It was def the dreamcast - the first model didn't require any hardware, just a burned CD-ROM. It's demise and Segas departure from consoles is blamed on the amount of piracy. A real shame, because it had some great games

One thing I was found interesting about Dreamcast piracy was that everyone was burning them onto 700 MB CD-Rs. But the retail games were actually pressed onto 1GB GD-ROMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM

For a lot of games, it totally didn't matter (shoutout Ikaruga, 38 MBs! https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2023/03/the-worlds-sm...)

But for games that took advantage of the extra 300 MBs, pirates had to use all these tricks to get the game down to a CD-R size. They'd compress assets, compress or sometimes rip out the FMVs...I think they might have even split some games across multiple CDs.

That's why DRM cracks me up, the pirates will always figure a way around it one way or the other. (Especially in today's day and age where the live service model is so effective. I'd weep for the AAA single-player game, but I can't remember the last one I played and enjoyed. They've been dead for a long time. Long live the indie single-player game.)

The Dreamcast GPU was also really neat. It was tile based and could do order independent transparency!