This is amazing. The video avoids too technical language, and basically explains the whole process of reverse engineering. I think this is the best explanation of reverse engineering I've seen in a long time.
Micah Scott's toastermelt videos are another great example of reverse engineering workflow/techniques. More technical and detailed but still very accessible.
Why is this being downvoted? I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a TLDR on a 30 minute video.
Anyway, the basic story is that the Saturn had copy protection in the form of physical marks on the copy protected CDs. This puts a huge barrier to entry on homebrew and the like, so a guy going by Dr Abrasive tried to reverse engineer a way around that. He first looked into a way of disabling the copy protection on the CDs to allow burned CDs to be used but that proved too difficult.
He eventually hit upon the fact that the Saturn had an external module that could be added to allow the system to play video CDs. He then built a component to take advantage of that fact and feed in his own commands through this interface thereby avoiding the copy protection entirely. This allowed content to be run from USB sticks without the need for CDs at all, lowering the barrier to entry even more. It also helps workaround mechanical failure of the CD drive which is becoming a common problem for the 20 year old hardware.
So now if you have this custom built component, you can take an off the shelf system and start running code from a USB stick without any soldering, hacking, or modification at all beyond plugging the device into the back of the console.
the most impressive part, to me, was how thoroughly he reverse engineered what looks to be a crazy complicated CPU architecture - the Saturn has four of them.
Also, I love that his original motivation was to use the sound processor for mixing chiptune, and basically opening up the entire system at metal level is a happy by product.
ALSO, the fact that he decided that his first working prototype was too hands on and finding a way to piggyback the video playback expansion card to make the mod orders of magnitude less complicated to install / execute.
Wasn't it only one of those CPU's though? He mentioned there is a CPU dedicated to disk operation and that's the one no one had been able to get a ROM dump of, which in turn enabled all the other stuff? Not trying to downplay his achievement or anything, I'm new to all this but it's easy to see that this is some truly amazing work.
2 CPUs, 2 GPUs, and there is a separate CPU dedicated to disk operation which was (almost) completely isolated. His achievement was getting access to that disk CPU, but that access allows access to the rest of the CPUs.
He dumped ROM of Saturn's CD-ROM module's CPU, reverse engineered OS in it, discovered a developer mode which allows Saturn to read non-protected CDs but requires a special protected CD which nobody has, then he turned attention to the slot for Video CD decoder card, discovered that this card can send additional encrypted code to CD-ROM module's CPU, then created replacement for CD-ROM module as a card for Video CD decoder slot, which allows to load CD images from USB mass storage devices connected to it's USB port.
I can't wait for him to start selling these! I would buy one in a hot minute. My Saturn is collecting dust and there are so many games I just can't get my hands on for my Saturn, and emulation in my experience hardly works. It's way too weird a machine.
I think that's both why they were so expensive back in the day AND why it was so hard to develop on (all I have -ever- heard about developing games for that platform).
To be fair most devs at the time completely ignored the second CPU because it was apparently very hard to make them work together. So they treated it as a single CPU console. Which kinds of defeats the purpose :)
Going by the Wikipedia description of it, they had multiplexed RAM access. So developers could choose between having two CPUs at half the RAM speed (4KiB CPU-local cache are enough to make up for it, right?) or a single CPU at full RAM speed.
Australia has some of the best reverse engineering laws currently. Those four kids reverse the Sydney train system legally (they did responsibly disclose n such).
I think Odin was Windows only, there were multiple old versions floating around and how do you know what you're really running? (as Administrator, too)
In case it helps, there is actually a very low tech solution to booting copied games on Saturn hardware that works with the vast majority of games released (especially expensive/rare/hard to find games like the Treasure releases).
Tape/wedge the drive lid sensor down, power up with a real game in (you don't need to close the lid as the sensor believes the lid is always shut) and allow it do the initial copy protection check on your real disc.
At this point it stops the disc for just less than second - just enough time to pull the real disc out and swap in a CD-R. It takes a little practice and potentially can damage the drive motor if your timing is frequently poor.
Games this won't work with are those spanning multiple discs where you need to swap discs in game to progress.
I practiced this trick with my original playstation years ago.
Then I killed it trying to mod it. Got a PS1 instead, couldn't figure out the trick anymore.
It was funny that they kept on changing the points where the disc would read info, you had to swap multiple times at different points. They wouldn't stop either, just slow down.
Modding the PS2 is still one of the hardest soldering jobs I've ever done. The worst part is that the modchips were apparently pretty crude in how they worked and ended up burning out the laser diode after about 6 months even if you only used it for imported games and not burned games.
Why not just cut the wobble edge of a real CD off and attach it to a burned CD?
Maybe you can shave the back of the shimmed wobble edge down, so that it won't stick out as much on the burned CD. This shimmed wobble can be your key for all the burned CDs you have.
Maybe double sided tape can keep the wobble shim attached to your burned CD while still allowing it to be removable for other CDs.
I've never had a Saturn, so I don't know what this wobble edge looks like in person. Am I missing something?
I seriously loled at this. That would not have been a graceful solution to say the least.
This isn't about hacking cdroms just to get it to run on the system. It is about understanding the intricate details of how it worked so that when the cdrom drive itself died you would have a way of playing those games along with full cd bloc emulation
it's not a physical wobble, it's a data track written in a wave-like path. You can't write it as all CD-Rs already have the spiral track so it's very hard to fake.
It's similar to the Gamecube using the burst-cutting area to implement DRM - it's impossible to duplicate without a production setup.
The video's graphic is a bit of an approximation. In practice it appears that every second disc sector is displaced, IIRC. And they've got particular bit patterns written into them to produce a visual logo; these patterns (but not the actual logos) are checked too.
