it all got blown up by lightning, with huge losses on both ends of that connection. The ISP never fully recovered and died absolutely a month or two later. Which, incidentally, is how I learned to never, ever run Cat5 between two buildings. Woops.)

MBCook 3y ago

As the console continued on, if we assume it lived a full five years or something, piracy would have gotten worse as more and more CD burners became commonplace. Didn’t they have to pay MS a small license fee for each unit? I’m assuming that was a drag too. Not one that killed it, but just another little kick.

SpecialistK 3y ago
The MilCD exploit was already patched in the last hardware revisions (VA2) so I imagine it would be a bit like the Switch (IIRC) where early models are vulnerable to exploits and more desirable on the second-hand market. I'm not sure what the agreement with Microsoft was, but it was probably on a per-game basis if the developers wanted to use Windows CE.
- MBCook 3y ago
  Oh I didn’t know it was patched in hardware. I knew it was per game whether the software actually used the windows CE stuff. I’m really not sure it was ever used much at all. I know the first version of Sega rally used it but it performed so poorly they had an updated version that didn’t that they put out later to fix the issues. And I’m not sure the bad version even came to the states.
  - SpecialistK 3y ago
    Technically I misspoke. Some VA2 DCs used the older BIOS with the exploit still there, but most did have it patched. One Reddit thread I see claims that Microsoft actually paid Sega for the Windows CE logo on the front of the system. But as you said, not many games used it.
486sx33 3y ago
You COULD d/l a game on 56k, worked best if you had a dedicated phone line. It believe it was just under 48hrs for a large game… I had almost every game! I loved DC Railroad tycoon for the win as a WinCE game I also didn’t mind the web browser and some of the online stuff - I only had dial up on the Dreamcast - broadband adapters were extremely rare! Plus I didn’t have broadband anyway. Crazy taxi was a real favorite as well. I worked all summer in high school and my first purchase was a Dreamcast. I was the first person I knew in town that got the utopia boot disc, and then on from there. Discjuggler burns for self boots, manual patching - unlocked Japanese games. What a fun time!
- SpecialistK 3y ago
  I also love DC - enough to be typing this with an arm with 2 DC tattoos :D But I've never taken it online. I'll be getting a DreamPi at some stage, but sadly shipping to where I am takes it out of "impulse buy" territory.

giantrobot 3y ago

> Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000. Piracy of CD based games in the late 90s most assuredly did not require broadband or personal ownership of a CD-R drive. A lot of piracy happened via SneakerNet. As long as you knew someone with games (legit or pirated copies) and a CD-R drive you could get your own copies for the cost of a CD-R disc. Every college had at least one person with a CD binder full of CD-Rs of pirated PC and console games. I suspect a majority of high schools at the time did as well. Dorm ResNets were also loaded down with FTPs and SMB shares filled with games, porn, and warez.

SpecialistK 3y ago
Maybe so. I had an Action Replay disc from the time that presumably used MilCD. But according to this link (sadly Fandom), the attach rate was good: https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio#Consoles https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Software_tie_ratio#Consoles So SneakerNet and dorm rooms may have been a factor, but not enough of one to kill the system.
- masklinn 3y ago
  > but not enough of one to kill the system. Oh definitely no, IME piracy was a much better issue on the original PlayStation, very quickly every other friend had a cousin who would chip your console and had access to a CD-R. Plus didn’t the Dreamcast use some weirdo variant of CD?
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    > Plus didn’t the Dreamcast use some weirdo variant of CD? Yes, GD-ROM which through some tricks could fit something like 1GB on a disc. However what most pirated discs did was just stub out the FMV. Most games that used the full space on the disc did so because of FMV. Quite a few games would easily fit on a Mode-2 700MB CD-R with the FMV stubbed out. This was thanks to the MIL-CD functionality of the Dreamcast which was only removed in very late models.

yellowapple 3y ago

> Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000. In those days the piracy threat was less "players with broadband and CD-R drives are downloading games for free" and more "flea marketeers with CD-R burners are copying games and selling them to players for a fraction of MSRP".

