Hey Modern Vintage, seeing you are the best in porting emulators and even games for the OG Xbox, have you considered helped Marty finish his Half Life 1 port? www.emuxtras.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=188&t=5278 He just have to fit everything inside the 64mb and he is almost ready, maybe he needs a little push? My regards! You are the best MVG and the most honest.
The PlayStation one if you play Spyro 3 The Year of the Dragon if you have a bootleg copy you could only play through the first levels when you're done beating the first levels and you talk to the fairy the fairy tells you that you can not continue cuz your copy is a illegal copy
3:40 32 megabits is not 8 megabytes. It's actually 4 megabytes, which is the maximum cartridge size you can have in LoROM memory map. So this is probably not a piracy check, but your emulator doing all kinds of wierd stuff with the memory map, causing a crash. Maybe it switches to HiROM or the completely unsupported and unofficial ExLoROM. Maybe it causes FastROM ($80xxxx) mirroring to fail. Who knows. But extending any SNES ROM that's under 32 megabits to over 32 megabits does all sorts of stuff to the memory map detection in emulators that will most certainly cause problems.
That’s why there are not many homebrew or unlicensed games. Nintendo made the snes so it required external chips for its games to run instead of just implementing them into the damm thing. Nice way of ripping you off also as them fx chip titles were sometimes as much as the console in some cases.
Add-on chips like the SuperFX, Nintendo's DSP line, Capcom's Cx4, SA-1, and SDD-1 were effective anti-piracy measures as well, since without the presence of the chips, or without accurate emulation of them, any games utilizing them would be broken beyond belief. Example: Until Cx4 emulation was implemented in most of the popular emulators, I remember Mega Man X2 and X3 would display backgrounds but no sprites of any sort, and even if it did, it would be only portions, which led me to believe that the Cx4 chip was responsible for drawing all of the sprites on screen, and not just the wireframe graphics. I wonder how many pirates tried dumping games with extra hardware on them, only to find the games were absolutely useless without the hardware in them.
The Nintendo's DSP line was pirated too. But it's really hard to find. The board has a 7 MHz crystal just like the original DSP clock. And yeah, the Cx4 was used in some boss to do scaling and rotation. But they didn't used so much as Yoshi's Island.
Flintstones Treasure of Sierra Madrock has an antipiracy that makes it impossible to finish because the level timer goes down way too quickly. Learnt that on a real copier I found!
Running Chrono Trigger off an SD2SNES recently, whenever I would use the in-game hook to save state, I found that while the game ran fine in all other respects, I was no longer able to accumulate EXP and so my characters would never level up, even after saving via in-game menu and rebooting. I’m convinced this was some sort of anti-piracy measure
Huh, that's pretty cool tbh. The only thing I can think of that could make it not be an anti piracy thing is if you has the Workman's Wallet equipped, but you would probably know that you had it if that was the case.
I had a Mario All Stars cart and I triggered the anti-piracy message once. Pulling out the cart and reinserting it fixed it though. I remember it well because I was like "Why is my Super Nintendo mad at me?"
I got that one on my Wildcard 32X and was gutted haha. Managed to borrow a friend’s cart eventually not long after and go through it, however I never did play DKC2. The first one never had any issues with it.
This happens to me whenever I try to play my PAL copy on Super Famicom. I can't figure out why, it's not like it's reading the wrong SRAM size or anything. Same with Yoshi's Island, so those games feel sluggish to me compared to the rest of my library, which I happily use with a Games Master for that sweet, sweet 60Hz speed.
@@hostiusasinhostilityhostil7853 i think the SNES/Super Famicom has region checks as well. You mentioned having a PAL cartridge, is the system PAL as well? If the system is USA or JPN then that could possibly be the issue.
Yeah I experienced it too... Where does he get off calling us all liars! Then again, who wants to listen to someone who think the earthbound big bad is "GUYGAX" *HEAD DESK*
_Psst!_ *Giygas* was the end-boss of _EathBound._ Gygax was the guy who invented _Dungeons and Dragons._ It's okay, though. I really love reading about weird and devious anti-piracy countermeasures, and this video scratches that itch for today.