The protection ring is visible to the naked eye for this reason. I can't find a picture, sorry!
I tried to figure out how to reproduce the logo at one point (10+ years ago, when people were less worried about dying drives). IIRC, it's that the EFM patterns used to make the pixels don't make valid Red/Yellow Book sector contents, which causes some weird behavior if you try to read them as such.
You're not getting very technical responses to this, so I'll bite.
> Why not just cut the wobble edge of a real CD off and attach it to a burned CD?
This would have a very low success rate, as the precision required to accurately cut off the wobbled edge on an original disc (and the target area on a CD-R) would a lot of upfront engineering as well as cost-prohibitive tools. Optical discs require more precise measurements than most people who favor the scrapbooking "cut-n-glue" solution can provide.
This is just as long as we're pretending it's possible. Opitcal discs lose a lot of structural integrity the moment you start breaking/cutting them. The reflective portion where the data resides is on a thin film substrate at the back of the CD. Cutting that without outright destroying the disc or (at least reducing the operating life) would take significant effort, as would precisely healing the new gap from combining two separate materials without destroying the alignment of all those microscopic ones and zeroes.
Not to mention that any adhesives you might apply to combine the two pieces would make that level of accuracy impossible, if not highly improbable. And then you have to hope the whole thing holds up while spinning. Even assuming you could get the two pieces to combine seamlessly, there's always the chance that you've done something that destroys the balance of the disc, which could have a number of unfortunate effects in spinning media. I don't think the Saturn drive spins fast enough for it to sling off and demolish your hardware, but it could cause data inaccuracies at the very least.
I mean a company could attempt to do it for you, but it'd be cheaper and more reliable to engineer Saturn-compatible CD-Rs (or offer a disc-pressing service) at that rate. Considering the only use is to defeat old copy protection, it's not going to have a market large enough to sustain it. So you're going to have high prices, and low enough product sales that it would probably not be worth inviting the legal trouble. Even after all that, CD-Rs can have all sorts of QA issues that can affect their shelf life. And then you still have the problem mentioned in the video where the drive hardware fails.
Replacing it with flash data is just a better long-term solution.
GDEMU is for the Dreamcast, but the same person/group also produced Phoebe and Rhea which are similar products for the Saturn. Those don't have a separate home page, but most of the menu entries at the top of the page have separate Phoebe and Rhea options.
Looking at the installation instructions, the Rhea claims to require some soldering. The Phoebe doesn't, but still requires disassembling the system. They also each only work on specific versions of the hardware (20- vs 21-pin), and which version a specific Saturn is may not be obvious without disassembly.
The nice thing about this new solution, even ignoring that it furthers public understanding of the hardware, is that it's a simple module that plugs into a slot already available and accessible on every Saturn ever sold by SEGA (presumably it won't work on the Hi-Saturn units made by Hitachi, as they had the MPEG hardware integrated, though they are also very rare and very expensive).
The Rhea doesn't actually require soldering as Dominik will do the soldering first before shipping. For sure having to know 20 versus 21 pin is a pain. But the Rhea/Phoebe have a huge advantage of being here now and known to be very reliable (they work flawlessly). Not discounting this new approach, it seems very promising, but just pointing out there's already a solution available today for those who didn't realize.
Does anyone know how you go from a PCB to a product? I've made PCBs before, but I wouldn't know where to begin to make it into a product that I can sell to people...
Well, if you want to sell it legally, testing and validation with the relevant government departments. If not, eBay and "intended for novelty use only"?
Thank you, I've never seen a PCB assembly service, so that will be useful. I guess one would also need to design some sort of cover as well and talk to a company that makes plastics? Are there plastic assembly companies as well (for if your product has buttons/sprints/etc)?
There's Protomold[1] which does relatively cheap short runs of plastic manufacturing. I'm sure there are plenty of alternatives (and I recall seeing a massive chinese 3d printing contract manufacturer, but forget the name).
Not sure about assembling all the parts into the case. Depending on who does the PCB production and assembly, they might also offer a full assembly service, or not.
The Factory Floor series[2] by Bunnie Huang might be an interesting read about some of the steps necessary for getting an idea to production.
This looks great, thank you. They're still prohibitively expensive for small runs (for 10 boards, above, the cost was $100/board, but for 1000 it fell down to $2/board, and I'm sure protolabs is similar), but at least your comment and the GP takes me from "I wouldn't know how to even begin making this thing" to "Looks like I can just send these guys designs and my box prototype and get assembled PCBs and boxes back", which is almost there, pretty much.
You can already buy the Saturn Rhea. It is pretty much the same thing except SD based and it replaces the CD drive. I have one and absolutely love it. It's honestly the best retro gaming purchase I have made in a very long time.
It's definitely IDA Pro. If anyone is considering how difficult this is, let me offer you my experience. It is incredibly hard and requires utmost persistence. I tried to refresh (learn more about) my knowledge of x86/x86-64 asm and decided to give a go on modifying a binary that was not produced by me. It seems to be a common exercise, so I though - how difficult can this be? Right? You follow code procedures, take note of jumps, there's even a handy visual graph of the things, take another application that can offer you to see function names and break calls... Suddenly, you're in this loop where you take notes on paper (yes), you seem to understand a part, move to the next and then you realise you didn't actually understand the part before and go back, and then you get tangled in variables and registers..
It takes a special set of skills and a mindset to do this. I recommend everyone to try that once. Just take a foreign binary, any which you know the application of, and try to modify it. Then, after you give up, take a note this was done on an unknown binary with (almost) unknown functionality. TBH, he did say he looked up a table of known functions on a wiki somewhere, but still...
