I can't wait for him to start selling these! I would buy one in a hot minute. My Saturn is collecting dust and there are so many games I just can't get my hands on for my Saturn, and emulation in my experience hardly works. It's way too weird a machine.
Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
11–20 of 232 posts
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#12This appears to be where he actually dumped the ROM a few years back...
http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#13Awesome video. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#14TLDR (or TLDW*)?
Why is this being downvoted? I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a TLDR on a 30 minute video.
Anyway, the basic story is that the Saturn had copy protection in the form of physical marks on the copy protected CDs. This puts a huge barrier to entry on homebrew and the like, so a guy going by Dr Abrasive tried to reverse engineer a way around that. He first looked into a way of disabling the copy protection on the CDs to allow burned CDs to be used but that proved too difficult.
He eventually hit upon the fact that the Saturn had an external module that could be added to allow the system to play video CDs. He then built a component to take advantage of that fact and feed in his own commands through this interface thereby avoiding the copy protection entirely. This allowed content to be run from USB sticks without the need for CDs at all, lowering the barrier to entry even more. It also helps workaround mechanical failure of the CD drive which is becoming a common problem for the 20 year old hardware.
So now if you have this custom built component, you can take an off the shelf system and start running code from a USB stick without any soldering, hacking, or modification at all beyond plugging the device into the back of the console.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#15I was just thinking about the Saturn at a nerd memorabilia store, as this was the one system I saved my money up to buy at 11 years old. What an utter disappointment of a system (in terms of games), but what a great hack. Makes Dreamcast hacking look like Lego Logo.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#16Echoing what others have said, I never knew about just how amazing the engineering on the Saturn was in terms of incredibly tight timing.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#17Does Sega gain anything from not just releasing all the information?
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#18Echoing what others have said, I never knew about just how amazing the engineering on the Saturn was in terms of incredibly tight timing.
Was that a good thing?
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#19Does Sega gain anything from not just releasing all the information?
There's zero benefit in doing anything like this.
Not to mention that all the relevant information may not exist anymore, or is in a storage facility somewhere growing mold.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#20Does Sega gain anything from not just releasing all the information?
There's zero benefit in doing anything like this. Not to mention that all the relevant information may not exist anymore, or is in a storage facility somewhere growing mold.
> There's zero benefit in doing anything like this.
I don't know. Winning people's hearts? For the fun of it?