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XBOX modders caught. Might be facing Prison time if convicted.

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jennifer:

        Pong, Atari, nintendo, piracy wasnt even a concept at this time,[that I"m aware of] computers were a crazy fad, barbaric and slow.[Apple, IBM]
Thats where I quit consoles and started collecting arcade games. The timelines of what you guys are saying are correct however and with interesting
points, [1] burners were not somthing just everyone had. [2] dial-up, nuf said there. The Dreamcast may have or not had a piracy problem, but that
is about the the time the problem started. The one thing all these games[and the new ones] have in common is that they are the most state of the
art games/consoles of their day.

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: DaveMMR on December 14, 2010, 07:04:15 pm ---Fully aware I'm only speaking of my immediate surroundings.... I knew plenty of people who owned Dreamcast's; no one had pirated software.
--- End quote ---

Anyone in middle school, high school, or college at the time had easy access to someone selling them.  There was always one person that was doing it.  Same with PS1 games although that required hardware mods in many cases.  They were easily available on Ebay.  Piracy controls on Ebay didn't come along until much later.  I knew more people with Dreamcasts that had pirated games than did not have any.




--- Quote ---Second, YOU CAN NOT DIRECTLY COPY THE GAMES FROM THE ORIGINAL DISC. It's not the same as PSX - you can't rent a DC game and do a CD to CD copy. It simply doesn't work. You HAVE to download the images. Regular CD-ROM drives are incapable of reading the high-density sections of GD-ROM discs, and rumors of 'hacked cd-rom firmware' to read GD-ROMs are just that: rumors.
--- End quote ---

All you had to know is that someone local knew someone with a pirated game.  Sure, it took effort to get it from GDROM to CDROM, but once that was done, a person could turn out as many copies as they had blank discs.  One kid in a class buys a batch of copies off Ebay and sells copies to his friends to pay for the CD writer.  Happened all over the place.

What really slowed piracy on the DC was Gamestop prices.  When Gamestop started treating the DC like a worthless clearance item, probably because so many were buying pirated games rather than used games, you could get used games cheaper than copies.  

BTW, you don't need everyone to have a burner, you only need one.  And it was very possible to download large items over dialup.  There were several free download resumers that would manage lost connections or disconnects to use the phone.  Many free FTP clients did it too.  You have to realize that it only took one person in a group to be able to do these things and pass on the games to everybody else.  Maybe you folks weren't exposed but it really was widespread in a lot of places.

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: pinballjim on December 15, 2010, 09:47:07 am ---Widespread piracy certainly hasn't killed the DS and you can find flash cards EVERYWHERE.

I think you could argue piracy has beaten the PSP to death in the US, though.

--- End quote ---


Yeah, nobody is saying piracy is what killed the Dreamcast.  It didn't.  Sega did that themselves.

Most of the DS users I know are elementary school kids.  They aren't old enough to steal games unless their parents do it for them.  The age of the average user is probably what is saving the DS.  I don't know many adults who are regular DS users.  Nearly every kid I know has one.

Bootay:
From what I remember, CD Burners were relatively cheap and high speed Internet was pretty common at least in my area during the Dreamcast times. And they even had a broadband adapter for the Dreamcast.

But anyhow, yes it is true that a PC cannot read a GD-ROM but what was done back then was they got a device that was meant for developers to make their own games. What this device did was allow you to connect the Dreamcast to your PC. This device was made by Sega FYI. So they just linked the Dreamcast to the PC and copied the data from the GD-ROM to the PC, downsampled the audio and sometimes a few video clips, then burn the data to a CD and the Dreamcast would read them just fine with a Boot CD that the pirate scene made. Later they figured out a way to make the bootlegs work without the boot cd.

Just thought I would share that info for the ones that were confused on how they got the PC to read the GD-ROM. Sega screwed themselves more or less with this device, but like people have already stated, the Dreamcast was already on a decline anyway.

ChadTower:

--- Quote from: Bootay on December 15, 2010, 10:40:40 am ---Just thought I would share that info for the ones that were confused on how they got the PC to read the GD-ROM. Sega screwed themselves more or less with this device, but like people have already stated, the Dreamcast was already on a decline anyway.

--- End quote ---

That device was part of the standard software development kit provided by Sega to third party developers.  It was very expensive and came with a very heavy license agreement.  Of course, someone abused it, as always happens.  Devices like that exist for every closed software platform.  They have to or else the software development process would be severely slowed down by the nature of writing out masters for rapid testing.

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