I was just thinking about the Saturn at a nerd memorabilia store, as this was the one system I saved my money up to buy at 11 years old. What an utter disappointment of a system (in terms of games), but what a great hack. Makes Dreamcast hacking look like Lego Logo.
The Saturn had great games what are you talking about?
Maybe it didnt have all those game your schoolmate was playing on his Playstation but does take away from some of the great games it did have
Arguably it can be better than blocking threads, which can waste precious time for synchronization. But if you design your code with precise timings, you can ensure that the different processors will complete their work and communicate their data at a precise time, thus saving code and time.
>I don't know. Winning people's hearts? For the fun of it?
That's true, but as long as they can still make money from their IP they won't (i.e. repackaging old source + game(s) into a VM for sale on Steam or next-gen consoles)
Some of the source code/etc may be licensed from a third party, which means that releasing it is treading through a legal minefield.
In cases like these I'm thankful for pirates. When an interesting project is about to die because all the stakeholders lost interest and there's too much legal mess to deal with to give it away, it's good if there's someone that steps in, ignores that legal mess altogether and simply dumps the product on-line.
What's strange is that a lot of the Sega games from this era are just missing completely. Try hunting down Skies of Arcadia (even the GC port) or anything Panzer Dragoon. They were never released in virtual consoles despite significant cult followings.
If there is one thing I learned from internships and various jobs (I'm still a student), it's that companies pretty much always exist of people who care. If there's an opportunity to spread the name SEGA around without any downsides, good odds you could find someone in the company who's up for that.
Trouble is, you probably need to find whoever was on the original product team, or it's going to cost the company more hours than they'd find it worth.
They probably have contractual restrictions - agreements to help fight against unauthorized copying, or to protect the copyrights of people who create games on the system.
And in general, most console systems are a serious bundle of hacks, mostly tolerated by programmers by the sole fact that you can rely on every system to be identical.
You certainly didnt know the history of Sega or the Dreamcast if you think it died because of piracy.
...with that thinking then the Saturn would of been an ultra success.
I knew a lot of people who owned a Dreamcast and no games.
No modchip required, no soldering, broadband penetration on the rise, filesharing was now a thing.
I completely understand the Saturn's botched launch and limited number of retail outlets, but the Dreamcast had the best launch of all time up to that point and broke sales records.
I'm not convinced piracy is not in fact the cause of the Dreamcast's demise.
I really did love the Dreamcast, built in modem and the second-screen VMU.
If you don't think piracy killed it, what do you think killed it? The PS2?
No EA Games, when Madden was huge; no DVD player, and the PS2 hype cycle was perfectly timed and had an even better launch. Wikipedia sales numbers for the PS2 and Dreamcast say the PS2 sold 10.6M by March 31, 2001, whereas the Dreamcast was dead by then and only sold 9.13M. Sega also had troubled finances as a result of the Saturn.
the 2K Sports series negated the need for EA and sold so well that EA sought out an exclusivity contract with the NFL so that 2K would be killed?
The DVD drive after the ps2 was released probably would be a huge factor though, if the dreamcast wasn't in fact already dead which it was.
I'm sure some business school guys have written papers on this, I should find them. Would be interesting to read all the opinions on Sega's near death and exiting the hardware business.
I believe Sega also had some institutional issues. There was a documentary a while back, can't quite remember the name. Something about the corporate structure a lot of the business was based in the US while the technical knowledge was based in Japan and thru some skulduggery they ended up torpedoing themselves ...
Sega wasn't losing money on the Dreamcast, but they weren't making money either. Sega's exit didn't have to do with sales; they chose to exit the console market because there was more money if they focused on games and less on hardware.
As a Sega fanboy, this makes me happy. That copy protection scheme (outer ring spiral) is quite something. I find it amusing that Sega went with yet another proprietary disc format for the Dreamcast (GD-ROM) and that system is able to load homebrew code from any CD-R / CD-RW without any modifications to the hardware.
Yeah, that is something. They thought better hardware protection was unnecessary because they believed in the strength of their software solution (which was quickly cracked)? The games could be larger, so that CDs could not fit them without changes. IIRC early Soul Calibur burns had their music down-sampled to fit 650 MB. And was it Skies of Arcadia that really did have too much content to fit on a CD, without serious changes?
Also, you mention CD-RW, but IIRC you could not boot off CD-RW, only CD-R. Or maybe that was the softmodded xbox?
Dreamcast games varied in size massively. Crazy Taxi was only around 100mb. So small in fact that when initially burnt to a CD the drive couldn't load files fast enough (as files were closer to the inner ring of the disc). Tools were then released to 'pad' the game files out to be closer to the outer edge with a dummy file. Files close to the outer edge can be read faster as the drive laser can cover more distance per revolution.
Skies of Arcadia was I believe the biggest ever 'released' - 2x1GB. A group called Echelon did manage to release it after many months/1 year+(?) without anything ripped, sized to fit on 2x700mb CD-R's. They pre-compressed the whole game and wrote a custom on-the-fly decompresser. Apparently this did slow the game down in places, but the technical achievement certainly needs to be appreciated.
If you search google for their Skies of Arcadia nfo file, you will see this is clearly what they claim. I won't link to it here due to other material hosted on those sites. The trainer injected into the executable also makes this claim (you can view this on pouet.net).
I have little reason to doubt their claims given their clear technical skill spanning multiple console generations (Echelon might have only been associated with the Dreamcast/PS2, but it's obvious that their 'group' were behind multiple other, very highly technically accomplished scene groups).
Access to the source code is even a possibility - at one point they routinely released games weeks or even months before street dates.
Wonderful. I love things like this. In these days of Steam DB and people scrutinising every byte, it seems like the easter egg / message from the developer has gone by the wayside.
