Perhaps A Dumb Question #3: What Was GD-Rom?

Okay, so what exactly was the GD-Rom? Was it an actual propriety media developed by Sega or just a plain ol' CD with just the inner ring pushed out to the center and a fancy name (a la Blast Processing).

Also, what's the capacity? I recall it being quoted as 1 GB, but considering that most ripped DC games, at least from my knowledge, all fit on a CD-R. Or was stuff left out when hackers re-complie the games for CD? Or did most DC games simply not fill capacity (or were poorly optimized to just fill the disc, like how early Neo Geo games had data uncompressed to fill out memory chips to help hike the price.... something I head was a practice but was never sure about).
 
Actually, I believe it's 1.2 GB, but I don't remember exactly. It is indeed it's own format though.

DC games that couldn't fit on a CD had stuff ripped out (music downsampled, movies removed, etc)

I remember the crowning achievement that was Skies of Arcadia though. Echelon managed to actually write a compression routine that decompressed data on the fly as you play the game to make it fit on CDs. Supposedly it was perfect, except for longer load times. My SoA is the real thing so I can't actually confirm if it was though.
 
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