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Dreamcast Hacked: Will the Net Spell the End of Sega?
by Jeremy Horwitz for Gamers Today
For a few months at least, the Internet appeared to be Sega's savior - the means by which the company would struggle back to profitability by linking all of its Dreamcast fans together for paid online gaming. Without warning, and right as the summer was just starting to heat up, Sega found itself fighting off an unexpected adversary: Internet-based Dreamcast game piracy. If the stories are to be believed, the company has had European game pirates arrested and charged with breaking the Dreamcast's copy protection and disseminating DC knockoffs over the Internet.
For all intents and purposes, Dreamcast software was supposed to be copy-proof. DC games are pressed onto proprietary "GD-ROMs," a special disc format that looks physically similar to a CD yet can hold twice as much data. Sega intentionally developed the format to be all but impossible to duplicate, and simple attempts to use standard CD hardware to read or copy DC games had predictably poor results. So game pirates developed a workaround which became possible only in the Internet era - they somehow read the data off of Sega GD-ROMs, transferred that data onto blank standard CDs, and tricked the Dreamcast into recognizing the standard CDs as game data discs.
The first question one might ask is "how," and there are actually two "how" questions here. First, if you can fit twice as much on a Dreamcast GD as a CD, how can you fit a full Dreamcast game onto a smaller capacity CD? Many DC titles either fail to use the full capacity of a GD-ROM or use the majority of the capacity for music, movie cut-scenes, or other space-consuming filler material that adds little to the actual game-playing experience of a given title. Pirates have been able to either transfer entire games intact from GD to CD or snip out material such as music without problems.
The second "how" question: how did programmers trick a Dreamcast into thinking that a recorded CD is a GD-ROM? Rumor has it that the pirates were armed with a Dreamcast development kit that slipped into the wrong hands, using it to develop a special boot disc that is only a megabyte in size and easy to transmit over the Internet. Sega has used boot discs since the days of the Saturn console, specially made CDs that their consoles recognize as keys to unlock the hardware protection against copied software. For the Saturn, Sega gave developers and game magazines access to two boot discs - a black disc and a red disc, one to unlock third-party games and one to unlock Sega titles. Dreamcast pirates have created a single boot disc that unlocks all discs on the console, letting the Dreamcast read the data as if it came off of a final GD-ROM.
Now copied Dreamcast software has spread like wildfire over the Internet, so much so that nearly every title from the American DC library is floating around on numerous servers across the world. The timing could not have been worse for Sega: the company's Japanese parent recently celebrated its first profitable quarter in years, albeit with minor profits, and is in the process of rolling out SegaNet, its 56K-modem network of Internet services for the Dreamcast. It's bad enough that the company's interest in seeing SegaNet flourish prevents Sega from taking the public relations offensive to decry the piracy enabled by Internet growth. Worse yet, SegaNet will ironically put novice DC Internet users in touch with more experienced DC fans around the globe, and swapping DC titles will thus unquestionably become even more popular as time goes on.
What are Sega's possible solutions? Stronger copy protection for DC titles is one strategy, though protective methods tend to be quickly outmaneuvered by software pirates. Filling up DC discs with additional crucial data may be another option, preventing CD-ROMs from being able to hold all of the game data; in the past, however, pirates have been willing to settle for partial or crippled versions of popular games just to have something close. Serial numbers, online serial checks and other forms of software keys have been tried in the past for PC games with limited success; Sega is unlikely to try these protections, as console gamers have never been forced to go through such measures just to enjoy their games.
If this sounds like a serious problem, that's because it is - Sega immediately set up an anti-DC piracy hotline and has been fielding calls regarding sources of the pirated material. The company's profitability and very longevity is at stake - as they've put all of their chips behind the Dreamcast and its software, Sega, unlike other companies, may actually go out of business if this piracy keeps up. If you have any information on Dreamcast piracy, you can contact Sega at the SEGA email address.