I don't think Nintendo cares about the WiiU or DS anymore. It's that the Toddler-wranglers are more worried about pirates on the Switch. Not that it matters, as Nintendo just clones conventional videogame formats (Balloon Fight=Joust, the Mario games=[Platforming game of choice here], Zelda=[RPG franchise of choice goes here]) and most people play on PC almost exclusively anyways. Making consoles in the 2010s is like mining gold in a supernova.
@@Code7Unltd balloon fight=joust is the only thing that holds water, which is why you couldn't think of a game Nintendo cloned to creat Mario or Zelda. Nintendo popularized those game styles, if not invented them.
@@Code7Unltd "making consoles in the 2010s is like mining gold in a supernova. " riiiight, that's why the ps4 has 100 mil sales and the switch is selling quite fast too
I seem to remember some games having a 50/60hz check (perhaps Mario Cart?) not so much of an anti-piracy (but i guess it could have been used too) but to prevent region swapping.... I had a switch on my Euro snes to switch between 50/60hz speed and usually left it to 60hz but a few of my euro carts wouldnt boot at 60hz and displayed some message about not being deisgned for this region (if i remembr rightly.. it has been 25 years ago)
You remember correctly. There was games that had those 50/60Hz checks and actually games that had multiple checks on it as well. Well, the switch on the SNES was intended to remove the black stripes generated from PAL/NTSC difference more than a copy protection work around but yes, it helped us playing games ahead of time or even play games we could never play with an official release on the right region.
When I bought a Super Everdrive, it had Tales of Phantasia. I ask the seller about it, and he told it was used for testing the Everdrive, because of its anti piracy features.
He's actually the final boss of everything, you just don't know it yet. Life is merely a massive D&D campaign run by Gary Gygax, and we're just the villager mobs.
One of the funniest things I ever read was about the ingenious methods Gameboy pirates (!) used to prevent other pirates from copying their games. Maybe you should do an episode about that!
Also true with bootleg famicom games! Hammer team was known to implement anti-piracy measures in their SNES to NES demakes, like developing proprietary mapper chips, which other pirates circumvented by messing with the game code.
I hope you'll consider making an episode on the interesting history of the Nintendo DS/3Ds's security and how some companies enabled piracy without giving anything for the Homebrew community to work with.
I remember playing megaman x on an really old emulator and thought that the behavior of it was super strange, so I changed emulators and it worked. Now I finally know why it didn't work.
Demons Crest also has an annoying region check. You can get to the end of the first level and then it tells you it’s only for US systems. I imported the cart for use on my AUS Pal system, only to find this
@@ka9d00d3 nonono, I get that, praise be to uncle Jobel, but afaik there was no reference to him or 7GD in this video. Hence my question: where did that come from?
I do have a memory when I was a child to get stuck on a infinite time travel scene on Chrono Trigger. My rom was a fan translation to Portuguese, don't know if this helped to trigger the anti-piracy method on the emulator.
On my super wild card on Megaman X every SECOND JUMP was tiny you had to do a tiny jump first before jumping any hole ONLY every second jump was a real jump SERIOUSLY made the game unplayable (love the channel)
These sorts of sneaky DRMs are morally ambiguous at best; a very grey-area. Some might argue they're just tricking thieves, but it's still dishonest to be sneaky like this. That said, if they're only doing things like pretending to work or deleting the game's own save-game, that's one thing, but some people have gone too far and actually cased damage like GoldenHawk's CDRWin 4.0 accepting a keygen'd serial but burning coasters, which is simply vigilantism (read illegal). 😒That's like if Nintendo or Disney sent someone to smash your console and TV because they found out (or just suspect ¬_¬) that you copied a move or game.
The Chrono Trigger anti-piracy measure you just mentioned is something I absolutely experienced in the DS version (on an OG R4). I wonder if your sources got the version mixed up.
Jema well, A number of people including myself encountered it back when emulators were still in their infancy. So it must’ve relied on some sort of inaccuracy in the emulation to Trigger. However I was still able to set off the protection consistently using pro action replay codes (I have a set of codes to give the party infinite HP/MP as well as make certain attacks like Frog’s Frog Stomp and Ayla’s Dino Tail do a consistent 9999 HP damage) when emulators matured enough, so there’s a possibility that it’s more of an anti-cheat mechanism than a copy protection one.
