Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

That would definitely make cycle accuracy easier between all the system parts.

The hard part is for someone to actually develop the emulation for all the custom chips in the system. In particular, the two graphics chips are very complex and the documentation is very hard to understand. The same goes for the sound chip. The others are all standard enough to be reasonably straightforward (if not actually easy).

Wow. I certainly hope someone with a lot of power over company culture at, say, Apple is watching this. And that they get inspired to think about cultural preservation.

I really think it should be a standard act of corporate responsibility and platform stewardship to make it so that work like that of Professor Abrasive's, is not the only spare key we have to current culture a few decades down the road. We as a global culture just might be really, really lost and bereft of history if that was to be the case.

I frankly think that Apple under Tim Cook is in a historically unique position of making cultural preservation of games and software feasible and something built into the whole social and legal contract of proprietary, locked down platforms. It's not like Sony is going to lead the way with the PlayStation?

I mean, to really make preservation legit, there needs to be some sort of useful official emulation and data extraction capability down the road. For all we know now, there might be terrible legislation that prohibits reverse engineering in a lot of jurisdictions.

There's of course a lot problems to solve, with all the crypto and stuff, and licensing, but someone should be on this. Especially since software distribution is becoming all ephemeral and download based! Not to mention the cloud fragmentation of personal data.

Great work.

These crazy reverse engineering projects kind of make me feel insecure about my own abilities, as weird as it sounds.

I wonder if I would have been able to come up with the same solution if I worked at it. My fear is that I would not, but who knows.

A lot of it is purely analytical, but there is a portion that relies on pure creativity and problem solving abilities.

I understand the process he went through as well as the technical details behind it, but following along is much easier than looking at a circuit board with a blank face, wondering where to begin.

I spent the last 2 hours last night just reading about Sega Saturn…

It's definitely IDA Pro. If anyone is considering how difficult this is, let me offer you my experience. It is incredibly hard and requires utmost persistence. I tried to refresh (learn more about) my knowledge of x86/x86-64 asm and decided to give a go on modifying a binary that was not produced by me. It seems to be a common exercise, so I though - how difficult can this be? Right? You follow code procedures, take note of jumps, there's even a handy visual graph of the things, take another application that can offer you to see function names and break calls... Suddenly, you're in this loop where you take notes on paper (yes), you seem to understand a part, move to the next and then you realise you didn't actually understand the part before and go back, and then you get tangled in variables and registers..

It takes a special set of skills and a mindset to do this. I recommend everyone to try that once. Just take a foreign binary, any which you know the application of, and try to modify it. Then, after you give up, take a note this was done on an unknown binary with (almost) unknown functionality. TBH, he did say he looked up a table of known functions on a wiki somewhere, but still...

It was impossible to find anyone capable of producing CD's with the wobble when the Saturn was alive. Finding somebody capable today would be possible, but it wouldn't be very profitable because its a dead system.

If a new console used the wobble/burst then surely you'd be able to order these CDR's from Alibaba..