They seemed to protect the Saturn to great lengths, but expose the Dreamcast to the extreme. Cheaper consoles must all have gimped security. Both Wii and Dreamcast cost 200ish and used discs to burn easy.
I think the Saturn was $500 at launch.
It was $449.99 with Virtua Fighter 1 and a preview disc and $399.99 with just the console. The Saturn had a surprise early launch in North America after Sony announced at E3 1995 that the Playstation was going to be priced at $299.99. But Sega's surprise early launch backfired as there was supply constraint and only angered retailers. Then Sega slashed the price of the Saturn down to $299.99 one month after release to compete with the Playstation 1. By Christmas of 1995, Sega was including Virtua Fighter 2, Daytona USA and Virtua Cop with the Saturn to try and stay competitive. By 1996, the Saturn dropped to $199.99.
Dreamcast Launched at $199.99, which was a really good price for the hardware. The reason why it was so quickly pirated was because Sega left an exploit in the system by mistake that developers quickly discovered that lead the information to be leaked out to the internet which allowed piraters to develop a utopian boot disc that could be swapped with a CDR. Later on piraters found a way to include the utopian boot disc on the same CD as the game, so no disc swapping was necessary.
Though the Dreamcast GD-ROM discs themselves were never easy to rip onto a PC for the average person. It would take a very specific type of CD ROM drive/ DVD drive with custom firmware, or a modded Dreamcast that could be used to rip the game from the console to an ISO on a PC. So the only way to obtain a Dreamcast ISO is through pirating. Which was still a bit of a problem for many, due to 56K connections still being a thing in early 2000. Though higher speed internet was becoming more popular with every passing day back them. It is still not possible to run a GD-ROM on a modern DVD/ Blu-Ray drive.
The Dreamcast itself could've been a pretty hard system to pirate if it weren't for an open exploit.
This is awesome. I have a very unique dev Saturn (with a prototype controller!) that was given to me a few years ago, and I was always afraid of the drive dying, so this could be a lifesaver.
It's similar to this -
Except the red pin is much longer on mine.
That's basically just a Sega Genesis six button pad with a Saturn connector: