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New GameCube Network Loader Runs Homebrew Games
An anonymous reader submits: "Cube Hacker is reporting that a new network loader has been released which allows you to execute retail code by exploiting a known bug in Sega's online game, Phantasy Star Online. Obviously piracy is not condoned but this certainly opens the door for future home-brew development! Linux on GameCube anyone?" Update: 10/13 23:33 GMT by S : Previous update removed, due to it only referencing retail titles.
www.maxconsole.com has lots more information about this subject matter.
that the webserver was running on the Gamecube as well.
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A while back, someone hacked the GameCube disc format. They found a way to get the raw data off of GameCube discs. This data then could be posted to the internet or saved on your computer hard drive. However, that was a pretty useless trick, piracy-wise. You couldn't burn that data to a blank CD and put it into a GameCube and play your pirated games. GameCube discs are custom sized. You can't get a spindle of GCD's at CompUSA, and conventional burning software wouldn't write to it properly if you did. So it was a neat mental excercise, but with no practical applications.
Until now. Now these guys have hacked the GameCube broadband adapter. These adapters are hard to find, and currently the only game that supprots them is Phantasy Star Online (although the new version of Mario Cart coming soon will support it, and they should make more broadband adapters available for that). So now, you can load a game over the GameCube broadband adapter.
Those GameCube discs you previously could rip to your computer, now you can load them to your GameCube over the broadband adapter. That opens the door for piracy pretty wide. It also opens the door for you to load just about any code you want to the GameCube, hence the remarks about a Linux version for the console. So now it is possible to play pirated games our custom software on the cube. It is still a pretty involved and difficult process, involving hard-to-find hardware and requiring a lot of technical know-how, but it is possible.
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The copy protection scheme works in several ways. You DO need to have a special DVD burner, since the LENS is what's different on the Gamecube. It can't read regular DVDs. Also, the retail discs use a special barcode imprinted on the disc to prevent the cube to be tricked into reading fake discs.
There's a special debugging Gamecube which can read burned games, it's called the NReader, and you can only get it from Nintendo if you are a) a developer b) an important gaming news house.
The catch is, this NReader can't read retail discs, it can only play those burned specially for beta testing or magazine reviews.
Also, the PSO loader works by tricking PSO into loading special code by resolving the DNS of the Sega PSO server to your own PC. Then you have access to the GCN. Animal Crossing is a port of the same N64 game, so it fits on the GCN's memory without having to read the disc more than once, that's why it's completely playable.
The situation is far from the "retail games pirated!" outcry.
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