The DC did have copy protection, it would've made no sense to release a disc-based console in the late 90s without it considering CD burners were becoming ubiquitous (some early CD-based consoles like Sega CD didn't have copy protection because nobody really had the means to write CDs at home). Sega believed their proprietary GD-ROM format would prevent piracy, but ironically it was another format called MIL-CD Sega introduced with the DC that allowed it to be exploited and cracked games to be run without the need to modify the console. Info here.
Am I remembering it wrong? I was huge on DCEmulation back in the early 2000s. Also I’m too lazy to read that link. I recall having to burn a weird music track… partition? To have my CD read. But I was able to play NEA/GB/SNES (with frameskip, unfortunately) and the only way my young broke butt could play Ikaruga was to pirate it and burn it to a CD.
DC copy protection was bypassed within months of the Western launch IIRC, so for most people who weren't really early adopters there might as well have been no copy protection. I'm not sure if this was the first ever copy protected console where you didn't need a physical mod to play CD-Rs, but it seems likely.
The DC did have copy protection, it would've made no sense to release a disc-based console in the late 90s without it considering CD burners were becoming ubiquitous (some early CD-based consoles like Sega CD didn't have copy protection because nobody really had the means to write CDs at home). Sega believed their proprietary GD-ROM format would prevent piracy, but ironically it was another format called MIL-CD Sega introduced with the DC that allowed it to be exploited and cracked games to be run without the need to modify the console. Info here.
Am I remembering it wrong? I was huge on DCEmulation back in the early 2000s. Also I’m too lazy to read that link. I recall having to burn a weird music track… partition? To have my CD read. But I was able to play NEA/GB/SNES (with frameskip, unfortunately) and the only way my young broke butt could play Ikaruga was to pirate it and burn it to a CD.
DC copy protection was bypassed within months of the Western launch IIRC, so for most people who weren't really early adopters there might as well have been no copy protection. I'm not sure if this was the first ever copy protected console where you didn't need a physical mod to play CD-Rs, but it seems likely.