Honestly, inserting compression doesn't sound impossible. Difficult, but a few months and a team of people and it sounds achievable. Warez folks do some crazy stuff.
However, I read some forums from the time, it sounds like the results weren't great. Mainly folks notice sound triggering noticably late. So uh, Maybe instead of downsampling they built a MP3 decoder, but to use the existing system, it couldn't stream the audio, so they had to decompress the clip completely into a buffer before playback?
Sorry, I wasn't very clear. In my head I was thinking in terms of games that weren't ripped/downsampled to 'fit' on an 80min CD-R. I think the largest release was probably D2, which from memory needed 5x99min CDR's and even then numerous elements were downsampled/ripped/etc.
Oh yes, I remember padding the image, and Echelon, of course. I still have the tools somewhere in my backups.
You mention the read speed issues, meaning the dreamcast drive was CAV. Were all data drives of the time CAV? Are audio CD players CAV? Not some 40 second skip protection discman, but like a hifi unit from the 80s (since my naive 80s implementation would not like the data rate changing across the disc)? Does CAV vs CLV have any meaning here, or is pretty much laserdisc only terms?
All things I vaguely feel like I should know (like if all optical media has pits that are the same length across the disc. I think not, again laserdisc.) I love my dreamcast. Left one in an apartment 6 years ago when I moved out. It could be still there. Still have one.
CDs are CLV, data-wise. But many CD-ROM drives can also read at faster-than-realtime-audio speeds, and in those cases reading at the outer edge of the disc can net faster rates. IE, a 2x CD-ROM might not be 2x throughout the whole disc.
> That copy protection scheme (outer ring spiral) is quite something.
Yeah about that, I don't get it. Is there data hidden in that spiral that acts as a checksum for the CD or something? Or is it of special material that lights up differently under certain light (like money)?
To me it doesn't look that hard to duplicate a simple spiral, but then I know nothing about it.
original Playstation used similar copy protection trick - ASCII string SCE(I/E/A) was stored in pregap pre-groove wobble between the leadin and the first track. PSX used Three-beam pickup and was able to track this wobble and extract code from radial tracking error signals. Modchips simply injected same error signal for couple of seconds after closing CD lid, enough for the CD controller to recognize it as "original".
they didnt. lasers were poor to begin with, plus weaker media(cdr) probably caused extra mechanism movements (focusing)
edit:
hmm, now that I think about it, its possible someone incompetent made modchip that would keep sending wooble constantly, that could cause tracking problems and tire mechanism pretty fast.
Very unlikely that would happen. Sega generally takes a pretty relaxed view to the emulation community and to my knowledge has never pursued anyone for releasing firmware from their systems.
He does claim legal and professional risks as his reasons in the assemblergames forum thread[0] though.
>I, myself, am not going to release these ROMs. This isn't the first project where I've dumped a commercial object for some other purpose and been asked to share (see: shairport, for one), and after much thought I conclude - now, as then - that it's not the right thing for me to do in any project. There are legal and professional risks which I'm just not comfortable taking. That's not negotiable.
>But that's not to say I won't help you dump it yourself. I'll have a dump feature in the cart, and I'm sure someone will rapidly archive all the available systems.
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't see how "I didn't steal anything; I just broke open the safe and told others how to get the money" would get you of the hook.
There's an active hobbyist lockpicking community out there with plenty of instructional videos. One could nefariously apply these skills, doesn't make the video producers liable.
By analogy, if the original comment had been "I will not give you a copy of the copyrighted harry potter book, but I can teach you how to use a scanner if you'd like, and I'm sure someone else will scan it" would you say that teaching someone to use a scanner is illegal?
It's actually typically legal to make a backup of a copyrighted item you own for personal use if the original is damaged.
He's teaching people to do something that's typically legal, avoiding infringing copyright by redistributing himself, and commenting that it's quite likely others won't be so scrupulous; I don't see how anyone could reasonably fault him.
A scanner doesn't target a single (intellectual) property. This feature of this hack, on the other hand, would have only one use: dumping the ROM of a Sega Saturn.
I hadn't thought of the 'for personal use' defense, though.
I follow /r/crackstatus but it is far from being really done. This said I think all things equal piracy is a good thing for the gaming industry and without it I would not have been a gamer who now have more than 300 games in Steam and many more in GoG and Blizzard games too Back in the day I wasn't rich and even if I had money I couldn't buy games because I had no access to them living in a third World Country, but piracy made me a gamer.
I'm so so glad he mentions archiving in this video - I don't think enough thought has been given to the impact of DRM on museum collections in 10-50 years.
I'm going through this as a relatively new PS Vita owner. Sony decided to go with proprietary game cartridges, proprietary memory cards, and DRM'd digital distribution. Despite the quality of the games and hardware, the system didn't do well commercially and it appears Sony has lost interest in the system and it's sibling PS TV/Vita TV.
There are a lot of great games (including PS1 and PSP games) for the system, but once the hardware dies or the download servers are shut down, what is left for people who still want to play these games?
In the back of my mind I've been thinking what digital consumer rights look like. It seems like this point in history has laws that favor publishers more than consumers or the public good.
Absolutely. The PSP is still my favorite way to go and play the classic PS1 games like FF7, Metal Gear Solid, etc. It really is a wonderful device, but the DRM Sony has repeatedly strengthened over the years has made using it somewhat of a gamble.
It'd be a shame if we suddenly couldn't play these classics anymore just because Sony wants us to repurchase it on Console XYZ.
The PSP has been thoroughly owned, and just about every game for it is available somewhere on the internet. Even emulating the PSP is getting pretty good.
