Sega Dreamcast Katana SDK Leak

This post was written in 2019, but dated original April 6th, 2004: the date of the occurrence. I was given access to an installer file that a lot of people didn’t even have room to host, or the bandwidth to distribute in 2004. It was a large SDK for the Sega Dreamcast console. This version of the SDK was codenamed “Katana.”

I was not a developer, I wasn’t even much of a fan of the Dreamcast at the time. But I helped spread it out there, knowing that the Dreamcast had been effectively dead for years, and wanting to see the homebrew community get a shot in the arm. A community which still exists to this day.

By July, the link was taken down from my website. Thankfully not due to any legal threats, but simply because of it’s large (for the time) size and bandwidth needs… funny to look back, now, because I think the file was only about 350 MB, if memory serves me correctly.

It’s funny to find a quote of myself on the DCEmulation forums, quoted by user Strapping Scherzo (typos and all): “I’m not out to do it for fame, or to get under a companie’s skin… it’s all for the hopes of progress.” It was all true. I didn’t even have ads on my website back then.

I don’t have the installer any more, but nothing on the internet dies, and I certainly wasn’t the first person to have it, I just got it in a few more hands. What a wild time.