[HN Gopher] Sega Saturn CD - Cracked after 20 years (2016) [video]
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Sega Saturn CD - Cracked after 20 years (2016) [video]
Author : swills
Score : 125 points
Date : 2022-06-14 12:13 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| sentirist wrote:
| I brought Saturn CD to a 1995 New Years party as a teenager and
| was so cool that day. I only ever had Virtua Fighter though and
| that was the last gaming console or game I ever bought. I just
| remember it being a massive waste of money for me. $399 in 1995
| dollars, about $690 adjusted for inflation with a CPI calculator.
| AndrianV wrote:
| I've always been interested in electronics and programming, and
| I've always struggled to write excellent code. This guy, on the
| other hand, makes it look easy.
| unsignednoop wrote:
| Disappointing that he didn't elaborate on how the rom was dumped.
|
| Also please check out the discussion on mil-cds here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18655524
|
| Edit: found the scrambler algo for milcd if anybody is curious
| https://mc.pp.se/dc/files/scramble.c (google was useless thank
| heavens for kagi)
| alt227 wrote:
| Ive seen this video pop up again and again over the last 5 years.
| I have 1 question: when/where can I buy one!
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| https://www.satiator.net/
| alt227 wrote:
| Thanks very much!
| acomjean wrote:
| Interesting. He went back to SD card from USB storage.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Saturn has several options for playing backups:
|
| Pseudo Saturn Kai: a firmware for the pro action replay cartridge
| that will boot non-official discs. Affordable and no modding
| required.
|
| Phantom mod chip: like a classic playstation mod chip, but it
| plugs into the ribbon cable between the optical drive and the
| main system board. It needs one wire other than the ribbon cable,
| to provide 5V power.
|
| Satiator: As shown in this youtube video, plugs into the VCD port
| on the back of the system and runs backups with no modding
| required.
|
| Optical drive emulators: TerraOnion MODE, Fenrir, Rhea & Phoebe,
| these all replace the CD drive in the stock console.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Great overview, one correction:
|
| Satiator doesn't play backup discs. It plays your games
| directly from an SD card.
| daneel_w wrote:
| As complementary info, the copy protection of the Sega Saturn was
| cracked already in the second half of the 90s. I had a "modchip"
| in my Saturn already in the late 90s, and more or less every game
| title was readily available as a PAL/NTSC region-unlocked ISO
| dump to be burnt on a blank CD-R.
|
| The effort in this video is about deconstructing the CD drive's
| protocol and link-layer, to allow for disc emulation with flash
| memory storage.
| thevagrant wrote:
| It was also possible to copy games using a cd burner and boot
| them without any mod chip.
|
| During the boot process the Saturn would check the drive for an
| authentic disc. Once the check passed, the drive paused and
| prepared to boot the game.
|
| At this point of pause you could swap the authentic disc to a
| completely different pirated game (one burned onto a normal
| CD-R that would fail the first boot check).. Timing the swap
| correctly, the Saturn would play the pirated game.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| There are also ways of bypassing the protection using the
| memory cartridge port. Cartridges with Pseudo Saturn Kai pre-
| installed are readily available these days.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Right, the Saturn just like early versions of the PS1 had an
| opening for the famous "swap trick". I never used it myself
| other than on the PS1.
| justinhj wrote:
| Ha yes I remember this. There was a physical mod that
| allowed the disk door to be opened without the ps1 noticing
| so you could switch disks after the verification
| jmkni wrote:
| IIRC you could do something similar with Action Replay, you
| would load into the Action Replay UI, swap out the disc and
| then boot into a pirated game
| ericlewis wrote:
| ps2 slim also had the disc swap trick
| deaddodo wrote:
| If you had the action replay cart, you could just leave
| it in and it would bypass the check altogether. I played
| burnt discs aplenty on my Saturn.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Reminds me of the BleemCast CD's - with the right one you
| could play PS1 games on a dreamcast! And it nicely upscaled
| the resolution and everything. Such an odd product
| PokemonNoGo wrote:
| Even though emulators were a thing and we had seen copying
| devices for the most obscure consoles come out of China
| bleem was something else. Such a mad idea and they actually
| made a business case out of it.
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| What prevents current generation consoles from loading a game
| that was copied exactly from the original disc to another
| Blu-ray?
