Because the BIOS is copyrighted software owned by Sega. Even though Sega no longer makes the Dreamcast, the code is still their intellectual property. Distributing it is illegal. Emulator developers will include a "BIOS dumper" tool or leave a placeholder, but they will never ship the BIOS file with the emulator.
Sega included compatibility for MIL-CD (Music Interactive Live CD)—a failed multimedia format. MIL-CDs had a different boot signature. Hackers discovered that the MIL-CD authentication was weaker and lacked the full GD-ROM check. bios sega dreamcast
By 2000, warez groups released "self-boot" Dreamcast CD-Rs that: Because the BIOS is copyrighted software owned by Sega
This backdoor effectively killed Dreamcast piracy protection and is why burned games run on unmodified consoles. and the gateway between hardware
The Dreamcast’s BIOS is tiny but iconic: the first code that runs when you power on Sega’s last home console, and the gateway between hardware, software, and the moment players first glimpsed its personality. Below is a compact but thorough tour of what the Dreamcast BIOS is, what it did, why it mattered, and a few interesting side stories that make it memorable.
If you download a random "BIOS pack" from the internet, you are technically engaging in copyright infringement. However, given that the Dreamcast is 25+ years old and Sega is now a software publisher, enforcement is virtually non-existent for personal use.
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