111–120 of 167 posts
Error in the article: 32x32bit multiply (i.e. 2^64 bits) is not a "heat death of the universe" thing. It's a lot, yes. Not practical for these purposes. But there's a reason we don't use 64bit encryption. 64bit encryption is easily brute forced. If you want to keep it in a table, sure that's 18 exabytes (multiplied by element size in bytes), but that's before compression. I imagine multiply output compresses very wel…
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I'm sure the answer is no, but I emailed a few people at NERD (Nintendo European Research & Development). Asked the obvious question about the documentation even existing anymore, and if there were any possibilities of it ever being made public. You've probably done that already, but I figured it was worth a shot. I'll update if I actually get a response.
Nintendo's official development manual is available at archive.org [0]. However, AFAICT it is rather low-quality and incomplete, and it pales in comparison to the wealth of documentation created by years of reverse-engineering effort from hobbyists like byuu. I imagine that the official documentation was leaked rather than publicly released. Nintendo wants to make money selling re-releases of classic games, so they a…
Can original SNES hardware play ROMs somehow?
Yes! These are called flash carts (short for cartridge). Here is a popular one for SNES: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052URJKM Many people who stream older console games on twitch seem to use them as well as people who like to play romhacks.
This wasn’t possible for N64 titles until relatively recently[1]. Interestingly, the method of cracking N64’s boot security sounds rather standard when compared to the 3DS and switch glitching[2][3].
1. https://youtu.be/z5uOK0nR934
Interesting tangent from the article: >Today, SNES emulation is in a very good place. Barring unusual peripherals that are resistant to emulation (such as a light-sensor based golf club, an exercise bike, or a dial-up modem used to place real-money bets on live horse races in Japan), every officially licensed SNES title is fully playable I had to look up the 'dial-up modem' reference - apparently it's a Japan-only pe…
Nintendo had dial up modems and their own intranet in 37% of Japanese households in the mid 80s? How did I not know this was a thing.
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Thats 16 bytes of data, not nearly enough to be covered by copyright. Its not about how important it is. Like how a single line slogan isn't copyrightable even if its unique and clever, they can be covered by trademarks however. I doubt a 16 byte header could be covered by trademarks either.
"16 bytes of data" is also the size of an AES-256 key, which is apparently able to be copyrighted.
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Also, when you think about it, if a game behaves differently when run in an emulator, as part of an emulator-and-ROM bundled software product released by Nintendo... then that behavior is just how that particular release of the game has been canonically chosen to behave . Any bugs in the emulation of a Virtual Console title, or a SNES Classic title, or a SNES Online title, are just "how that version of the game is ."…
I don’t agree. Canonical status is bestowed by the artist/author, not the publisher, and certainly not a republisher. If Lord of the Rings is republished with page 527 arbitrarily missing, that omission doesn’t become canon.
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If ever there's a law passed that allows Nintendo to get non-licensed emulators banned entirely, I have no doubts they'd do everything in their power to have them wiped from existence by the next day. If they give up and give assistance to emulator devs, there's no going back on it.
Luckily laws are limited to countries.
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:B094-P...
It's sad that Nintendo doesn't seem to see this as an opportunity to earn free press and goodwill by simply releasing all the design documents, mask images, etc. The community is going to get there eventually without their help, but they could probably make it much faster and cheaper to get there. Doubly so because they sell products which almost certainly benefit from these open source emulation efforts.
Nintendo is still actively selling SNES games via Nintendo Switch Online, and as far as I know rolls their own emulator(s) for this rather than using existing open source ones as Sony did for the PS Classic, so I doubt this will happen any time soon.
Wouldn't it be possible to reverse engineer these emulators? Maybe the official Nintendo SNES emulator has all the right S-PPU1/2 values in it.
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The security solution was probably that the user had to type the account's PIN, and that it uses the phone line instead of the Internet. It's from 1995 (check the date of the Folha de São Paulo article above), not using encryption at all was very common back then; and even today, phone lines are still considered reliable enough that one can type the account PIN on it without any encryption (for instance: if I want to…
Faxes are unencrypted and send medical crap all the time today.