How the Sega Dreamcast Copy Protection Worked - And how it Failed | MVG 

dumb phoneposter

@@Koseiku ???

Doesnt just develop a Karaoke GD-ROM

Deoxal 4chan terminology.

You know... it's just Japan and its unconditionnal love for Karaoke. That's the weakness.

Yeah like damn, that's dedication to "preservation"

@WolframaticAlpha Yeah, it is but as we know, USB technology is always improving in terms of data transfer speed.

@WolframaticAlpha Wow, thats very interesting, are there pics of it in google? i may try to find it.

Usb is not a serial or a bus. No fucking clue why it's called universal serial hus

But you only have to do it once

I used to do that but with PC games back in 1999 also. I got a Creative 2x CD burner for my birthday. First game I sold was a copy of Sim City 3000. The games were all rented for maximum profit. I had a library of games, software and audio cds. The kids would choose whatever they want and I would bring the copy on the next day. Teachers had absolutely no idea what that was all about. A full blown black market of pirated software LOL I had a really good pc back then I bought with all that dirty cash lol Good times!

@@fullmetaljacket7 Did you have trench coat?

Deoxal would have been really useful

@@deoxal7947 If drug wars taught me anything, it's to have a trench coat with 12,500 pockets.

The best part about copy protection is the fun we all used to have defeating it! 😉

I'd like to know about this, especially considering emulation of disc based systems. You see, I'd just assume that the emulator of a disc based console would be able to read discs intended for the console it's emulating, but I do know that Dolphin (Gamecube and Wii) only works with ISOs and I'm not sure about other emnulators eg RPCS3 (PS3) So I'm guessing that copy protection is something emulator authors have to get past not only on ISOs but also on the discs themselves.

LambdaCalculus379 I can bet any amount of money you had no part in any copy protection hacking 😂🖕

@@LambdaCalculus379 That saturn was a bitch....

Checking in one year later, he’s made some absolutely amazing videos on it!

And them, they included a version of a media, the could be cheaply read and written, and this become their fall.

well no because MIL-CD meant you could use regular CDs lmao. now the Saturn...the Saturn took _decades_ to crack the protection of

Damn its crazy people take time out of day to crack codes on video game consoles. How do they learn how to hack?

The good old days, when everything wasn't 100% gatekeeper'd by companies.

@@datriaxsondor590 That's the best part

@@JitSlayer true

Some good points here.

AfterBurnerTeirusu One would expect them to have access to the dev kit, or at least the software tools, since they had to do more coding. That was the easy part. There’s also a video from the about the hack resulting from a reverse engineered Action Replay CDX demo disc from one of Datel’s former partners (Larry Bundy Jr; 5 Hilariously Idiotic Gaming Screw Ups). Still, I’m interested in this other article. The N64 devkit software was so prevalent at the time that they had to explicitly ban it from coding competitions like POM’99. The DC scene wasn‘t so different.

AfterBurnerTeirusu Yeah, it’s very possible that Datel paid a German group for an exploit they developed entirely on their own, but the AR CDX did predate Utopia Boot Disc. I recall a Datel rep on some of the scene’s IRC channels soliciting Game Boy coders for one of their projects (a programmable multicart that needed some legit content to justify its existence). They’ve definitely been known to reach out. ;)

What ever happened to the people that made the Playstation emulater called Bleem. Those guys reverse engineered the PlayStation so they could get their emulator running without breaking any copyright laws. Sony tried to sue the guys at Bleem but lost. Sony even went as far as to get someone to break into the Bleem office and try to recover sales figures on the emulator. Then came the Bleemcast to stick it to Sony. I wonder how it felt for Sony at the time, watching their games running and looking nicer on the competitions hardware.

​@@BoomBox02 You might be mixing some of that up with Sony v. Connectix (Virtual Game Station) but, yeah, Sony sued both. Connectix demonstrated VGS to Sony in an attempt to get them on-board but Sony didn't want any part of it. At that point they were using Sony's BIOS. Sony's refusal sent them back into development to make a functional BIOS substitute that didn't break any copyright laws. Of course, Sony still sued in an attempt to set a precedent and make all similar emulation illegal on the basis that it infringes on IP related to the rest of the platform's technical specifics. Luckily, Connectix wasn't such a small company (makers of VMWare) so they were able to defend themselves. When Sony sued Bleem! it was for "Unfair competition" and the use of screenshots to market it (deemed "Fair Use" by the courts). Imagine if Sony had partnered with Connectix instead and attacked the makers of Bleem! with that earlier lawsuit instead, which would have set a bad precedent for all of emulation. D:

