Dear Future Gamer

Regarding the cracked Dreamcast GD-ROM issue. For what it's worth, I work for an official Sega developer and the information I have is that GD-ROMs still haven't been copied. There was indeed a picture of a 'mod-chip' and a copy of Powerstone going around online, but it was actually fake - it even appeared before Powerstone came out in the shops, I think, so that was a bit of a giveaway! Whoever wrote in was right - you'd certainly get the .HK pirates advertising all over the newsgroups if they managed to get it working.

I guess the problem is partially the physical size of the games - they're often over 600Mb so you just can't copy them in a normal CD burner. There's been some talk of certain CD cutters getting BIOS fixes that allow you to cut over 650Mb on special discs, but nobody's actually figured it out yet. Plus there's no MOD-chip yet, which is probably also needed, although it's being sorted now the US Dreamcast is out in the shops.

Simon

FG: I'm becoming more convinced that the GD-ROM format's still pirate-proof at the moment, which has got to be great news for Sega, but I bet it won't mean a significant reduction in the price of Dreamcast games, despite publishers often shouting that piracy's one of the reasons games cost so much.