That said, the Vita is much nicer for PS1 games, and if your firmware is old enough, you can even convert your old discs yourself for it.
I don't know any players that are in favor of DRM per se. Players are willing to accept DRM, IF it is transparent, and even more willing if it enables some perks.
There was a time when DRM was only visible when it broke your legitimately purchased game (e.g. SimCity, Diablo 3)
Now at least gamers are getting some decent perks from DRM (e.g. digital loaning, play anywhere, cross platform licensing) so it's a bit easier to stomach.
> Now at least gamers are getting some decent perks from DRM (e.g. digital loaning, play anywhere, cross platform licensing) so it's a bit easier to stomach.
That's because people have been vocal about that. If the companies had it their way, I'm sure the majority would want you to buy a new license for each platform and system (like how the cheap Windows licenses are - locked to your system)
Yes, I'm sure companies want to maximize sales, that is their job. And yes, people were very vocal about shitty DRM (and rightly so).
The old way of doing business was proprietary everything. (See Sony in the 80s and 90s) I'm just glad manufactures finally saw that locking things down so much increased customer anger and frustration more than it increased sales. Being a child of the 80s, I'm still surprised at stuff like using a generic USB thumb drive in an Xbox 360 and things of that nature.
People don't know any better and don't understand the issues. They're not voting with their wallets. They just want to access the "protected" items. I tend to think most people are just going to accept when they lose access to "protected" items they've already purchased (or just have to re-purchase them). I don't like any of this, but I don't expect it will happen differently either.
There's actually a very large collection of Saturn games archives at archive.org. They're MESS compatible CHD files (I wish other emulators would support it, it's a good way to handle large drive copies), but it's a fairly good collection.
I may be wrong, but a quick Google shows a lack of development resources for the CHD format. Either they need to do some SEO, or some straight up marketing.
Maybe a condition of copyright should be that you submit the unrestricted media to Library of Congress, and it gets released upon expiration of copyright.
But you'd still need to have the build process, so really you'd need submission of the full dev environment. But then you might also need the hardware to run it ...
Personally I think it should be copyright protection or DRM: the demos doesn't get the DRM stuff to enter the public domain so strictly speaking DRM stuff can't be copyright as the deal of time-limited monopoly is broken by the corps that are using DRM.
He mentions archival as a motivation but can we trust the rest of the hardware to last more than a few decades? Isn't emulation the real archival solution?
Thanks, hadn't found that one with some quick googling, only found some horrible binary "freeware" stuff. He also mentions using his reverse engineering knowledge to help emulation authors so hopefully that includes Yabause. Having an open-source emulator is particularly important if we want to be able to archive these games forever.
Non Open Source emulators are dead in the water in terms of archiving. 10 years later if the original author is not around anymore, you won't be able to rely on it nor improve on it. I wish all emulator writers understood that.
PPSSPP and Dolphin have made great progress BECAUSE they were open.
And it's not only film. Early television, audio recording, books (in special in times when copying them was costly)... The list of information we lost is enormous.
Saturn emulation on MESS is surprisingly good. Not up to some of the others, but I was pleasantly surprised last time I tried it with how many games were playable.
It would be, but cycle perfect emulation is very difficult and costly. Higan (formerly Bsnes) manages it with Snes emulation and it requires a cpu with a rate over 3GHz. I remember reading the N64 would require a 10GHz cpu to emulate with 100% archival accuracy.
long story short, it is the real solution, but its not a practical one by any means.
That would definitely make cycle accuracy easier between all the system parts.
The hard part is for someone to actually develop the emulation for all the custom chips in the system. In particular, the two graphics chips are very complex and the documentation is very hard to understand. The same goes for the sound chip. The others are all standard enough to be reasonably straightforward (if not actually easy).
Yes. In general there are two real paths to long-term archival of games: emulation and reproduction.
Emulation is the best possible path IMHO since it enables the games to be played (and experienced) on pretty much any hardware. I think this work may do quite a bit to help in that area, there's really no reason the Saturn isn't nearly perfectly emulated these days.
Reproduction is the next best and much harder than Emulation. Basically figuring out how to build the hardware again. There's several versions of this with much older hardware (C64, 2600, etc.) with new hardware being produced that can run the old software natively. There's also "lesser" versions that use modern CPUs, etc. to run the code basically also in emulation, but this is not the same thing. However, reproduction is both technically more difficult and has a smaller audience who's willing to add yet another machine to their collection to see old games.
also, MESS's emulation is also not too terrible, I was pretty surprised with how many games worked under it
Emulation is far from perfect even for older systems. Amiga emulation is still being worked on. Less popular systems have poor standars of emulation too.
Yeah of course. But there's a lot of distracting work that's being done to try to keep old, rapidly failing and limited quantity systems alive (for various definitions of alive).
In a hundred years, the only practical way to experience classic software like this will be via emulation and I believe that's where resources should be put.
There's a weird kind of snobbery in classic gaming that, unless you're playing original games on original hardware, you're doing it entirely wrong and emulation stuff is basically just dirty piracy. Fast forward to today and the talk of the community is that old game and hardware prices are getting sky high, and in the case of some systems (like the 5200) finding working equipment is getting to be impossible. No duh, sucking all of the inventory for a product that's not going to be manufactured in anymore and allowing the prices to slip into normal supply-demand areas means that's what's going to happen -- even worse, the new audience who can be exposed to this material shrinks even smaller every day.
For almost all practical purposes, systems like the Amiga or the SNES or similar vintage are pretty much complete in terms of emulation -- the entire known software libraries are basically completable. In many ways, emulators like UAE offer better software compatibility than real hardware!
As I think I mentioned that's been another major outcome. I've been working with Yabause developers both to improve their HLE of the CD block, and to implement full low-level emulation using dumped ROMs.
