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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.
But I wish every consoles could just run games off a USB stick.
I wouldn't mind having to buy a special type of USB stick just for the console, if it means to just "charge" a game to it at a video game store and play the games from that, for faster load time. Or heck, just to get the "download files" and then transfer the finished product to the internal drive, would be great for people still stuck with a slow network connection, where downloading a 50GB game is just too much.
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.
DRM in some form has existed for years... Even the original Nintendo had it https://hackmii.com/2010/01/th...
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Yep, had the DRM been broken when the Saturn still had games being made for it, that would have been a big deal.
23 years later? Meh. Just play a rom on a emulator. It upscales, loading times are non existent, can save the game when you want, can have the whole library on one SSD. Why doesn't this guy try to break DRM on systems in circulation?
You do know this isn't going to stop Sega's landsharks from invoking DMCA.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Interestingly back in the day the laws and courts were more sane and it wasn't illegal for companies to circumvent Nintendo's lockout technology and there were a few companies that produced unlicensed games for the original Nintendo. Even more funny, one of the companies that was (in)famous for doing so produced a lot of bible themed games that they sold through Christian stores because Nintendo started to lean on retailers to stop them from selling unlicensed games.
There were even more primitive versions of "DRM" in older PC games such as the game periodically requiring the user to enter the fifth word on the seventh page of the manual under the assumption that people with a copy wouldn't have the manual. A few others had codewheels that came with the game that served a similar purpose. Eventually this resulted in the pinnacle of copy protection.
the Saturn is nowhere's near perfectly emulated. It is very, very well emulated by a program called SSF thanks to some chap in Japan, but there are significant limitations. It also doesn't upscale and needs a beefy processor to deinterlace. I don't want to make light of the achievement of SSF's author's. The Saturn is a nightmare featureing 7 or 8 different processors with cache ram all over the place. It's a minor miracle what's been achieved. It's still fantastic to see this. The Saturn had a vibrant and incredible library that's largely inaccessible, especially if you're not Japanese. The difficulty of emulation means almost nothing got ported (and many of the "Saturn" ports on Xbox Live/PSN are really Model 2 ports). I always thought it sad Sega couldn't monetize their Saturn back catalog (outside of a very short lived service in Japan for PCs based on a different emulator). I would kill to get Panzer Dragoon 1,2 & Saga on PSN/Steam.
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This sort of thing is specifically exempted.
"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/...
Good-bye
Terms change. They tried to make the games impossible to copy. Called it copy protection until someone came up with a new term, DRM. Tada! Didn't work, never works.
Didn't toilet tissue used to be call toilet paper.
The people on the MAME team who work on the Saturn driver would disagree that the Saturn emulator is anywhere near perfect. No emulator currently emulates the co-processor used for the control of the optical drive. (as far as I know the only people who have dumped the internal code of this chip haven't released it to anyone else)
It's even older than NES. The **ATARI 7800** had DRM used to lock out unauthorized cartridges, and it was technically released around 1984 (though 99% of the 7800s sat in warehouses until the early 90s before Tramiel finally dumped them on the market).
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.
"News for nerds".
Actually, I vaguely remember that even the TI-99/4A had some kind of DRM that prevented most thirdparty software from running on it. I've never fully understood why, but I think it was something like this:
* The CPU could only directly access 256 bytes of RAM. The remaining RAM technically belonged to the graphics subsystem.
* The CPU could only execute code from a ROM cartridge after the graphics subsystem authorized it. I think it was protected by a combination of aggressively-defended patents and some technical means that was ultimately cracked years later.
* TI BASIC, unlike Commodore, Atari, and Apple BASIC, had no way for users to poke an assembly-language program into ram & begin executing it (with something like "SYS 49152")
It's sad, because the TI-99/4A was a seriously hot mess. It was technically one of the most powerful computers on the market at the time, but TI arbitrarily crippled its usage so badly that it just withered on the vine while more open platforms (the 3 mentioned, plus probably ZX Spectrum in Europe) flourished. Most people have NO IDEA that the TI-99/4A actually had the same graphics & sound chips as a Colecovision, a faster CPU, and probably more total RAM (though RAM beyond the 256 bytes of SRAM hardwired to the CPU had to be read and written a byte at a time, kind of like copying data to a VGA card's ram). Weirdly enough, the Radio Shack COLOR COMPUTER actually had the same graphics chip, too... though it provides a great example of how a bad design can ruin an otherwise good graphics chip (to cut costs, Tandy eliminated the ram that was supposed to be used for defining background colors of individual characters, and instead hardwired the chip so it always just used green as the background color in any character-based graphics mode).
