Perhaps things were different in my neck of the woods, but my recollection is different: By the turn of the century, CD recorders were pretty common amongst even some of the non-geek computer users I knew. Most of the extant drives were not very good, but by then there were also examples of absolutely stellar drives (some of which are still considered good for burning a proper CD-R, even though they're a ~quarter-century old, like the Plextor PR-820).
I don't recall any particular difficulty in downloading games over 56k dialup around Y2K with a modem, though it was certainly a good bit faster with ISDN (and a couple of years later, 2Mbps-ish DOCSIS).
It was not fast with dialup -- it took a day or so, or longer if slowed it down to avoid what we now call buffer bloat -- but some of us had time, and a ye olde Linux box that was going to be dialed-in ~24/7 anyway.
But usually, the route to piracy that I recall being most-utilized back then involved renting a game from the video store for a few dollars and making a copy (or a few, for friends).
I can only speak from my own experience, but I was on dialup until 2002 and had 1 friend with both broadband and a CD-R drive around the DC's lifespan. We burned many DivX files to Video CDs, but no games (his dad brought back a chipped PS1 and lots of burned games from Kosovo though)
Perhaps the availability of burning games wasn't the right lens for me to look at it, but if the attach rate of 8 games per system is true (as I linked to in another reply) then that's similar to the NES and SNES and not at all a factor in the system's demise.
Because the DC's games were on Yamaha 1GB CDs ("GD-ROM") I doubt popping the disc in a PC and running Nero would have been possible. Most dumps were probably made using chipped consoles and a coder's cable or BBA.
And I can only speak for myself, too, but: By Y2K, I had dual-B channel [128kbps] ISDN dialup with a local ISP. (As housing situations changed, it ebbed and flowed a bit after that for me at home -- at one point after ISDN, I was doing MLPPP with three 33.6k modems and hating every minute of it. But by 2001, I had unfettered access to 860/160kbps ADSL at a music studio I helped build that I could drive to in about 20 minutes, any time of day or night -- by then, "broadband" was common in my old turf. And by mid-2002, I had DOCSIS at home. Changes were happening fast back then, for me.)
The Dreamcast did use GD-ROM, which did hold up to around 1GB, and the usual way to rip those was to connect the [rooted/hacked/jailbroke/whatever-the-term-was] DC to the PC, so the Dreamcast could do all of the reading and transfer that data to the PC for processing and burning.
But even though GD-ROM could hold 1GB, a lot of DC games were (often quite a lot) less than ~650MB or ~700MB of actual-data, so they often fit well onto mostly-kinda-standard CD-R blanks of the day without loss of game data.
There were also release groups -- because of course there were -- that specialized partly in shrinking a larger (>650 or >700MB) DC title down to a size that would fit onto a CD-R, or sometimes onto two of them. (That involved Deep Magic, for the time, and implicitly involved a download stage.)
And my friends and family? I had one sibling who danced around with computers, and she had a (flaky AF, but existing) CD burner a year or two before I did, and most of my computer-geek friends were burning discs before Y2K as well -- even if it meant using a communal CD burner at a mutual friend's house.
But again, that's just my story -- which I've simplified to remove some stages from.
I don't doubt your own story even a little bit. Gaming for high-speed internet access, even in properly-large cities, was kind of the wild west around that time, and I agree that CD burning was unusual around that time.
I was a bit early for getting things done fast in my own area of small-town Ohio, and I think I was generally good at exploiting available options.
(Not all ideas were good ideas: I once helped negotiate and implement a deal to run some Ethernet cable overhead across a parking lot to a small ISP next door, so we could have access to a T1 at the shop I was working at, for $40/month. The money was right according to all parties, and we didn't abuse it too bad or too often...until it all got blown up by lightning, with huge losses on both ends of that connection.
The ISP never fully recovered and died absolutely a month or two later.
Which, incidentally, is how I learned to never, ever run Cat5 between two buildings. Woops.)
My own story is complicated by the fact that my family moved trans-Atlantic at the time. In fact, I got a DC in the UK after the PS2 because we moved back and I got a system and games for cheap from a newspaper classified ad, around late 2002.
I suspect my parents didn't feel the need to upgrade from dial-up to DSL or DOCSIS while we were planning a 5000 mile move. We went from 1p-a-minute dial up ("put a timer on the stove, you have 15 minutes!") in 1998 to unlimited (but still with one phone line; drag the cord from the PC to the kitchen and hope Grandma doesn't try to call) a year-ish after, and then got 1.2Mbps DSL once we were in Canada in mid 2002.