Personal archiving is allowed under USC's Fair Use terms AFAIK whilst emulation isn't; might just be legally protective wording (or an attempt at that).
Longterm yes, but the cd drives on these things die decades before the roms and processing hardware. He had mentioned in the video that he was surprised that the solid state laser died so soon but I was under the impression that it's almost always the drive motor that's the first to go.
Yes, what a wonderfull example of corpoorate paranoia. They are out there- the enemy, the other tribesman and there psychopaths- out to get me, my fortress, my product for cheap- but i will show it to them, i shall leave no mark upon this world, for which i shall be remembered.
I'm glad someone else out there digs the Sega Saturn because I always felt left out being into Sega games while the rest of my friends were Nintendo kids all the way.
I'm glad someone else out there digs the Sega Saturn because I always felt left out being into Sega games while the rest of my friends were Nintendo kids all the way.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadAnyway, the basic story is that the Saturn had copy protection in the form of physical marks on the copy protected CDs. This puts a huge barrier to entry on homebrew and the like, so a guy going by Dr Abrasive tried to reverse engineer a way around that. He first looked into a way of disabling the copy protection on the CDs to allow burned CDs to be used but that proved too difficult.
He eventually hit upon the fact that the Saturn had an external module that could be added to allow the system to play video CDs. He then built a component to take advantage of that fact and feed in his own commands through this interface thereby avoiding the copy protection entirely. This allowed content to be run from USB sticks without the need for CDs at all, lowering the barrier to entry even more. It also helps workaround mechanical failure of the CD drive which is becoming a common problem for the 20 year old hardware.
So now if you have this custom built component, you can take an off the shelf system and start running code from a USB stick without any soldering, hacking, or modification at all beyond plugging the device into the back of the console.
Also, I love that his original motivation was to use the sound processor for mixing chiptune, and basically opening up the entire system at metal level is a happy by product.
ALSO, the fact that he decided that his first working prototype was too hands on and finding a way to piggyback the video playback expansion card to make the mod orders of magnitude less complicated to install / execute.
Super impressive stuff
[1] http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...
Sega should really make an HD remastering of all of them though. Or even a new one. Especially after the sadness of Star Fox Zero.
I can assure you, I am not looking forward to the TPP!
[1] https://github.com/Benjamin-Dobell/Heimdall
Tape/wedge the drive lid sensor down, power up with a real game in (you don't need to close the lid as the sensor believes the lid is always shut) and allow it do the initial copy protection check on your real disc.
At this point it stops the disc for just less than second - just enough time to pull the real disc out and swap in a CD-R. It takes a little practice and potentially can damage the drive motor if your timing is frequently poor.
Games this won't work with are those spanning multiple discs where you need to swap discs in game to progress.
Then I killed it trying to mod it. Got a PS1 instead, couldn't figure out the trick anymore.
It was funny that they kept on changing the points where the disc would read info, you had to swap multiple times at different points. They wouldn't stop either, just slow down.
Ugh, don't remind me. My brother fried our n64 and our ps2 trying to mod them into handheld's (with built-in screen).
Maybe you can shave the back of the shimmed wobble edge down, so that it won't stick out as much on the burned CD. This shimmed wobble can be your key for all the burned CDs you have.
Maybe double sided tape can keep the wobble shim attached to your burned CD while still allowing it to be removable for other CDs.
I've never had a Saturn, so I don't know what this wobble edge looks like in person. Am I missing something?
It's similar to the Gamecube using the burst-cutting area to implement DRM - it's impossible to duplicate without a production setup.
The video shows it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E#t=2m13s
The protection ring is visible to the naked eye for this reason. I can't find a picture, sorry!
> Why not just cut the wobble edge of a real CD off and attach it to a burned CD?
This would have a very low success rate, as the precision required to accurately cut off the wobbled edge on an original disc (and the target area on a CD-R) would a lot of upfront engineering as well as cost-prohibitive tools. Optical discs require more precise measurements than most people who favor the scrapbooking "cut-n-glue" solution can provide.
This is just as long as we're pretending it's possible. Opitcal discs lose a lot of structural integrity the moment you start breaking/cutting them. The reflective portion where the data resides is on a thin film substrate at the back of the CD. Cutting that without outright destroying the disc or (at least reducing the operating life) would take significant effort, as would precisely healing the new gap from combining two separate materials without destroying the alignment of all those microscopic ones and zeroes.
Not to mention that any adhesives you might apply to combine the two pieces would make that level of accuracy impossible, if not highly improbable. And then you have to hope the whole thing holds up while spinning. Even assuming you could get the two pieces to combine seamlessly, there's always the chance that you've done something that destroys the balance of the disc, which could have a number of unfortunate effects in spinning media. I don't think the Saturn drive spins fast enough for it to sling off and demolish your hardware, but it could cause data inaccuracies at the very least.
I mean a company could attempt to do it for you, but it'd be cheaper and more reliable to engineer Saturn-compatible CD-Rs (or offer a disc-pressing service) at that rate. Considering the only use is to defeat old copy protection, it's not going to have a market large enough to sustain it. So you're going to have high prices, and low enough product sales that it would probably not be worth inviting the legal trouble. Even after all that, CD-Rs can have all sorts of QA issues that can affect their shelf life. And then you still have the problem mentioned in the video where the drive hardware fails.
Replacing it with flash data is just a better long-term solution.
To achieve this did not require fully reverse engineering the cdrom controller but it is great someone did though.
The nice thing about this new solution, even ignoring that it furthers public understanding of the hardware, is that it's a simple module that plugs into a slot already available and accessible on every Saturn ever sold by SEGA (presumably it won't work on the Hi-Saturn units made by Hitachi, as they had the MPEG hardware integrated, though they are also very rare and very expensive).