ssl-3 3y ago

Perhaps things were different in my neck of the woods, but my recollection is different: By the turn of the century, CD recorders were pretty common amongst even some of the non-geek computer users I knew. Most of the extant drives were not very good, but by then there were also examples of absolutely stellar drives (some of which are still considered good for burning a proper CD-R, even though they're a ~quarter-century old, like the Plextor PR-820). I don't recall any particular difficulty in downloading games over 56k dialup around Y2K with a modem, though it was certainly a good bit faster with ISDN (and a couple of years later, 2Mbps-ish DOCSIS). It was not fast with dialup -- it took a day or so, or longer if slowed it down to avoid what we now call buffer bloat -- but some of us had time, and a ye olde Linux box that was going to be dialed-in ~24/7 anyway. But usually, the route to piracy that I recall being most-utilized back then involved renting a game from the video store for a few dollars and making a copy (or a few, for friends).

SpecialistK 3y ago
I can only speak from my own experience, but I was on dialup until 2002 and had 1 friend with both broadband and a CD-R drive around the DC's lifespan. We burned many DivX files to Video CDs, but no games (his dad brought back a chipped PS1 and lots of burned games from Kosovo though) Perhaps the availability of burning games wasn't the right lens for me to look at it, but if the attach rate of 8 games per system is true (as I linked to in another reply) then that's similar to the NES and SNES and not at all a factor in the system's demise. Because the DC's games were on Yamaha 1GB CDs ("GD-ROM") I doubt popping the disc in a PC and running Nero would have been possible. Most dumps were probably made using chipped consoles and a coder's cable or BBA.
- ssl-3 3y ago
  And I can only speak for myself, too, but: By Y2K, I had dual-B channel [128kbps] ISDN dialup with a local ISP. (As housing situations changed, it ebbed and flowed a bit after that for me at home -- at one point after ISDN, I was doing MLPPP with three 33.6k modems and hating every minute of it. But by 2001, I had unfettered access to 860/160kbps ADSL at a music studio I helped build that I could drive to in about 20 minutes, any time of day or night -- by then, "broadband" was common in my old turf. And by mid-2002, I had DOCSIS at home. Changes were happening fast back then, for me.) The Dreamcast did use GD-ROM, which did hold up to around 1GB, and the usual way to rip those was to connect the [rooted/hacked/jailbroke/whatever-the-term-was] DC to the PC, so the Dreamcast could do all of the reading and transfer that data to the PC for processing and burning. But even though GD-ROM could hold 1GB, a lot of DC games were (often quite a lot) less than ~650MB or ~700MB of actual-data, so they often fit well onto mostly-kinda-standard CD-R blanks of the day without loss of game data. There were also release groups -- because of course there were -- that specialized partly in shrinking a larger (>650 or >700MB) DC title down to a size that would fit onto a CD-R, or sometimes onto two of them. (That involved Deep Magic, for the time, and implicitly involved a download stage.) And my friends and family? I had one sibling who danced around with computers, and she had a (flaky AF, but existing) CD burner a year or two before I did, and most of my computer-geek friends were burning discs before Y2K as well -- even if it meant using a communal CD burner at a mutual friend's house. But again, that's just my story -- which I've simplified to remove some stages from. I don't doubt your own story even a little bit. Gaming for high-speed internet access, even in properly-large cities, was kind of the wild west around that time, and I agree that CD burning was unusual around that time. I was a bit early for getting things done fast in my own area of small-town Ohio, and I think I was generally good at exploiting available options. (Not all ideas were good ideas: I once helped negotiate and implement a deal to run some Ethernet cable overhead across a parking lot to a small ISP next door, so we could have access to a T1 at the shop I was working at, for $40/month. The money was right according to all parties, and we didn't abuse it too bad or too often...until it all got blown up by lightning, with huge losses on both ends of that connection. The ISP never fully recovered and died absolutely a month or two later. Which, incidentally, is how I learned to never, ever run Cat5 between two buildings. Woops.)