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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.
The "DRM" (anti-copy protection) was circumvented decades ago, and modchips to perform that function have existed since that time. This is nothing new.
What James figured out was how dump the internal ROM of the CD controller MCU. This in no way "breaks" the copy protection, though it provides useful information about how the MCU works. Keep in mind that he is hoarding *ALL* of this information and has *NO* intention to share it with the public, for example to improve Sega Saturn emulation.
He is selling a mass-produced product to play games on the Saturn over USB and withholding information so nobody else can compete in that market.. This is a Slashvertisement and nothing more.
Just a reminder: this guy is a slimebag who refused to share the Saturn SH1 ROM dump with MAMEdev so that he could commercialize this.
He's basically a scam artist.
I've had a CD-ROM Emulator on my Saturn with no modchip for quite some time now: There are a pair of devices called Rhea and Phoebe. You unplug the CD drive and plug this in it's place, insert an SD card loaded with disc images and that's it.
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