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Simply the fact that it's actually very hard to make an
| exact copy of the disc. You can make an exact copy of the
| files, but there are layers underneath the file level that
| are harder to duplicate correctly, and the copy protection
| uses idiosyncrasies in that to work out if the media is
| original.
| I_dev_outdoors wrote:
| Why can't you also make a copy at the block level?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| BR is one part key exchange, one part manufacturing, one
| part firmware lockouts using that key. So if you mod a
| drive you probably could get raw data from the disc. The
| problem is getting that back out to a disc correctly that
| another unmoded player would like it. There are projects
| out there that are reading data right off the read head.
| But they are more focused on laserdisc items.
| ramses0 wrote:
| A simpler explanation than some of the below: imagine a
| damaged CD (or floppy) where one of the "blocks" returned
| inconsistent data. for x = 1 to 10:
| total += (read $DAMAGED_BLOCK) mod 2 assert total
| > 2 and total < 8
|
| Basically you'd need extra metadata to go along with your
| block-copy and a custom driver to know which blocks
| should return inconsistent data.
|
| Plain English explanation of the above code would be read
| a sector multiple times, make sure it is never always
| just even or just odd, but instead varies.
|
| Usually perfection in digital media is what you strive
| for, but strategically introducing imperfections has a
| long history in authenticating "genuine" products.
| MadVikingGod wrote:
| So think of a block on a CD as some amount of data (like
| 512 bytes), and some amount of error correction bytes.
| When the CD is copied those blocks aren't copied exactly,
| but the data is read, corrected and the block is written
| with the corrected data and error correction data. Most
| formats don't record bad blocks, nor do consumer writes
| write invalid blocks.
|
| One of the original methods used as copy protection used
| a special industrial writer write a invalid block, data
| was ok but the error correction would say it's something
| different, and check because the consumer hardware
| wouldn't read or write these blocks.
| comboy wrote:
| Protection is at the physical level. I mean, it was for
| the CDs, but you can easily imagine stuff that you can
| press onto the disc that your burner can't do.
|
| https://youtu.be/XUwSOfQ1D3c?t=481
| jaywalk wrote:
| Part of the copy protection includes physical features of
| the disc that must be pressed into it when it's produced,
| meaning a BluRay writer has no way of replicating it.
| dundarious wrote:
| My understanding is that the PS1 copy protection encoded
| the first pits and peaks in a way that a normal CD
| drive's error correction logic would tolerate, but in
| such a way that the special firmware on the PS1 could
| detect the profile of the "errors" and ensure they
| matched expectations.
|
| Consumer CD Burners didn't have firmware (or maybe even
| the physical capability) to reproduce these "errors".
|
| Imagine a vinyl record where the start of the track has a
| groove that isn't perfectly tracing the perimeter, but is
| actually a low amplitude sine wave of a certain
| frequency, waving in to the center and out to the
| perimeter. Any record player could trace the groove
| correctly, despite the fact that there is a low amplitude
| sine wave, and you'd hear the audio correctly (error
| correction). But a special record player could even
| detect the sine wave and reject records that don't have
| it. I'm hand-waving away the fact that you'd get a little
| bit of wow and flutter from the sine wave, but you get
| the idea.
| Thoreandan wrote:
| Excellent analogy. You could, if you had a full CD
| pressing & mastering plant, copy those discs with "wobble
| groove" and all. But it's a clever clever side channel. h
| ttps://archive.ph/LuPaY#:~:text=they%20track%20the%20%27-
| ,w...
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Awesome, I learned a lot in this thread. Thank you
| (plural) for the answers and your time to reply to my
| question!
| bombcar wrote:
| This is usually what they add, though the Nintendo
| Gamecube used a DVD-similar format at a different size to
| make it harder to copy. They also ran at CAV (constant
| angular velocity) instead of constant linear velocity
| (CLV) which lead to the rumor that they "spin backwards".
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Why can't you also make a copy at the block level?
|
| I don't know about CDs / BluRays but similar to what user
| jaywalk answered: back in the floppy disks days some
| copy-protection relied on physical differences created on
| purpose on the original game. It could be something as
| "simple" as damaging a track on purpose, by punching a
| hole in it. Then the game would try to read the data, any
| data, from that track. And the read command had to fail.
| A dumb block level copy wouldn't work: it could of course
| not physically punch a hole in a floppy disk.
|
| So pirate groups would crack the game and ship a version
| of the game without the copy protection and these could
| be copied at will.
| toast0 wrote:
| Do you have a Blu-ray mastering and pressing operation? In
| that case, not that much.
|
| Do you just have a Blu-Ray optical burner? Burned discs are
| typically simple to distinguish from pressed discs, so you
| can't make an exact copy.
|
| Some early CD systems were made before CD-Rs were common
| (or maybe even contemplated) and didn't have mechanisms to
| check media type, but modern consoles know about these
| things.
| Melatonic wrote:
| This has got to have been one of the weirdest game systems ever.
| Even the games were weird. Innovative and the graphics were mind
| blowing for its day but.....Knights? What an odd but unique game.
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