My friend down the street upgraded and got a new PC around 1999 or 2000. I don't remember the specs, but it was much nicer than my dad's 300MHz K6-2 with no USB ports. For a while we even needed to use CursorKeys because the V90 modem used the same COM port as the mouse! So I used their PC for Napster, then Kazaa and WinMX, for 128kbps MP3s and "which pixel is Neo?" 700MB copies of The Matrix (sidenote: I warned him against searching for xXx featuring Vin Diesel, but he had to learn the hard way...)
We were aware of "chipped" consoles, and my family even asked the local indie game store if they could do it ("That'z Entertainment" in Lakeside, if any locals are reading this) but my only experiences with game piracy at that point was my dad's friend who had a modded PSX ("holy crap it says SCEA instead of SCEE!") and then the same friend as the paragraph above getting a PSX that his Army dad brought back from Eastern Europe along with Ice Age on DVD.
DC piracy was 100% a thing in its lifetime, but I still don't think it was widespread enough to have harmed the console's chances. The company was just out of cash.
> There were also release groups -- because of course there were -- that specialized partly in shrinking a larger (>650 or >700MB) DC title down to a size that would fit onto a CD-R, or sometimes onto two of them. (That involved Deep Magic, for the time, and implicitly involved a download stage.)
Even years later I was annoyed that the CDI version of Skies of Arcadia (Echelon, maybe?) didn't support the VGA box.
You've travelled a lot more than I have. I've mostly stuck around Ohio.
I suspect that we're about the same age.
Man, com ports and IRQs: I had 14 functional RS-232 ports on one machine, once, between the BocaBoard (with 10P10C jacks), the STB serial card that 3dfx promised to never erase documentation for (it is erased -- *thanks, nVidia*), and the couple of serial ports that were built into a motherboard or multi-IO card at that time.
Once configured to be actually-working, which I did mostly as a dare to myself, I could find no combination of connected serialized stuff that would upset it.
And that was fun having a ridiculous amount of serial ports: I had dumb terminals scattered around, and I had machines connected with SLIP and PLIP. (Ethernet seemed expensive, and "spare laptops" or "closet laptops" were not at all a thing yet.)
Anyhow, piracy: My friends and I were mostly into PSX back then. I may or may not have installed a dozen mod chips for my friends so I could get a discount on my own mod chip. (I was not trying to make money.)
Aaand there may have been quite a lot of piracy. I remember coming home and checking the mailbox to find a copy of Gran Turismo 2, with a hand-written note from a friend who I didn't expect to be able to succeed in duping a disc with Nero, but he'd done it, and hand-delivered it, and it worked. I subsequently played the fuck out of that game.
But you've clearly got a different perspective. And that's interesting to me.
> Even years later I was annoyed that the CDI version of Skies of Arcadia (Echelon, maybe?) didn't support the VGA box.
I've never actually-played a CDI system (I do recall poking at them in retail displays), and I don't know what "the VGA box" is in this context. Can you elaborate?
> I've never actually-played a CDI system (I do recall poking at them in retail displays), and I don't know what "the VGA box" is in this context. Can you elaborate?
Oh, sorry for the confusion. CDI and GDI are disc images for Dreamcast games, like ISO files. Not the Philips CDi game console.
The VGA box is the video output for Dreamcast, which supported 640x480 progressive scan video, most games supported it but a few didn't.
I did do a little bit for/with Dreamcast at one point a long time ago, but I never actually owned one for myself. It has always seemed like a nice platform when I've played games on one -- however that happened.
At one point I probably knew the difference between formats, but I've definitely forgotten. It has been a very long time.
(In other Sega news: The thing I really miss is the Virtua Fighter port to the Sega Saturn.)
I don't recall any particular difficulty in downloading games over 56k dialup around Y2K with a modem, though it was certainly a good bit faster with ISDN (and a couple of years later, 2Mbps-ish DOCSIS).
It was not fast with dialup -- it took a day or so, or longer if slowed it down to avoid what we now call buffer bloat -- but some of us had time, and a ye olde Linux box that was going to be dialed-in ~24/7 anyway.
But usually, the route to piracy that I recall being most-utilized back then involved renting a game from the video store for a few dollars and making a copy (or a few, for friends).