[laurent123456]

Interesting that they've invested so much in designing a new unique type of CD-ROM, even being the only one to manufacture it, and then being caught by a feature they didn't even need. The obfuscating trick was also kind of lazy from the dev team who added it.

But I don't think this hacking was the reason for the end of Sega, because nearly all consoles at that time could be modded to play hacked games. Sega had been messing up for years before that, with all the useless hardware (Sega-CD, Sega 32X, and even the Game Gear and Saturn weren't big successes) they had been releasing after the Megadrive. The Dreamcast was good but just no good enough to save the company, they basically would have needed a console that completely dominate the market to recover, and to compete against Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

[ljf]

It is easy to say 'didn't even need' - as this misses the huge draw that karaoke devices had in Japan and beyond at the time. Plus VCD had a huge draw across many Asian markets. These could have been the Dreamcast's 'killer app' in an alternative path.

[rasz]

They didnt, GDROM is a slight tweak to CDROM standard, just enough to make it not readable in standard drives.