Old Vintage Computing Research: Dusting Off Dreamcast Linux

And this is how GD-ROMs got ripped. Broadband adapter and the shoot out the data over Ethernet

Yes, or via the (very slow) built-in serial port. The broadband adapters are quite rare.

Interestingly, for a long time there were no publicly available tools for or docs on dumping GD-ROMs. New releases from Echelon and Kalisto would appear promptly, so there was obviously a way, but you could only partake in the rampant piracy by downloading the (occasionally-massaged to fit on a CD) disc images online.

A lot of discussion in the (tbf probably quite young and inexperienced) community was around how this was possible. A popular theory/rumor at the time was that they were using CD drives with modified firmware, for example.

This probably also helped keep the piracy amd homebrew scenes fairly well separated on the Dreamcast, as there was a lot of info and examples around running your own code. This is in contrast to eg. the Xbox scene, which was in many ways the equally vibrant successor to the DC scene, but where piracy and homebrew seemed much more intertwined. Not least because all the homebrew binaries were built using the off-limits Microsoft SDK, so you had to go to some shady FTP site via links found on IRC to download them.

If memory serves, the first (at least publicly disclosed) interface was the "Dreamcast Debug Handler", created by a member of Hitmen. This worked by adding a breakout connector to the expansion port terminator (which came with some Asian Dreamcast systems instead of a modem), then connecting that to some homebrew hardware to adapt the bus to a parallel port.

Another alternative that was reasonably-priced for a short while was the Japan-exclusive "LAN Adapter", which was in lower demand because it was only officially supported by the Dreamcast web browser app and was only 10Mbps instead of 10/100.

Iirc the Katana devkit could be used to play commercial games so I wouldn't be surprised if some developers were part of the groups and if so writing a dumper was probably not hard.

There was even a preview version of the game I worked on that got leaked so either someone in our office was part of the cracking scene or someone at Sega/QA (they were our publisher) since AFAIK no-one else had any copies.