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Sega Saturn's DRM Cracked Almost 23 Years After Launch (gamasutra.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via Gamasutra: The Sega Saturn's DRM has finally been cracked after it hit store shelves nearly 23 years ago in November 1994. Engineer James Laird-Wah first set forth to break through the console's copy protection in an attempt to harness its chiptune capabilities. Laird-Wah has, however, developed a way to run games and other software from a USB stick in the process. Since disc drive failure is a common fault with the game console, his method circumvents the disc drive altogether, instead reworking the Video CD Slot so it can take games stored on a USB stick and run them directly through the Saturn's CD Block. "This is now at the point where, not only can it boot and run games, I've finished just recently putting in audio support, so it can play audio tracks," explained Laird-Wah, speaking to YouTuber debuglive. "For the time being, I possess the only Saturn in the world that's capable of writing files to a USB stick. There's actually, for developers of home-brew, the ability to read and write files on the USB stick that's attached to the device.
He did it without requiring a modchip. If I understood the interview right, he has built a card that can be put into the extension slot which simulates the CD-ROM controller chip. So it essentially fakes a CD-ROM to the OS.
And yes, those devices do have "DRM" of some sort: its a "wobbly" line at the outer border of the CD-ROM which the reader reads. All writeable CD-ROMs have non-wobbly lines. Without a modchip you'll have problems.
23 years ago would be July 1993. That's a 16 month difference.
In a forum post yesterday, he stated that he will include a CD Block firmware dumper as part of the finished product. That way he (in my words) doesn't need to care about the legality of sharing the ROM images that he personally dumped, and rare versions can be dumped without having to ship rare consoles around the world. So you can stop this conspiracy theory bullshit already. He has also been working directly with the Yabause team to improve their emulation.