Do you have the other SDK docs, with the "Sega Packet Interface" PDF? There's also the System Architecture PDF, which I refer to as the "Dreamcast Programming Bible". Not that I'm very good at that side of it. lol The closest I got to coding anything for the Dreamcast is when I did the first ever tests of an IDE HDD as a Slave device on the G1 bus (alongside the GD drive). I modified the KOS examples to access the data on the HDD (or CF card), and print the sectors as hex. I then designed a simple passive adapter, sent a few to Mr SWAT, who then added support for IDE devices in Dreamshell. And so, the G1-ATA and IDE mods were born. ;)

You could disc swap to rip Xbox 360 games in img burn too. Or you needed a kreon drive

Did you even finish watching the video? He clearly stated in the video that you can read GD-ROM disc with certain model PC CD-ROM drives. You aren't sharing any new information here.

@@MrRobarino That was using specific firmware which can allow specific drives to read the HD track without further modification. The method I'm talking about is forcing a generic CD drive to read the track, by moving the laser sled zero-offset switch. Two completely different methods, as the second way involves physically modifying the drive, and can work on many models, not just the ones stated in the vid.

(the wiki article shown in the vid may have contained more info on that method, but the link wasn't included in the vid description at the time of posting, so I couldn't easily check it.)

I have 3 Dreamcast in public storage

@@Keepskatin My collection has REALLYYYY shot up since this post. I have almost the entire North American library of the REAL GD-Rom discs, I have limited edition dreamcasts and a demo kiosk console. WOW this comment takes me back to before I built it up

​@@jk-474yoo that's so cool!!

​@@KeepskatinI don't get it what do you use >1 Dreamcast for?

@@ThatPianoNoob Spare parts and backup hardware

They left the bike lock at home

Aaron Greenfield Dreamcast copy protection was fine. If someone gives you the keys to unlock something is not necessarily the locker at fault.

@@BADSeCt0R2XPDreamcast fanboys are the most closed minded of all system fanboys.

the GDs were safe, for many years no one was able to crack them, but the mild-cd support killed the dreamcast, who the fuck thought of that?

@@BADSeCt0R2XP Fine? The scrambling was a good idea, but as MVG mentioned Sega screwed up by having it be the same every single time. Easily reversible encryption is about as useless as no encryption at all. It isn't a matter of "giving you the keys", they chose to use a flimsy Master lock that can be easily defeated once you see what is going on.

Annie Warbucks it was sega making way for Microsoft I believe. Sega was running out of money at the time where Microsoft was not.

@Lassi Kinnunen Not to mention that Sega's previous business decisions undermined consumer confidence and made gamers leery about the company. Sony's announcement of the PS2 with its DVD playback capabilities was the final nail in the coffin.

@@BADSeCt0R2XP Sega bungled up with the Genesis addons and the Saturn. The 32X was kind of pointless as most of its games were merely slight facelifts of existing titles even though the hardware does have potential. The Saturn had a lot of flaws both on part of the hardware and how it was marketed. It was infamously rushed to counter the PS1 in the States, and its hardware was and still is a *nightmare* to develop for. That certainly accounted for why they were in dire straits at the time.

The UK TV advert i saw was obscure as not to explain it was a console advert

Not to mention the Wii which was extremely Easy to mod, no chip required and allow it to play downloaded games and rip a game to ROM and be able to then play it from the ROM making it easy to copy games you would rent.

You can swap a retail gd-rom for a burned gd-rom or a gdr and if you get the timing right it will boot

@@MrXiandra Gotta Love Them Hot-Swaps!

I had self booting back ups later on in the dreamcasts life about a year after the boot disc appeared

@@carlopepi sorry for confusion, the above is referencing gd-roms not CD-Rs

you couldn't buy gdroms.. they did that for that reason alone. no one had a gdrom burner.. GD ROMs weren't a viable option anyway but CD's were.. hence why that was the ultimate choice overall.. if people could buy gdroms and a burner.. probably would have been the price of a house.

I feel sorry you didnt even get a Playstation, but a Polystation, whatever chinese ripoff that is :'-D

Did your ears bleed?

Is that like, multiple Playstations combined??