I may add another (copyright?) protection for MMX: I remember trying to play the NTSC cartridge on a PAL console via an adapter. You may start and play the game but you won't be able to beat the first encounter with Vile. It should trigger a cut scene once you almost run out of energy. But he just kept killing you instead. I also remember I managed to get pass that protection by using an action replay and some code. Unfortunately I don't remember what it changed.
Er, how do you figure? It shouldn't be easy to trigger, to prevent false positives, and to prevent it being circumvented. So the fact it's not easy to replicate intentionally shows its good code.
These anti piracy methods were pre emulation though. These were intended to go off on original hardware when playing the game off a floppy disk. So it can be tricky to trigger some with out knowing the exacty what variables trigger it.
Keiji Inafune never programmed anything and Mega Man was not created by him either. His job at Capcom was mostly as a designer (he is credited with creating Zero's design for Mega Man X), with his first role as a producer being Mega Man 8. Also, I wonder if Star Ocean had copy protection, other than it being one of the few games to use a 48 megabit ROM cartridge with a special chip that would decompress the code and data to 96 megabits.
in fact, we all saw the trainwreck that was Mighty No. 9, and the vaporware that came under the name "Red Ash". He might be a good designer, but he's terrible at putting stuff together and advertising his own products. The very moment he left Capcom he was doomed.
@@waltercomunello121 He didn't leave Capcom. He was fired from Capcom. Inafune was notorious for abandoning projects he was involved with before they were finished.
@@mattfahringer148 - Yes, it is. There's an entire series that started on the Game Boy (with the original Gargoyle's Quest) starring FireBrand, the Red Demon. Demon's crest is the last one in the series.
I'm really surprised that the vendors of the disk copy machines would not just offer a simple switch that allows you to change the SRAM size, so you can adjust it to the size within the cartridge (which would then be listed somewhere or you just try to find it by playing around with different sizes, after all the number of typical sizes is very limited).
I've been in the emulation scene for years and Chrono Trigger was never a heavy issue game as far as antipiracy went. However, it was known if you attempted to patch the game in any way, such as any bug fixes, retranslations, or ROM hacks there would be some issues getting the game to work. I think this is why so much effort was made by Square-Enix to stop the Crimson Echoes and Flames of Eternity fan games because they figured out how to circumvent the antipiracy measures.
The NTSC-version of Mega Man X also had a nasty check in place for us Europeans trying to import the game. We used NTSC to PAL converters to do this back in the day and if Mega Man X detected some older type converters the game would boot you straight back to the intro sequence after you finished the opening stage of the game. Newer converters managed to fool the game, but it was a right pain in the butt.
I know with Earthbound there is a GameGenie/Action Replay code that adds the copy protection measures back into the game so players could see what happens with pirated copies of the game. Also there also some modern games that use the Demon's Crest Copy protection where they have an enemy that is impossible to kill because the players are playing a pirated copy. I think Serious Sam 3 is one such game. Never knew that Super Street Fighter 2 had Anti piracy that disabled the controls. The closest thing I have seen as far as anti piracy methods that are close to Mega man X and Super Street Fighter 2 is where the game's graphics get blurrier and blurrier as you play until you can't see anything and can no longer play.
Hey modern Vintage Gamer, I own a floppy disk copier UFO branded, it doesnt work wish my SNES 1 chip board (it loads but you can notice errors at the menu after that) but it works with the Snes Jr and other classic SNES boards. I really would like to fix that and turn my 1 chip board SNES compatible with the floppy copier. Do you have any idea how I could fix it?
@Modern Vintage Gamer: maybe make a video of stupid copy protections / region locks as well. The first that comes to mind is "Vandal Hearts 2 US" for PSX. I remember not working on my Euro PSX and my friend was here with a memory card where she was playing. When i booted my PSX with her MC, it would play fine but when i booted without MC or a MC without a VH2 savegame, it would not boot. I found out that there is a check for the first 10x bytes or so of the savegame where there is the is the game ID (SLUSxxx.xx). Any savegame (even with the wrong about of blocks) that had the right ID, would turn of the protection O.o
if most games just had SRAM checks why weren't there any DIP switches or something to select an SRAM size so that you could adjust it to whatever the game expects?
The Super Mario All Stars method would trigger when using a Game Genie occasionally. The SSF2 method often occured on legit copies. That game was kind of a mess.
