Only 20 years to go and Denuvo is done for.
Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
31–40 of 232 posts
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#32TLDR (or TLDW*)?
He dumped ROM of Saturn's CD-ROM module's CPU, reverse engineered OS in it, discovered a developer mode which allows Saturn to read non-protected CDs but requires a special protected CD which nobody has, then he turned attention to the slot for Video CD decoder card, discovered that this card can send additional encrypted code to CD-ROM module's CPU, then created replacement for CD-ROM module as a card for Video CD d…
Just say it: He's a wizard and he just hit level 20.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#33TLDR (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 o…
the most impressive part, to me, was how thoroughly he reverse engineered what looks to be a crazy complicated CPU architecture - the Saturn has four of them.
Also, I love that his original motivation was to use the sound processor for mixing chiptune, and basically opening up the entire system at metal level is a happy by product.
ALSO, the fact that he decided that his first working prototype was too hands on and finding a way to piggyback the video playback expansion card to make the mod orders of magnitude less complicated to install / execute.
Super impressive stuff
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#34As 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.
Yeah, that is something. They thought better hardware protection was unnecessary because they believed in the strength of their software solution (which was quickly cracked)? The games could be larger, so that CDs could not fit them without changes. IIRC early Soul Calibur burns had their music down-sampled to fit 650 MB. And was it Skies of Arcadia that really did have too much content to fit on a CD, without serious changes?
Also, you mention CD-RW, but IIRC you could not boot off CD-RW, only CD-R. Or maybe that was the softmodded xbox?
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#35I 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.
As an Aussie he's going to be subject to the TPPs DMCA-lite restrictions on circumvention devices once it's ratified.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#36Only 20 years to go and Denuvo is done for.
http://www.pcgamesn.com/rise-of-the-tomb-raider/denuvo-drm-c...
These days my interest in game cracking is mainly for archival purposes. (are you going to be able to play this game in 50 years?)
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#37I'm so so glad he mentions archiving in this video - I don't think enough thought has been given to the impact of DRM on museum collections in 10-50 years.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#38He 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?
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's zero benefit in doing anything like this. I don't know. Winning people's hearts? For the fun of it?
>I don't know. Winning people's hearts? For the fun of it? That's true, but as long as they can still make money from their IP they won't (i.e. repackaging old source + game(s) into a VM for sale on Steam or next-gen consoles) Some of the source code/etc may be licensed from a third party, which means that releasing it is treading through a legal minefield.
In cases like these I'm thankful for pirates. When an interesting project is about to die because all the stakeholders lost interest and there's too much legal mess to deal with to give it away, it's good if there's someone that steps in, ignores that legal mess altogether and simply dumps the product on-line.
Re: Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years
#40TLDR (or TLDW*)?