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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.
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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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)
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.
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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
23 years ago would be July 1993. That's a 16 month difference.
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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except that the speeds over usb, even usb 3, make trying to use external drives for that type of purpose a complete and utter waste of your time, it will be horrendously slow. The thing is, with a pc, you can do this right now, and you'll see how craptacular it really is. What you are really asking for is a return to game cartridges, which honestly, feels right. We're in a digital download frenzy but not all people have the connection to rely 100% on that, let alone the limited drive space on consoles. I certainly don't want to wait to install anything, but even a TB drive isn't enough to hold that many games considering most clock in a 10GB or more now. the happy medium (ignore the feasibility and price point) would be a solid state mini drive cartridge. Think NES or SEGA genesis, but it's not just a small board and chip, it's actually a tiny purpose built solid state drive. It would be fast as it could be on sata3 or Esata. The price would make it intangible. The life span of the drive might raise some concerns, hopefully one of the many knowledgeable Anonymous Cowards can answer this question: The limited lifespan of a NAND chip is related to the amount of writes, not reads correct? So if we manufacture a purpose build SSD that is NOT writable, only readable, shouldn't this extend the life of the memory? The drive wouldn't have any extra space and effectively would act like a factory pressed DVD, you can not use it as storage. The drive would have part numbers and serial numbers, and could even contain a controller and chip for "on the drive" DRM. I should be trying to patent this.
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.
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