I don't know if something like cheat devices were available back then, but theoretically a lot of these annoyances could probably be fixed with cheats. Like the Megaman checks they could maybe have a cheat were you're regening health when climbing walls. It would've been funny to see something like Datel making a "perfect cheat" package to counter the anti-piracy.
One problem with making the game unplayable and not telling the player it's a piracy protection is that they'll most likely believe it's just a bad game. Is this really good for business?
That is why the Spyro one I think is the smartest, because it tells you right away that you will face issues that are not present in the original game (sorta, it just detects an modchip, so even if you buy the original copy but are using on a modded console it will happen)
Just making the game bad will maybe work the best IF it's common knowledge that pirated games might or might not behave as expected. Not sure that was common knowledge then?
I tried to fix a MMX 1.0 cart once by moving the ROM chips to a new board. The new board used a 74LS139 instead of a 74LS00 to switch between the 2 ROMs so it triggered the copy protection
4:12 Oh, I can't _wait_ to hear about *_THIS_* one...lolz (why this game though?) 5:48 I guess the version I have is 1.1; I've never run across any of the anti-piracy glitches, either on actual hardware or emulation. I use ZSNES. It's stable enough for me. I mainly just want to play, I don't need a debugger...
Another thing to note is that in donkey kong country on my original SNES, when i powered it on with a turbo controller connected it triggered the anti-piracy screen.
Hey I think I know what the Anti Tamper Method used in Chrono Trigger is. When I was a kid playing this on a SNES emulator, there was this one boss Masa & Mune in the mountains which I could never beat. I would fight it for hours but the boss fight would never finish. It's in Chapter 11: Tata and the Frog. I thought we just got a bad dump of the rom but we could have accidentally triggered the anti piracy on it, cuz years later I got emulated it again and had no issues. Hope this helps!
If you do cover more SNES games, Mega Man X3's CX4 chip besides probiding neat wireframe graphics it's also an anti-piracy measure. I don't know the details, but according to Jeremy Parish even some hardware clones struggle with it. So that's something to look into
Kirby DL3 US on PAL won't work on classic 2 switches mod. I took a SMD CIC from a japanese Starfox as master CIC in SNES to boot the cartridge. It's looking for permanent 60Hz.
I wonder why many people talk about the "enhancing chips" ( FX / SA / DSP /etc...) as copy protection measure when the chips where chips to enhance the SNES with capabilities and didn't had anything to do with copy protection. Back on the days, many consoles / games at the time had / needed "enhancing chips" or "enhancing cards" like the MPEG card for the Saturn (used by Lunar), ram extention for Saturn or N64, co-processor and ram in the game Chess on Odyssey2 / Videopack, all "console expantions as Sega CD (or megadrive CD) + 32x / Jaguar CD / 64DD, games like Golden Sun / Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble / Harvest moon (all GBA) with internal hardware or Hey you Pikatchu / Tetris64 (N64) who had external hardware. They was all about pushing the boundaries of what the console / game could do or make it do better than other games. All the SNES enhancing chips had specific functions and none of them has something to do with copy protection. Sure, the chips was on the way when you wanted to copy the game because they was cutting edge and nothing changed until today where cutting edge hardware can not be copied quickly. Remember that back on those days, the limitations was always the hardware and not the software.
Because even if copy protection was not the main function of enhancement chips they still did work as such. When you made a copy from such game you could not play it unless you had that chip available (or emulation of it) one way or another. Case in point, normal Everdrive flash cart. You cannot play any games that need special chips with it, you need the much more expensive SD2SNES cart and even that does not copy all chips out there.
@@MaaZeus Nasa builds rockets because of necessity and they want to go to space, not because they want to stop others from going to space. In fact Nasa was for long time the only one that did successfully go to space. This was done with knowhow, infrastructure and money. Are rockets difficult to build? Are they expansive? Sure but they are not a Nasa copy protection systems. Apart that, what kind of copy protection was it if you could put sometimes other game with the same chip on top of the SWC and the copy would play fine? Don't get me wrong, they was a nuisance back on the day but it was not the function of those chip. Remember that those custom chips was not cheap either and added to the price of the translation/localization as well (especially in Europe with the shit ton of languages). Apart that, I don't know what the amount of piracy really was in the US but in Europe I knew only about 10 people ( mostly people working in import games shops) that knew what a SWC was but they sure had interest on selling them. Following you thinking had Start Ocean and Tales of Phantasia (and maybe other 2-3 games Japan only), had another layer of "copy protection" with the size of the ROM (48Mb if my memory isn't wrong) and the most SWC I ever see was 32Mb only (including my). Adding to that SO had even another "copy protection" (apart the DSP) and that was how it stored the graphics. From my knowledge, it wasn't the DSP that made problem in the Emulation of Start Ocean but the graphics. On the early day you neededed a graphics pack to play SO in Emulator.