When I was in high school I did this with a bit of tape. Trick the system into thinking the lid was closed. Start legit game, let it spin twice, swap legit disk with CDR. Play
While this workaround uses a very novel technique and had the side effect of giving the emulation community a chance to properly emulate the CD control chip, there is already a SD-Card based modchip that plugs into the CD-ROM drive slot and allows you to play games even if the optical bits fail. It works by emulating the CD-ROM hardware instead. Still, this modchip is better because you don't even have to crack the lid to install it, it simply slots into the MPEG card slot built into the console.
I read the internet for the articles.
The graphics chip in the TI-99/4A, ColecoVision, and SG-1000 was TI's TMS9918. The Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) had a different, less capable one: the Motorola MC6847. In high-resolution mode, the MC6847's graphics were conceptually similar to those of the Apple II: essentially bit-banging an NTSC signal through a frame buffer and relying on composite artifact colors. Compare CoCo graphics to the same game on the Apple II. You might have been thinking of the MSX computer, which also used a TMS9918.
The video chips in the Sega Master System and Sega Genesis are direct descendants of TMS9918, and the NES Picture Processing Unit (PPU) is a blend of TMS9918 concepts (especially searching for sprites in a larger display list that intersect the current scanline) and the background attribute method from the Radar Scope/Donkey Kong video hardware.
Even post-DMCA, circumvention involving copying a small amount of code for the sole purpose of interoperability is fair. Lexmark v. Static Control Components.
Actual printed manuals. That brings back memories...
Microprose B17 Flying Fortress on 5.25" floppies, a foldout keyboard shortcuts guide, and a printed manual about half an inch thick.
Now I'm remembering the WordPerfect 5.1 manual.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
23 years ago would be July 1993. That's a 16 month difference.
I still play SU-27 Flanker. The original one. With the half inch thick manual.
(have a copy of Win98SE on Virtualbox just to run that and Homeworld 2 Complex).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I've got a Saturn here, and I've got some decent games for it. It's still IMO the best light gun platform. I've even kept an analog TV around for the purpose...
Thing is, devices like this for consoles tend to cost hundreds of dollars, and it's hard to imagine getting more enjoyment out of it than buying four or five new games, or eight to ten slightly older ones on sale...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
interesting... so anything from 2600 cartridges to floppy disks...?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Please ignore the username above, I forgot to check AC.
When I saw BeauHD had posted this, I expected a link to some unrelated Apple bullshit at the end of the summary.
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.
Collector's Edition
copy protection = DRM. DRM is short for Digital Rights Management, which is done via copy protection schemes.
Chuck Yeagers air combat. First game I remember having "copy protection" that was literally a quiz before you could play, asking you a fact or detail that you'd have to open the game manual to the correct page to find. OR..... You simply keep resetting until you get a question you can answer from one of the many many military war planes trading card sets your wonderful grandfather gave you. Yup, I "cracked" chuck yeagers air combat by learning facts about the planes in the game.
He did it without requiring a modchip. If I understood the interview right, he has built a card
So he's not using a modchip, he just... built a modchip?
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Saturn modchips connect between the laser unit and the rest of the CD drive to detect when the system is trying to identify whether a disc is genuine and return the required data. This device plugs into the expansion slot and uploads code to run on the CD block processor the way the VCD playback add-on did. It causes CD block commands to read from the flash storage rather than the optical drive.
Back then, we called it "copy protection." Because that's what it was. DRM is to copy protection what a tree is to fruit. Or perhaps, as a better analogy, what Sony BMG CDs are to rootkits.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
This sort of thing is specifically exempted.
"Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access."
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/...
That has never stopped corporate lawyers before, and it'll be very expensive for him to prove himself right.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Just because his implementation is different than previous modchips does not make this "not a modchip."
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
This news made my day, and the comments were fun too.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Just a reminder: this guy is a slimebag who refused to share the Saturn SH1 ROM dump ...
So, in your opinion, choosing not to voluntarily help out a project by violating copyright law (and risking mill-of-the-gods grade legal retribution) makes one a "slimebag"?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Did you watch the video? It's pretty drastically different than the traditional mod chips. His implementation requires no soldering of the existing components. The work is also amazing. He gets pretty detailed and shows the dumped assembly code.
Also, existing mod chips still require a functioning CD drive, and those parts are slowly dieing in existing units. His modifications allow reading images straight from a modern data source.
He doesnt have to prove himself right, the opposing side has to prove he infringed. Generally speaking, it would start with a simple C&D, and then from there you can make the economic choice to pursue it or not. Considering there is no real money involved, its really not a big deal.
Good-bye
I think you mean the NV1, which shipped in the Diamond Edge 3D. Many ports were based off of this software. It used quads and spheres to render instead of triangles, close to what the Saturn did.
Twinstiq, game news