> Most of our security engineering seems to be undone quickly by the homebrew
> crowd.  We've had to make some hard decisions because of the rampant DC
> piracy taking place.  This will help us to prevent DC from going the way of
> the Commodore 64.

Not to mention it makes Sega better able to pay your salary, which is
always a nice bonus. ^_^

Now, assuming your earlier statement that the new DC units will be unable
to read ANYTHING from a standard CDROM means even under program control
(I.E. isis it really unable to read a CDROM, or does it just refuse to
boot from them?), then it would be "safe" to simply add a serial-line
bootloader/debugging program (Like the VAX console debugger, or the PDP11
serial consoles) into the formware.  This would allow experimenters to
play with their Dreamcast units, but not allow the pirates to do their
thing.  The only way I can think of for this to go bad is if the unit is
able in some way to read a standard CD, in which case someone could simply
write a second-stage bootloader for their pirated CDs.