I was playing MegaMan X for snes and i was playing it on my New 3DS and i would get the dash boots upgrade and when the level reloads or i start the came from a password and the Armor upgrade would be gone i even came across the same problem on a snes emulator for windows
What, the eShop port was busted? Yikes. I know there's a password you can put in to recreate the antipiracy - the game buzzes as if it's invalid, but takes you to the intro stage anyway, with the maverick weapons unlocked.
I have a super street fighter 2 mint in box ... but its a unusual red box... its legit but when i bought it in the 90s it had a diffrent box ... any ideas anyone?
Yes, I remember that, at the beginning of the 32-bit era, some of the most important SNES games were reprinted with a new red box. It was part of a strategy to convince people that they didn't need to buy those new consoles and the SNES could deliver the best games possible. Of course because the launch of the N64 was delayed
I do feel like Demon's Crest is obscure enough to warrant an introduction, but the way you talked about it made it sound like you didn't know this was the third game in its spin-off series. I don't know why they didn't call it "Gargoyles Quest III," but I guess Demon's Crest is a pretty metal title, so there's that.
If you look at Lunar Magic, and press Ctrl+Shit+PgDn in the 8x8 GFX Section in a Super Mario World ROM, you might see these weird text graphics that are not accessible in any assigned hex address. You may ask what are these? Those are the text used in the Anti-Piracy Screen, which is originally detected when the ROM detects a copier, these graphics would display.
As someone who's been learning 65xx programming language recently, I would love to know what tool(s) you're using at 7:30. It looks like it may be notepad++ with some really nice add-ons?
I really do love your videos on the anti piracy and security. I think someone bricked my SNES version of Chrono Trigger or the backup battery is just dead. Saves just don't update on it but it keeps the saves it came with on it.
In the comments on the previous SNES Anti-Piracy video, someone mentioned that they adjusted a pin on the SRAM chip one of their friend’s games so the sister couldn’t delete the saves. Maybe that’s what the previous owner did?
The anti-piracy protections on the SNES version of Chronotrigger are absolutely real, as a kid I had this old ass copy of zsnes that used to lock into the timetravel anim every time.
the chrono trigger transltion packs returns anti piracy screen on super everdrive version 1, the piracy screen is edited in the translation packs so it produces a screen showing who made the translation pack and piracy patch, but you are unable to progress.
Donkey Kong Country for me would display the anti piracy screen if I connected in a turbo controller while it was starting up, but everything would be fine if I connected the turbo controller later
Some of the later copiers masked out the SRAM address lines that shouldn't be connected - so if the ROM header indicated 256kbit/32kbyte SRAM then only A0-A14 were let through and A15-A17 were forced low. Similar stuff was implemented for ROM size and mirroring - so if, for example, you loaded a 12Mbit/1.5Mbit game then the last 512k would be loaded twice and the map size forced to 2MB.
yup...I hail from the Netherlands and back in 'the days' ...I owned a SNES and a disk copier.. I recall it was called a Pro Fighter-X, able to play 'bigger' games like SF2 turbo and even was able (I believe) to play DSP-chipped games like Mario Kart Great thing at that time I was about 14 years old, and managed to bargain (read:manipulate) my parents into giving me an advance on my coming birthday and Christmass presents....and alow me the money to purchase this device... Main thing was that I convinced them that a single game for the SNES (at that time) costs about (converted) 100 dollars... So purchasing a disc-copier would equivalant about 7 games....and I would be able to pick up games from guys downloading them from 'boards' for about 5 dollars... Great times back then....shame I sold off all my stuff a few years later when I decided to become a 90-ies acid-stoner hippie who doesnt need any game systems....hahaha Of course, when I was around 30 all the systems and games came back in my life in some form....mostly through emulators...