For PCB assembly, http://www.4pcb.com/ is recommended.
Some reviews from Lady Ada: http://www.ladyada.net/library/pcb/manufacturers.html
Also check out http://pcbshopper.com/
Not sure about assembling all the parts into the case. Depending on who does the PCB production and assembly, they might also offer a full assembly service, or not.
The Factory Floor series[2] by Bunnie Huang might be an interesting read about some of the steps necessary for getting an idea to production.
[1] https://www.protolabs.com/injection-molding
[2] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=2812
Thanks again!
I applaud crazy fuckers like you. The world needs more of you.
Well done sir.
It takes a special set of skills and a mindset to do this. I recommend everyone to try that once. Just take a foreign binary, any which you know the application of, and try to modify it. Then, after you give up, take a note this was done on an unknown binary with (almost) unknown functionality. TBH, he did say he looked up a table of known functions on a wiki somewhere, but still...
http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...
Harder to program of course.
Not to mention that all the relevant information may not exist anymore, or is in a storage facility somewhere growing mold.
I don't know. Winning people's hearts? For the fun of it?
That's true, but as long as they can still make money from their IP they won't (i.e. repackaging old source + game(s) into a VM for sale on Steam or next-gen consoles)
Some of the source code/etc may be licensed from a third party, which means that releasing it is treading through a legal minefield.
If there is one thing I learned from internships and various jobs (I'm still a student), it's that companies pretty much always exist of people who care. If there's an opportunity to spread the name SEGA around without any downsides, good odds you could find someone in the company who's up for that.
Trouble is, you probably need to find whoever was on the original product team, or it's going to cost the company more hours than they'd find it worth.
This included the remark that Hasbro would not go after developers for discovering or bypassing the encryption key (which was discovered shortly after) to run their own software: http://allanswers.org/games/games/video-games/atari/jaguar-4...
And in general, most console systems are a serious bundle of hacks, mostly tolerated by programmers by the sole fact that you can rely on every system to be identical.
No modchip required, no soldering, broadband penetration on the rise, filesharing was now a thing.
I completely understand the Saturn's botched launch and limited number of retail outlets, but the Dreamcast had the best launch of all time up to that point and broke sales records.
I'm not convinced piracy is not in fact the cause of the Dreamcast's demise.
I really did love the Dreamcast, built in modem and the second-screen VMU.
If you don't think piracy killed it, what do you think killed it? The PS2?
The DVD drive after the ps2 was released probably would be a huge factor though, if the dreamcast wasn't in fact already dead which it was.
I'm sure some business school guys have written papers on this, I should find them. Would be interesting to read all the opinions on Sega's near death and exiting the hardware business.
Also, you mention CD-RW, but IIRC you could not boot off CD-RW, only CD-R. Or maybe that was the softmodded xbox?
Skies of Arcadia was I believe the biggest ever 'released' - 2x1GB. A group called Echelon did manage to release it after many months/1 year+(?) without anything ripped, sized to fit on 2x700mb CD-R's. They pre-compressed the whole game and wrote a custom on-the-fly decompresser. Apparently this did slow the game down in places, but the technical achievement certainly needs to be appreciated.
To achieve what you claim would more than likely mean game engine modification and without the source code I dont see that happening.
I have little reason to doubt their claims given their clear technical skill spanning multiple console generations (Echelon might have only been associated with the Dreamcast/PS2, but it's obvious that their 'group' were behind multiple other, very highly technically accomplished scene groups).
Access to the source code is even a possibility - at one point they routinely released games weeks or even months before street dates.
http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=97250 is worth a read for an indication of some of the shenanigans that were afoot back in those days.
https://tcrf.net/The_Cutting_Room_Floor has a lot of examples of left over / hidden content but nothing as cool as a message left for a particular group.
However, I read some forums from the time, it sounds like the results weren't great. Mainly folks notice sound triggering noticably late. So uh, Maybe instead of downsampling they built a MP3 decoder, but to use the existing system, it couldn't stream the audio, so they had to decompress the clip completely into a buffer before playback?
Bigger than Shenmue / Shenmue 2? IIRC both Shenmue games spanned 3 GD-ROMs.
You mention the read speed issues, meaning the dreamcast drive was CAV. Were all data drives of the time CAV? Are audio CD players CAV? Not some 40 second skip protection discman, but like a hifi unit from the 80s (since my naive 80s implementation would not like the data rate changing across the disc)? Does CAV vs CLV have any meaning here, or is pretty much laserdisc only terms?
All things I vaguely feel like I should know (like if all optical media has pits that are the same length across the disc. I think not, again laserdisc.) I love my dreamcast. Left one in an apartment 6 years ago when I moved out. It could be still there. Still have one.
Yeah about that, I don't get it. Is there data hidden in that spiral that acts as a checksum for the CD or something? Or is it of special material that lights up differently under certain light (like money)?
To me it doesn't look that hard to duplicate a simple spiral, but then I know nothing about it.
Gamecube discs utilised a similar technology which you can easily see on the disc surface - http://www.gamesx.com/grafx/ngcdisc2.jpg & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_optical_discs#Burst_c...
Years before, companies actually did a similar thing with floppy discs, albeit in a slightly different way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_sector
edit: hmm, now that I think about it, its possible someone incompetent made modchip that would keep sending wooble constantly, that could cause tracking problems and tire mechanism pretty fast.
He does claim legal and professional risks as his reasons in the assemblergames forum thread[0] though.
[0] http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...
