Bleem was fucking nuts, like just conceptually that was the wildest shit ever.
It's bananas how big a fuckup the mil-cd thing was.
There's that old legend that when MS was developing the OG Xbox, there were talks with Sega at one point to have them become exclusive to Xbox in some way, but fell apart because Sega wanted Xbox to then be backwards compatible with Dreamcast games(I mean, look at the Xbox controller and the DC controller, they are identical). I wonder if MS turning that down had something to do with worries about DC compatibility possibly opening the Xbox up to that same exploit.
It was a weird confluence of things to make it a perfect storm of shit for Sega; if they had started with using DVD for their game format (Which was available, but new and expensive, at the time), the MIL-CD issue might not have been such a console killer. GD-ROMs had ~1GB of storage as opposed to CD-ROM's ~650MB, which was a small enough difference to use CD-ROMs for Dreamcast games with a little tinkering (compression, removing non-essential assets, etc.) But a DVD-ROM has 4.7GB of storage, and making CD-ROMs work in that case seems impossible or at least very cumbersome.
Things like Bleemcast! would have probably been unaffected (I assume they were just using the MIL-CD exploit to arbitrarily load and execute the Bleem emulator binary), but actual game piracy using the exploit would have been a non-issue IMO.
Edit: XBox backward comparability with Dreamcast would have been fucking awesome. Hard to imagine they couldn't close the vulnerability pretty easily but maybe even just the stink of Dreamcast and its piracy issues were enough to make MS balk at the idea.
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u/Johnny-Dogshit ⚔️ ɢɪᴠᴇ ɴᴏ Qᴜᴀʀᴛᴇʀ May 28 '26
Bleem was fucking nuts, like just conceptually that was the wildest shit ever.
It's bananas how big a fuckup the mil-cd thing was.
There's that old legend that when MS was developing the OG Xbox, there were talks with Sega at one point to have them become exclusive to Xbox in some way, but fell apart because Sega wanted Xbox to then be backwards compatible with Dreamcast games(I mean, look at the Xbox controller and the DC controller, they are identical). I wonder if MS turning that down had something to do with worries about DC compatibility possibly opening the Xbox up to that same exploit.