The PlayStation 1 had a copy protection system that measured physical properties of the disc which couldn't be replicated by normal CD writers. There were a few ways to get around this, but to be able to put a burned CD into your console and boot directly from it into the game (as usual) required the installation of a fairly complex mod chip. A lot of people alternatively used the "swap trick", which is how I used to play my imported original games.

The DreamCast's copy protection was heavily reliant on using dual-layer GD-ROM discs rather than regular CDs, even though they look the same to the naked eye. There were other checks in place as well, but simply using GD-ROMs was pretty effective in and of itself.

Unfortunately, Sega also added support for a thing called "MIL-CD" to the DreamCast. MIL-CD was intended to allow regular music CDs to include interactive multimedia components when played on the console. However, MIL-CD was supported for otherwise completely standard CDs, including burned CDs, and had no copy protection, because Sega wanted to make it as easy as possible for other companies to make MIL-CDs, so the format could spread and hopefully become popular. Someone found a way to "break out" of the MIL-CD system and take over the console to run arbitrary code like a regular, officially released game, and that was the end of DreamCast's copy protection. People couldn't just copy an original game disc 1:1 and have it work; some work had to be done on the game to put it on a burned CD and still have it run (sometimes quite a lot of work, actually), but no console modification was needed. Anyone with a DreamCast relased before Sega patched this issue (which seems to be most of them) can simply burn a CD and play it on their console, provided they can get a cracked copy of the game.

Ha! I was a Mega Drive fan as a teen, and I got really angered by this... until I realized that you were speaking about the Mega CD and 32x specifically. Yep, there really weren't many good games for either of them.

LISP: You are an AI researcher and a nerd.

Despite this, I still bet that they post "nvm fixed it" an hour or two later.

Most people use the term "Hungarian Notation" to mean only adding an indicator of type to a variable or function name. While this is one of the ways in which it has been used (and actually made sense in certain old environments, although those days are long, long behind us now), it's not the only way that it can be used.

We can use the same concept (prepending or appending an indicator from a standard selection) to denote other, more useful categories that the environment won't keep straight for us, or won't warn us about in easy-to-understand ways. In my own projects I usually append a single letter to the ends of my variable names to indicate scope, which helps me stay more modular, and also allows me to choose sensible variable names without fear of clashing with something else I've forgotten about.

Perhaps similar to OP, I gravitate toward whatever's handiest. That's usually my smartphone or one of a number of old-ish Linux laptops. I have a handful of smartphone games that I play pretty much every day, and I've got controllers for both, so there's also lots of emulation of older games, and also some newer indie games on the laptops. After that I have a "gaming" PC (nothing amazing but it does enough for me) for more current games, although I'm finding that I don't turn that on as much as I'd like to, lately. Then I have a handful of less-old consoles that my other devices can't emulate well, but I can't even remember the last time I used one of those.

Me too. I started with the little brown first-party stick that came with the Pro Pack, but soon switched to an inexplicably beige Quickshot II.

Does this also apply to Android?