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How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

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Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#161

Post by tenebrisalietum »

bitwize wrote: post #117
elsonrodriguez wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. Sega led to the failure of the Dreamcast. They had failed fans with the SegaCD. Released the 32X as a "bridge" between the 16bit and 32bit consoles (then promptly abandoned it). They released the Saturn with almost no fanfare in the US, and with last minute architectural hacks to make it pass as a 3D console (just barely). By the time the Dre…

A lot of people were stoked for the Dreamcast upon its release. What ultimately did it in was the PS2 -- a superior console in virtually every respect, released just two years later (in the USA).

> a superior console in virtually every respect

Except antialiasing

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#162

Post by jolmg »

laumars wrote: post #156
jolmg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good example was the branding of the PS2's processor as the "Emotion Engine," ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_Engine ) which in the runup to release got hyped as some kind of fundamental breakthrough in computing that would let the PS2 render things like faces with so much detail they'd be able to break your heart. That reminds me of the hype around the PS3's cell processor. There was a lot of videos comp…

Consoles often (or at least were often) sold at a loss because Sony / Microsoft will make their money back on licences from developers / games sold. I think Nintendo are the exception to the rule there though.

If that's true, it explains why Sony removed the feature allowing you to install a custom OS on the PS3. There was at least one group that was building a supercomputer out of PS3s. Removing the feature was probably to limit losses from sales to people that were not buying their PS3s to play games on them.

It was still shitty of them (and I wish illegal) to remove a feature, but now it makes sense. I wish they had limited the removal to only units not yet sold though. It's not like people that were using their PS3s for supercomputing would run the update anyway. It would only be those that were playing games and were restricted without running the latests updates.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#163

Post by thefringthing »

jolmg wrote: post #162
laumars wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consoles often (or at least were often) sold at a loss because Sony / Microsoft will make their money back on licences from developers / games sold. I think Nintendo are the exception to the rule there though.

If that's true, it explains why Sony removed the feature allowing you to install a custom OS on the PS3. There was at least one group that was building a supercomputer out of PS3s. Removing the feature was probably to limit losses from sales to people that were not buying their PS3s to play games on them. It was still shitty of them (and I wish illegal) to remove a feature, but now it makes sense. I wish they had lim…

My university had a PS3-based computing cluster. I'm not sure if they still do.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#165

Post by AgentME »

baochan wrote: post #164

Are there articles out there about how modern copy protection works? I'm interested in why there aren't Switch flash carts, or why there aren't shady companies with BD-ROM pressers making bootleg copies of PS4/XB1 discs.

I think the copy protection on the original Xbox, the 360, and probably most modern consoles worked like this: executables must be signed, executables must list what types of media they can be run from, the system supports a special type of disk that CD burners and regular disk pressers can't produce, and all game executables specify they can only be run from the special type of disk.

With the 360, you can do a firmware hack to the system's disk drive to make it report every disk is the special type of disk to allow you to play games from burned disks. There are some known utility/demo disks containing executables signed to be executable from burned disks, so they can be copied (and have resources modified if the executable doesn't verify the signatures of everything it loads).

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#166

Post by Wingman4l7 »

IshKebab wrote: post #158
philistine wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not underestimate the value proposition of a DVD player in 2001. It had a huge impact on sales.

Ah yes as I recall the cheapest way to get a dvd player was to buy a PS2.

Funny -- I believe this price situation repeated itself with the PS3 and Blu-ray.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#167

Post by krageon »

Wingman4l7 wrote: post #166
IshKebab wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes as I recall the cheapest way to get a dvd player was to buy a PS2.

Funny -- I believe this price situation repeated itself with the PS3 and Blu-ray.

The price of a PS3 and Blu-ray player was approximately identical (here, for basically the whole lifetime of a PS3), except a PS3 could do much, much more. There are of course good reasons for why this was the case but from a consumer standpoint it's always seemed hilariously weird to buy a Blu-ray player.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#168

Post by astrostl »

This is easily the easiest piracy situation I've ever seen: if you had an unmodified Dreamcast, a CD burner, and broadband your only steps were to pirate DiscJuggler, then the games themselves. I knew many people with Dreamcasts in this era, who bought them around launch day without even a thought of pirating, then went on to buy zero (0) additional games because it was so easy.

The conversation here seems to settle on the idea that piracy wasn't a primary cause of the system's failure, and I could hardly disagree more from what I widely observed (local + gigantic internet communities).

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#169

Post by cdmckay »

caf wrote: post #40
cdmckay wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if getting the SDK was enough to crack the copy protection, it would’ve happened eventually. The key seemed to be the descrambler. Why on earth did they scramble the executable in a deterministic way?

Why on earth did they scramble the executable in a deterministic way? Because they wanted official developers to be able to create MIL-CDs that would load. They just didn't want anyone else being able to do that.

Just seems like inevitably people would figure it out.
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