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Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

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Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

#151

Post by lunchTime42 »

quakeguy wrote: post #68
shmerl wrote: post #64

Amazing work. Also highlights how paranoid DRM proponents often are going to such lengths to cripple the hardware. Breaking DRM is like finding a cure for insanity ;)

"Breaking DRM is like finding a cure for insanity ;)" Well said.

Remeber those Arcade Game-Memory manufactured into the battery? You had to break the battery and (suppossedly) cut the powersupply to get to them.

Isane.

Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

#154

Post by patates »

bluesign wrote: post #152

I am not good with electronics tbh but why it is not possible to mitm the connection between CD drive and motherboard? As far as I see from 'swap disk' technique outer protection track is not changing depending on game

I was thinking about controlling an outside door unlock button by MITMing the electrical cables going out of it, but realized I have no idea how to go about it. I just need to generate the same signal... I thought maybe someone reading this could have some pointers.

Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

#155

Post by abrasive »

bluesign wrote: post #152

I am not good with electronics tbh but why it is not possible to mitm the connection between CD drive and motherboard? As far as I see from 'swap disk' technique outer protection track is not changing depending on game

You can. That's what traditional modchips do, and there's the Rhea/Phoebe which completely emulates that drive via that interface.

Of course, if you sit at that point in the system you have a different set of problems and capabilities. Much easier to build hardware for, but no data output, and of course you need to disassemble the console to get there in the first place.

Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

#156

Post by abrasive »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #115
MichaelApproved wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just cut the wobble edge of a real CD off and attach it to a burned CD? Maybe you can shave the back of the shimmed wobble edge down, so that it won't stick out as much on the burned CD. This shimmed wobble can be your key for all the burned CDs you have. Maybe double sided tape can keep the wobble shim attached to your burned CD while still allowing it to be removable for other CDs. I've never had a Saturn,…

> I've never had a Saturn, so I don't know what this wobble edge looks like in person. Am I missing something? The video shows it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E#t=2m13s

The video's graphic is a bit of an approximation. In practice it appears that every second disc sector is displaced, IIRC. And they've got particular bit patterns written into them to produce a visual logo; these patterns (but not the actual logos) are checked too.

The protection ring is visible to the naked eye for this reason. I can't find a picture, sorry!

Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

#157

Post by abrasive »

pedrocr wrote: post #38

He mentions archival as a motivation but can we trust the rest of the hardware to last more than a few decades? Isn't emulation the real archival solution?

As I think I mentioned that's been another major outcome. I've been working with Yabause developers both to improve their HLE of the CD block, and to implement full low-level emulation using dumped ROMs.

Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

#158

Post by creshal »

ekianjo wrote: post #45
mjevans wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's both why they were so expensive back in the day AND why it was so hard to develop on (all I have -ever- heard about developing games for that platform).

To be fair most devs at the time completely ignored the second CPU because it was apparently very hard to make them work together. So they treated it as a single CPU console. Which kinds of defeats the purpose :)

Going by the Wikipedia description of it, they had multiplexed RAM access. So developers could choose between having two CPUs at half the RAM speed (4KiB CPU-local cache are enough to make up for it, right?) or a single CPU at full RAM speed.

Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

#159

Post by rasz_pl »

lucb1e wrote: post #49
_qbjt wrote: post #22

As a Sega fanboy, this makes me happy. That copy protection scheme (outer ring spiral) is quite something. I find it amusing that Sega went with yet another proprietary disc format for the Dreamcast (GD-ROM) and that system is able to load homebrew code from any CD-R / CD-RW without any modifications to the hardware.

> That copy protection scheme (outer ring spiral) is quite something. Yeah about that, I don't get it. Is there data hidden in that spiral that acts as a checksum for the CD or something? Or is it of special material that lights up differently under certain light (like money)? To me it doesn't look that hard to duplicate a simple spiral, but then I know nothing about it.

original Playstation used similar copy protection trick - ASCII string SCE(I/E/A) was stored in pregap pre-groove wobble between the leadin and the first track. PSX used Three-beam pickup and was able to track this wobble and extract code from radial tracking error signals. Modchips simply injected same error signal for couple of seconds after closing CD lid, enough for the CD controller to recognize it as "original".

Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

#160

Post by rasz_pl »

orblivion wrote: post #116
tlrobinson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing it was state of the art at the time it was released, but wouldn't hold up nearly as well in a mass market console these days.

Then why did it take 20 years?

It didnt. 20 years is a lie/marketing/ignorance. There do exist CD emulators (Rhea) and there did exist modchips during console heyday.
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