How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated • Hacker News Board

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#71

Post by amyjess » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 2:59 PM UTC

wolfgke wrote: post #30

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK at least it was more than likely due to Sony's far superior marketing of the original PlayStation. The arrival of the PS2 and the Xbox sealed the deal. That said, I've always seen the original Xbox as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.

> That said, I've always seen the original Xbox as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast. In what sense? The architecture between these two consoles is IMHO quite different.

Take a close look at the controllers. The similarities are eerie.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#72

Post by fredoralive » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:02 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #61

> SEGA engineers knew that MIL-CD booting could be used as an attack vector so they added a protection. > The mashed potatoes problem was solved when a Katana SDK (the official Sega SDK for the Dreamcast) was stolen[6] by the hacking team "Utopia" in late 1999. It turned out that the scrambler was nothing more than "security through obscurity". I doubt this was security through obscurity. Most likely, it was hard (or…

Nope, GD burners existed[1], and there are a couple of legitimate "MIL-CD" releases. It was a weird multimedia thing that went wrong, not a dev tool.

[1] https://segaretro.org/GD-Writer

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#73

Post by perpetualpatzer » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:03 PM UTC

atVelocet wrote: post #31

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.

It was 4 consoles fighting for attention around that time: Sega Dreamcast Nintendo 64 Microsoft Xbox Sony PlayStation 2 The sales of the Xbox and Dreamcast never catched up to those of the N64 or the PS2. I would say the market was over saturated around that time with 4 stationary consoles.

>It was 4 consoles fighting for attention around that time: Sega Dreamcast Nintendo 64 Microsoft Xbox Sony PlayStation 2

Yes and no. N64 was 3 years earlier. PS2 was a full year later, Xbox/Gamecube were two years later.

I've always been confused how Dreamcast didn't win a that fight. The previous three rounds of console launches were heralded by improved graphics technology and immediately took over the market (1990 SNES/Genesis, 1994 Playstation/Saturn, 1996 N64). Dreamcast came out when nothing relevant had come out for 3 years, with a generation better graphics and a 1-2 year head start on competitors.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#74

Post by vernie » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:07 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #61

> SEGA engineers knew that MIL-CD booting could be used as an attack vector so they added a protection. > The mashed potatoes problem was solved when a Katana SDK (the official Sega SDK for the Dreamcast) was stolen[6] by the hacking team "Utopia" in late 1999. It turned out that the scrambler was nothing more than "security through obscurity". I doubt this was security through obscurity. Most likely, it was hard (or…

Sega's dev kit included recordable GD-ROM discs and a drive that could write to them.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#75

Post by ljf » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #58

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…

It is easy to say 'didn't even need' - as this misses the huge draw that karaoke devices had in Japan and beyond at the time. Plus VCD had a huge draw across many Asian markets. These could have been the Dreamcast's 'killer app' in an alternative path.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#76

Post by ljf » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Backup_Z64 - if anyone was wondering. I never saw one in the flesh, but they sounded interesting at the time, esp with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64DD taking a different (official) path.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#77

Post by ThrowawayB7 » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #61

> SEGA engineers knew that MIL-CD booting could be used as an attack vector so they added a protection. > The mashed potatoes problem was solved when a Katana SDK (the official Sega SDK for the Dreamcast) was stolen[6] by the hacking team "Utopia" in late 1999. It turned out that the scrambler was nothing more than "security through obscurity". I doubt this was security through obscurity. Most likely, it was hard (or…

> Most likely, it was hard (or impossible) to burn a GD-ROM for internal testing.

Not at all. Sega had a GD-ROM burner that could be attached to the Katana devkits that worked with Sega-issued media. Remember, there were no hard drives in consoles back in those days so getting the disc layout right so that the game had reasonable loading performance was important.

My memory is admittedly a bit fuzzier here but I also seem to recall that these burned GD-ROMs were normally only bootable on the devkit but could be run on a retail Dreamcast by using a special "system disk" beforehand.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#78

Post by wtetzner » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:23 PM UTC

croo wrote: post #36

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.

Excuse me, but real hackers use butterflies. [1] 1. https://xkcd.com/378/

No, real programmers use emacs: https://emacsredux.com/blog/2013/04/03/easter-eggs/#butterfl...

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#79

Post by ThrowawayB7 » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:30 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #23

new299 wrote: post #20

There are two points to note. The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. They didn’t sell many of the consoles... if it was a piracy issue then you’d expect they’d sell many consoles, but few games (the line up of games was really good). The article mentions Ikaruga a lot. It worth noting that Ikaruga for the Dreamcast was released a year after the Dreamcast was cancelled. They probably…

In the UK at least it was more than likely due to Sony's far superior marketing of the original PlayStation. The arrival of the PS2 and the Xbox sealed the deal. That said, I've always seen the original Xbox as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.

> I've always seen the original Xbox as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.

That's a rather persistent myth. The project that became the Xbox originated from an entirely different division within MS. The team in the Windows CE group that worked on the Dreamcast SDK actually had their own separate proposal for a non-x86 based console but MS chose to move forward with the Xbox proposal instead. IIRC, very, very few of the people on the Dreamcast SDK team moved over to Xbox when they were disbanded.

Re: How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated

#80

Post by isk517 » Tue, Dec 11, 2018, 3:33 PM UTC

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…

Piracy on the original Playstation was gigantic and also probably a big reason for why they ended up dominating the market. I know a ton of people that picked one up over the N64 because if you got a mod chip put in and new someone with a CD burner you could expand your game library for the cost of a rental.