RetroGaming

Don't forget DVD playback. Most people by the year 2000 still only had VHS. DVD players were prohibitively expensive at the time so a lot of people were holding out. PS2 had DVD and cost about half the price of dedicated players. I know a lot of homes bought them purely as a movie machine.

I bet if Dreamcast had DVD playback the history of the Dreamcast would've been very different.

Yeah I understand they were all 6th gen. My point was just that it doesn't really make sense to blame the Dreamcast failure on its timing. Dates also matter:

Late 98 was release in Japan
Late 99 was release worldwide
Early 2000 was PS2 in Japan
Late 2000 was PS2 worldwide
Early 2001 Dreamcast was killed
Late 2001/Early 2002 Gamecube and Xbox

The meme makes it look like the Dreamcast popped up late, but timing was not the reason for it's demise at all. PlayStation dominating the market, as you mentioned, was probably the biggest one. People knew the PS2 was around the corner and the Dreamcast had barely been out in the EU by the time the PS2 was strutting it's stuff on the Japanese market.

Problem is, you could pirate every single game on dreamcast. Just get a legit copy of the game (renting, buying and returning, borrow from a friend), and have a CD burner.

Then you could make a 1:1 copy of the game in roughly an hour.

You make it sound trivial. While Sega left a security hole open for games to be loaded from a regular CD, the official games were released on GD-ROMs, a dual-layer CD with a 1.2 GB capacity.

So first off, you couldn't read them completely in a regular CD-ROM or even DVD-ROM drive. (I'm not counting the "swap" method because it's failure-prone and involves partially dismantling the drive and fiddling with it during operation.) You had to connect your console to a computer and use some custom software to read the GD-ROM on the console, and send the data over.

Once you had the data, you then had the problem of trying to fit a potentially 1.2 GB GD-ROM image onto a regular CD-ROM. A handful of games were actually small enough to fit already, and 80-minute and 99-minute CD-Rs would work in the DC and could store larger games. But for many games, crackers had to modify the game files to make them fit.

Often they would just strip all the music first, because that was an easy way to save a decent amount of space. Then if that wasn't enough, they would start stripping video files, and/or re-encoding audio and textures at lower fidelity.

Burning a CD-R from a downloaded file was easy, but ripping the original discs and converting them to a burnable image generally was not.

you could go to your local library and carry a USB stick.

I don't remember it this way. Nothing else came close to the portable storage capacity of CD (and thus CD-R and CD-RW). The iomega zip drive was still a popular medium, allowing rewritable 100mb or 250mb cartridge. That was the preferred way to get big files to and from a computer lab when I was an engineering student in 2000.

USB flash drives had just been released in 2000, and their capacity was measured in like 8/16/32mb, nowhere near enough to meaningfully move CD images.

Then again, as a college student with on-campus broadband on the completely unregulated internet (back when HTTP and the WWW weren't necessarily considered the most important protocols on the internet), it was all about shared FTP logins PMed over IRC to download illegal shit. The good stuff never touched an actual website.

Firefly.

They do exist. For sonic adventure you could load a Chao onto it and it was basically a tamagotchi.

The fact that nobody has done "screen in a controller" since Nintendo toyed around with a handful of Gamecube-GBA games is a crime. It was a cool ass idea that got displaced by internet lobbies before it got off the ground.

edit: yeah I know Wii U too but that's not what I mean, that's something else.

Deinitely never editing that

Yes! It's the only kind of game where an LLM would be a good addition.