So, obviously there's no one really profiting from the Dreamcast nowadays. It's a 25 year old console, Sega isn't exactly filling shelves with new copies of Virtua Fighter 3 tb, so I have very little qualms with making my own copies of Dreamcast games rather than attempting to hunt down one of the few people who might still have a legitimate copy of an American Dreamcast game. All that said, here's how it's all gone so far.
At first, I actually paid someone else to get the games for me. I didn't have much experience hunting down ROMs or burning discs. Plus, they have a disc engraver and made a custom box case, so the whole thing felt a lot closer to a legit game than the ones I've made myself now, where I just kinda label it with Sharpie and place it in a clear case, so there are pluses and minuses.
The games I got from the guy were:
They all worked great, the guy clearly knows either where to get good ROMs, or how to do good rips himself. But recently, I decided I wanted to work on burning my own discs and could use some practice. The first disc I burned was actually a copy of Sunset of the Elements, where in order for it to work I had to do a whole bunch of other steps, but that's a topic for a different entry. The game I decided to burn for myself was also the reason I wanted to get the Dreamcast connected to the internet, Phantasy Star Online. I burned a copy of Version 2, because why wouldn't I? I ran into a little trouble getting the keys you need for the game to function, but I got it working eventually.
Then I ran into a well-known problem. In the tutorial quest, you have to talk to an NPC named Ash, who is laying face-down in the dirt. On a burned copy, it is not uncommon for you to interact with Ash and get locked out of the game, as if fades to black, and then simply does not load the scene afterwards. I did eventually find a workaround for this issue, but also the next day my husband surprised me with a legit copy of Version 2 he had found in a used game store, and because of it the next thing I burned to a CD was actually a Dreamcast Memory flasher to replace the codes with legit ones. As such, I really don't use any of the Dreamcast games I've burned for myself, thought I've thought recently about looking into the indie scene that exists for the console, that could be fun. See you for that, I guess?