Indian Dreamcast BIOS region lock technique implementation #2231
Description
Late into Dreamcast life, a month or two before its tragic demise (in December 2000), the console was launched in India:
https://segaretro.org/History_of_Sega_in_India
Interestingly, they seem to have employed some sort of regional lock, thanks to which an Indian DreamKey browser will only load on Indian PAL Dreamcast while European or Australian PAL Dreamcasts will display an error (seems like some sort of too-little-too-late anti-piracy measure):
No idea if the bundled Indian Dream-On disc or Indian PAL GD-ROM games (those which made it to India in the first place) are also region-locked and how Indian Dreamcasts differentiate them from generic PAL releases (if it does at all. Maybe only the browser is locked because region lock may have been planned for future Indian game releases in case Dreamcast survives, but the initial game release line-up may have been without any additional region lock).
Unfortunately, no Indian GD-ROM discs seem to have been dumped by either TOSEC or Redump to check if they match generic PAL releases: the batch of printed discs for India was likely very small (just like the Taiwanese NTSC-J release of Illbleed, the only game in the entire library to be officially translated into Mandarin Chinese), nor is an Indian Dreamcast BIOS dumped and floating around to experiment on, unfortunately!
I'd like to request the potential support of Indian region restriction technique in flycast in the future (should someday the Indian BIOS and discs be dumped in the 1st place of course, it's possible that this stuff will be lost in time) so that the Indian DreamKey browser (and other Indian discs if they're locked at all) would work in flycast.
Thank you.