@@davecarsley8773 it's a fake ps1 with a gun as the controller lol

i personally thought it was non-existant, now I know for a fact it was bad.

good suggestion! i may look into that for a future vid. thanks :)

ARS DC was so far ahead of its time, especially in Japan where the mouse, broadband adapter, I believe a camera, and (if it was made, a vmu MP3 player. So D.C. Had nearly all widely used PC components (except internal storage). Keyboard, mouse, live audio chat, modem/broadband, web browser and (I've heard rumor of a basic but very functional "Office-type" word processor & spreadsheets), live video chat, web camera. I'm betting some found ways to use the expansion ports on the back to connect printers, and the ILLUSTRIOUS VGA box/cable to play 480p so sharp on a pic monitor. Dreamcast, aside from storage limits had most bells and whistles of a $3,500 pc at the time for $200. Buying all the options adds up some, but not late 90's/early 2k's absurd prices. also had online multi-player. And my favorite: lots of killer games and arcade ports you could play by just pressing "power"- no crazy conflicts and patches and incompatibility that was so sloppy on pc- like physical jumpers, that made me spend days trying to get one crappy pc RPG to work with hours of tech support. Screw that noise: inert disc, press power, and it worked.

@@sideswipe1261 The VGA box was amazing! I had a Gateway VX1120 CRT monitor that was a huge (back then) 22". Shenmue and Shenmue 2 looked absolutely amazing on it.

@@HerecomestheCalavera I still think it's stupid that america didn't want to use SCART for it's media back in the day... RGB (vga) directly from the dreamcast onto your television... no box needed, just the right cable (advanced Scart cable), same for the xbox, 480p60 standard on PalPlus televisions ... (and 576P60 on the xbox)

@@BoGy1980 there were actually a couple NTSC TVs with scart, not many though, i know because I owned one

Even the N64 was capable of using a mouse. They even developed one specifically for it!

Well let me guess, this is my old pal Atreyu187? So we meet again!

BFKAnthony817 that would be me hehe hey Anthony817

Hah I knew it! Nothing much man, same old same old. Where have you been not seen you in the DC community much, and only once on that PS3 subreddit.

BFKAnthony817 NM I don't have any systems ATM due to some stuff so I just lurk and help.

Ah man I hope you can get your collection back. I just got a GDEMU and 128gb SD card for it for my Dreamcast, and am building a DreamPi so I can take it online over modern internet. Really back on a Dreamcast kick like never before.

They do not need RU-vid channels like this to monitor security. They will be on hacking groups and release groups forums instead.

You have ears of a bat, mate. Good catch. I caught it at 7:03

The Sega CD was a peripheral, not a console.

AztecCroc fair enough, however one could just say the Sega Genesis is a game console that had a peripheral allowing it to play disk based games. That would still make it sega's first.

@@AztecCroc How's about Sega Wondermega, then? The HWM-5010 from Sega, not the Victor's variants. And the MultiMega/CDX ones?

It's an add on

Wondermega isn't addon, MultiMega isn't addon, either.

I used to rip games for ReviveDC. D2 is a very curious one that we looked at a lot. The ADX decoder in that game is actually tied to the sample rate of the audio files in the game. Trying to reduce the size of the audio files results in scrambled audio. It's very bizarre and it's the only game (to my knowledge) that had a decoder that was hardcoded to the sample rate.

@@ComradeJared Nice, what was your handle back then?

comradesnarky

CDROM Sonic Adventure also had mono and resampled audio. And the music from Sky Deck part 2 was dropped too, i got to hear that song looong after, when owning an original copy haha

Still got my Swap Magic 2 disc 😎😊

@@chadbrick67 Got the FreeMcBoot on the memory card as well. HDD the old IDE connection? Got a couple of spare ones I could use from my old PC

Technology Connections channel already did it, worth a view.

@@yoshi314 he did it on the original PlayStation, not PS2 which is way more secure.. and yet not because of external media booting. But hey you cant play burned games by just burning a certain image from stock so they did one up on sega

@@NaokisRCafaik the core protection is the same, the ps2 additionally decrypts the ps2logo from the disc for extra validation.

This is because Echelons method of booting was released and most DC game downloads today used a prepared ISO with the exploit already in place.

technically the 4rth if you count the portable sega cdx

@@swfreeD why would cdx and sega cd be counted as 2 distinct consoles?

But took a lot longer to get a mod that worked around the "fortress" of a cd drive controller. My favourite is the mega cd which has no copy protection at all.

Saturn was better. Sophia ran Checksums and Lockjacking. Dreamcast used GD-ROM. GD ROM is basically HC CD ROM with all TOC packed on one layer. Dreamcast Copy Protection was all Software in the Whitebook of GDROM itself.