The first track had plain text files, usually with the license of the game, sometimes even artwork of the game, while the second track was an audio track, so when you insert a GD into a conventional CD player, a voice comes up reminding you now you need to insert the game on a Dreamcast to be able to play it. The layout of these discs made it impossible to dump.Įach disc had three different tracks, two of them were normal CD tracks readable by PCs, the last one (and biggest one) was the GD track and contained the game. These discs used the exact same technology as CDs, but differ in that the tracks are closer to each other, giving the disc approximately 1.2Gb of capacity. Just like the Gamecube, Wii and Wii U, the Dreamcast used a special type of discs called GD-Rom (Gigabyte Disc). Not only did the Dreamcast have security when booting burned CDs, it also had security on the official discs too. You can easily identify a Dreamcast revision by looking for the number 0/1/2 under it. Like I said above, the latest hardware revision of the Dreamcast still had Mil-CD code, but the playback of Mil-CD is disabled (much like the Ps3, which still has the ps2_emu, but disabled), this revision was v2 (there were three DC revisions: v0, v1 and v2) and you require a modchip to play burned games. This is similar to ESR on the Ps2, ESR patches the disc and tricks the Ps2 system into thinking the burned disc is a DVD-Video, instead of a Ps2 game. In other words, the dreamcast was able to boot these games because they posed as Mil-CD, instead of burned backups.
The reason for this removal is because Mil-CD was used to fool the dreamcast into booting burned commercial games. But like I said, this feature was never officially used, as a matter of fact, it was disabled on latest versions of the Dreamcast.
SEGA DREAMCAST ROMS BURNING SOFTWARE
Mil-CD was system that Sega developed to add software contents to multimedia discs, for example, more advanced menus, browsers, amongst other apps. First, trying to load a 1:1 copy of a Dreamcast game will end in failure because the DC’s security system will detect it, so how did hackers managed to boot games? The answer lies in one of the Dreamcast’s many features that ended up unused due to the console’s short life: Mil CD.