>I, myself, am not going to release these ROMs. This isn't the first project where I've dumped a commercial object for some other purpose and been asked to share (see: shairport, for one), and after much thought I conclude - now, as then - that it's not the right thing for me to do in any project. There are legal and professional risks which I'm just not comfortable taking. That's not negotiable.
>But that's not to say I won't help you dump it yourself. I'll have a dump feature in the cart, and I'm sure someone will rapidly archive all the available systems.
By analogy, if the original comment had been "I will not give you a copy of the copyrighted harry potter book, but I can teach you how to use a scanner if you'd like, and I'm sure someone else will scan it" would you say that teaching someone to use a scanner is illegal?
It's actually typically legal to make a backup of a copyrighted item you own for personal use if the original is damaged.
He's teaching people to do something that's typically legal, avoiding infringing copyright by redistributing himself, and commenting that it's quite likely others won't be so scrupulous; I don't see how anyone could reasonably fault him.
I hadn't thought of the 'for personal use' defense, though.
These days my interest in game cracking is mainly for archival purposes. (are you going to be able to play this game in 50 years?)
There are a lot of great games (including PS1 and PSP games) for the system, but once the hardware dies or the download servers are shut down, what is left for people who still want to play these games?
In the back of my mind I've been thinking what digital consumer rights look like. It seems like this point in history has laws that favor publishers more than consumers or the public good.
It'd be a shame if we suddenly couldn't play these classics anymore just because Sony wants us to repurchase it on Console XYZ.
That said, the Vita is much nicer for PS1 games, and if your firmware is old enough, you can even convert your old discs yourself for it.
* Windows falls out of popular use for residential people / People moving away from using PCs as we know it.
* Steam client not being available for the mainstream OS of the day.
* Most of the games in your library not working with the the mainstream OS of the day.
* A new platform replaces Steam and it has newer remakes of classic games.
* We are all in our 50-60s and lost access to our accounts long ago because we don't play games anymore.
Steam probably won't be killed off in one day. It will die gradually as it falls into disuse.
There was a time when DRM was only visible when it broke your legitimately purchased game (e.g. SimCity, Diablo 3)
Now at least gamers are getting some decent perks from DRM (e.g. digital loaning, play anywhere, cross platform licensing) so it's a bit easier to stomach.
That's because people have been vocal about that. If the companies had it their way, I'm sure the majority would want you to buy a new license for each platform and system (like how the cheap Windows licenses are - locked to your system)
The old way of doing business was proprietary everything. (See Sony in the 80s and 90s) I'm just glad manufactures finally saw that locking things down so much increased customer anger and frustration more than it increased sales. Being a child of the 80s, I'm still surprised at stuff like using a generic USB thumb drive in an Xbox 360 and things of that nature.
No point cracking it till they stop making games for the thing though.
Submission of complete source code, on the other hand, could help.
But you'd still need to have the build process, so really you'd need submission of the full dev environment. But then you might also need the hardware to run it ...
Personally I think it should be copyright protection or DRM: the demos doesn't get the DRM stuff to enter the public domain so strictly speaking DRM stuff can't be copyright as the deal of time-limited monopoly is broken by the corps that are using DRM.
Yeah, I like that. Sort of like how something can be a trade secret or patented but not both.
PPSSPP and Dolphin have made great progress BECAUSE they were open.
long story short, it is the real solution, but its not a practical one by any means.
The hard part is for someone to actually develop the emulation for all the custom chips in the system. In particular, the two graphics chips are very complex and the documentation is very hard to understand. The same goes for the sound chip. The others are all standard enough to be reasonably straightforward (if not actually easy).
Here are some relevant links (I'm sure there will be other systems that have been recreated in FPGA form):
http://www.retrocollect.com/News/super-nintendo-recreated-in...
http://hackaday.com/2013/01/23/stuffing-an-nes-into-an-fpga/
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?12847-fpgagen-a-...
http://www.fpgaarcade.com/platforms/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1chipMSX
Emulation is the best possible path IMHO since it enables the games to be played (and experienced) on pretty much any hardware. I think this work may do quite a bit to help in that area, there's really no reason the Saturn isn't nearly perfectly emulated these days.
Reproduction is the next best and much harder than Emulation. Basically figuring out how to build the hardware again. There's several versions of this with much older hardware (C64, 2600, etc.) with new hardware being produced that can run the old software natively. There's also "lesser" versions that use modern CPUs, etc. to run the code basically also in emulation, but this is not the same thing. However, reproduction is both technically more difficult and has a smaller audience who's willing to add yet another machine to their collection to see old games.
also, MESS's emulation is also not too terrible, I was pretty surprised with how many games worked under it
In a hundred years, the only practical way to experience classic software like this will be via emulation and I believe that's where resources should be put.
There's a weird kind of snobbery in classic gaming that, unless you're playing original games on original hardware, you're doing it entirely wrong and emulation stuff is basically just dirty piracy. Fast forward to today and the talk of the community is that old game and hardware prices are getting sky high, and in the case of some systems (like the 5200) finding working equipment is getting to be impossible. No duh, sucking all of the inventory for a product that's not going to be manufactured in anymore and allowing the prices to slip into normal supply-demand areas means that's what's going to happen -- even worse, the new audience who can be exposed to this material shrinks even smaller every day.
For almost all practical purposes, systems like the Amiga or the SNES or similar vintage are pretty much complete in terms of emulation -- the entire known software libraries are basically completable. In many ways, emulators like UAE offer better software compatibility than real hardware!
Breaking DRM is like finding a cure for insanity ;)
Well said.
Isane.
IIRC, tehy're a major hindrance to people who want to legitimately restore old arcade/pinball machines, rather than just grabbing a cracked rom.
[1] http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/
Ten layers of tinfoil can capture pirate-bullets.