How did Dreamcast bootlegs come about in the first place?
In October of 1999, a number of private hackers and software pirate groups operating independently of each other managed to “break” Sega’s proprietary GD-ROM format and read the program data previously hidden away on the outer high density area of the discs. At the beginning of 2000, several pirate groups obtained full-blown legit copies of both Dreamcast SDKs along with the appropriate hardware, which enabled them to read GD-ROMs directly. The key breakthrough apparently came in the spring of 2000, when one of these groups chanced upon a security hole in the Dreamcast’s bootstrap sequence that had been deliberately put there by Sega of Japan. When actived by what has been described by some as “a convoluted control sequence,” it enabled a stock Dreamcast to read program code from a standard CD-ROM instead of searching for the high density area on a presumably preloaded GD-ROM. From that point forward, it was only a matter of time until one of these groups devised a means to both enable
