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How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

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Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#51

Post by dfxm12 »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #29
londons_explore wrote: post #9

Did the breaking of the copy protection on the Dreamcast really play a big part in Sega's downfall? If so, it would be one of the only cases I know of where IP piracy led to financial ruin of the content creator.

I think that's the story being told, but I think the real problem is that the Saturn sucked, and the 32x, and the sega cd. Sega killed so much of their good will, that they barely had any customers left to pirate games. I only know one person who had a dreamcast, and they mostly had legit games with a few pirated ones. On the other hand I knew atleast 10 people with modded playstations, and mostly pirated games. I on…

I only buy Nintendo consoles, so I remember being jealous of their ability to pirate.

I guess you were happy with your Wii and DS.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#52

Post by syspec »

I remember downloading ISOs as rar file collections overnight off of IRC channels while in high school. I remember the magic of PAR files, being able to replace any particular file I was missing.

One thing i also remember is how it taught me an upside of actually purchasing games. I ended up having so many DC games I barely played any, because I became more interested in simply collecting them.

I would later decide against missing my consoles for that same reason. Although those Wii mods looked pretty sweet, with their home screen replacement and launchers

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#53

Post by mrfredward »

wolfgke wrote: post #32
londons_explore wrote: post #8

The fact this was broken by stealing a developer's SDK is disappointing. Real hackers would have disassembled the machine to reverse engineer it, rather than using black market/social engineering tricks.

> The fact this was broken by stealing a developer's SDK is disappointing. Real hackers would have disassembled the machine to reverse engineer it, rather than using black market/social engineering tricks. You cannot assume that an attacker will have an "honor code" or that you can keep information secret from an attacker. Because of the latter one, there exists Kerckhoff's principle > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde…

Well, I found it disappointing just from a story standpoint. I certainly wanted to read a story about clever technical hack...about someone sniffing a memory bus and writing a program to align the dump to get a valid program, or finding a complex pattern by analyzing the scrambling by hand.

I suppose it's a good reminder that in the real world, the easiest way in is often through a gullible or untrustworthy employee.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#54

Post by rtpg »

syspec wrote: post #52

I remember downloading ISOs as rar file collections overnight off of IRC channels while in high school. I remember the magic of PAR files, being able to replace any particular file I was missing. One thing i also remember is how it taught me an upside of actually purchasing games. I ended up having so many DC games I barely played any, because I became more interested in simply collecting them. I would later decide a…

For me by the time I got a Dreamcast games were hard to come by, but I was still pretty limited by slow download speeds at home / not that many CD-Rs so I got to experience most of the great games at a fun pace.

I think it’s hard to overestimate how important privacy is for building wide fanbases. Games are expensive, kids have time but no money.... of course now that I have a job I can just get stuff off of Amazon and not worry about patches.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#56

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

I was heavily into burning DC ROMs back in the day. Its most valuable utility was making backups of the games we owned, as our first copy of Sonic Adventure 2 became scratched and nearly unreadable after awhile. The backups allowed me to keep our "critical" games like Soul Calibur, MvC2, and Power Stone 2 (that one cost a pretty penny) in their cases while we used the backups. It also allowed a handful of custom soundtrack-editions of games to float around on the web, like one which changed MvC2's (IMO, awful) soundtrack.

One thing I lament in hindsight was that the CD's we burned were not GD-ROMs, and so the backups or ROMs we burned often had their assets compressed in order to fit on the smaller disk.

Further pity is that even 15ish years later, many people in the ROM collection scene are still relying on those early, compressed CDI rips that were made over a decade ago. The higher-fidelity GDI dumps are comparatively rare and hard-to-find, especially with such reliable repositories as Emuparadise shutting down. If I had the proper equipment, I would probably try to make proper GDI dumps of my collection.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#57

Post by rincebrain »

cdmckay wrote: post #38
londons_explore wrote: post #8

The fact this was broken by stealing a developer's SDK is disappointing. Real hackers would have disassembled the machine to reverse engineer it, rather than using black market/social engineering tricks.

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?

Dunno, you could try asking Sony, who helpfully used the same random input for every PS3 ECDSA signature, thereby leaking enough information to let people recover their private key.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_homebrew#Private...

(I would _suspect_ that internally, they deliberately made this choice, so that the same inputs would produce the same output, because someone important thought that was valuable and either didn't know or thought it wasn't risky enough to possibly leak key information by doing this. But I have no special knowledge, just a suspicion that people who pick elliptic curve crypto would be aware of the leaks involved in reusing IVs.)

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#58

Post by laurent123456 »

Interesting that they've invested so much in designing a new unique type of CD-ROM, even being the only one to manufacture it, and then being caught by a feature they didn't even need. The obfuscating trick was also kind of lazy from the dev team who added it.

But I don't think this hacking was the reason for the end of Sega, because nearly all consoles at that time could be modded to play hacked games. Sega had been messing up for years before that, with all the useless hardware (Sega-CD, Sega 32X, and even the Game Gear and Saturn weren't big successes) they had been releasing after the Megadrive. The Dreamcast was good but just no good enough to save the company, they basically would have needed a console that completely dominate the market to recover, and to compete against Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#59

Post by izacus »

cesarb wrote: post #16
Ntrails wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners? Also, and again only from vague memory, wasn't the dreamcast itself underselling drastically. If it was game sales that broke the manufacturer then mayb…

> But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Does it matter? You only need a few people to download and burn the CDs, and sell them in stalls or out of a backpack. From what I remember from that era, physical distribution of warez through burned CDs was very common.

This was also the case for PC games and those made healthy profits in that era too. So blaming piracy seems to be more pushing a certain idea than the actual cause of Dreamcast issues. Especially since the hardware itself sold poorly - if piracy would be to blame, you'd see a lot of unit sales and low game sales. Which did not happen.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#60

Post by izacus »

anjc wrote: post #44

I don't think this contributed to the Dreamcast's downfall. Given the state/speed of CD Writers at the time, quality of CDs, difficulty of finding ISOs, download speeds, and the temperamental Dreamcast laser, it was far easier to just buy games imo. It was even easier to chip your Dreamcast to region unlock it and buy cheap, legitimate Jap/US games, rather than wasting CD after CD trying to burn them.

Yeah, PC games did well in that era and were as easy to copy as Dreamcast ones. It's more that the console just wasn't competitive with others.
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