15 ms·

Sega Saturn CD Cracked after 20 Years

1126 points by flurpitude 10y ago

majke 10y ago
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.
- Gracana 10y ago
  Micah Scott's toastermelt videos are another great example of reverse engineering workflow/techniques. More technical and detailed but still very accessible.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    I tried looking for those videos but haven't found them yet, do you have a link?
    - reitoei 10y ago
      Poster meant 'Coastermelt': http://www.misc.name/coastermelt/ http://www.misc.name/coastermelt/
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        Thank you.
      - Gracana 10y ago
        Whoops, yeah, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks.
dmix 10y ago
TLDR (or TLDW*)?
- rwc 10y ago
  No, just no. This one is worth savoring.
- slg 10y ago
  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.
  - simplemath 10y ago
    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. Super impressive stuff
    - Neeek 10y ago
      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.
kilroy123 10y ago
Holy hell what an amazing hack. This guy must have spent hundreds of hours on this.
- nacs 10y ago
  He mentions at one point that he's been working on it off and on for a few years so definitely at least 100s if not thousands of hours.
  - MichaelApproved 10y ago
    Since 2013.
  - janvdberg 10y ago
    In this [1] forum post, from yesterday, he says: "I've put thousands of hours into this project" [1] http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dumped.52419/page-13#post-891851 http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...
donatj 10y ago
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.
- mjevans 10y ago
  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).
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    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 :)
    - creshal 10y ago
      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.
- arprocter 10y ago
  I want to re-play Panzer Dragoon Saga so badly
  - xyience 10y ago
    Panzer Dragoon Orta was on the x-box. :) 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.
    - Grazester 10y ago
MrTortoise 10y ago
haha awesome I applaud crazy fuckers like you. The world needs more of you. Well done sir.
fernandopj 10y ago
This is by far the best showcase of an assembly code I've ever seen. Kudos for the editor.
- speps 10y ago
  It seems to be IDA, not sure what you meant by "the editor".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Keyframe 10y ago
    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...
DeepYogurt 10y ago
Awesome video. Thanks for sharing.
mmastrac 10y ago
This appears to be where he actually dumped the ROM a few years back... http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dumped.52419/ http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...
peterwwillis 10y ago
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.
- Grazester 10y ago
  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
hyperion2010 10y ago
Echoing what others have said, I never knew about just how amazing the engineering on the Saturn was in terms of incredibly tight timing.
- Bromskloss 10y ago
  Was that a good thing?
  - em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
    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. Harder to program of course.
Bromskloss 10y ago
Does Sega gain anything from not just releasing all the information?
- grawlinson 10y ago
  There's zero benefit in doing anything like this. Not to mention that all the relevant information may not exist anymore, or is in a storage facility somewhere growing mold.
  - Bromskloss 10y ago
    > There's zero benefit in doing anything like this. I don't know. Winning people's hearts? For the fun of it?
    - grawlinson 10y ago
      >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.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        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.
      - jonhohle 10y ago
        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.
83457 10y ago
If only the Dreamcast protection had been that good. Was really disappointed when it died :(
- djsumdog 10y ago
  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.
- Grazester 10y ago
  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.
  - PostOnce 10y ago
    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?
    - ricksplat 10y ago
      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 ...
    - toast0 10y ago
      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.
supernintendo 10y ago
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.
- uxp100 10y ago
  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?
  - christoph 10y ago
    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.
    - Grazester 10y ago
      I believe they did no such thing(proof would be greatly appreciated). What they did was downsample the audio files and the pvr game textures. To achieve what you claim would more than likely mean game engine modification and without the source code I dont see that happening.
tsao 10y ago
One of the YT comments is about how he is not releasing the "ROM dump". Any idea of why he isn't doing this?
- jrockway 10y ago
  Copyright? Although Sega Saturn is a dead system with zero commercial value, the ROM remains copyrighted.
- 0x0 10y ago
  The ROM is probably under copyright?
- ben174 10y ago
  Just a guess: might get some serious attention from Sega's Lawyers if he releases that.
  - mikepavone 10y ago
    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. [0] http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dumped.52419/page-13 http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  From jhl in the forum thread: >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.
donpdonp 10y ago
Here I thought the title was describing how plastic CD media became brittle after 20 years. The hack is way more interesting.
zouhair 10y ago
Only 20 years to go and Denuvo is done for.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  http://www.pcgamesn.com/rise-of-the-tomb-raider/denuvo-drm-crack-torrent http://www.pcgamesn.com/rise-of-the-tomb-raider/denuvo-drm-c... 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?)
  - zouhair 10y ago
    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.
- unsignedqword 10y ago
  Intel SGX worries me much more than Denuvo.
voltagex_ 10y ago
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.
- jonhohle 10y ago
  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.
  - Griever 10y ago
    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.
    - phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
      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.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    If you care, dont support Sony. I have stopped buying consoles because of DRM abuse.
pedrocr 10y ago
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?
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Yabause already exists but it's not a perfect emulator yet. So right now the best way to enjoy games as they were is still the original hardware.
  - pedrocr 10y ago
    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.
  - erikj 10y ago
    SSF exists and is much better than Yabause, although it's not open source.
    - ekianjo 10y ago
      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.
      - oldmanjay 10y ago
        I would imagine a fair few emulator writers don't much care about maintaining the "backups" fiction, even under the classier name "archiving"
        10y ago
jryan49 10y ago
Anyone know what program he is using to view the dumps?
- machinagod 10y ago
  IDA Pro.
shmerl 10y ago
Amazing work. Also highlights how paranoid DRM proponents often are going to such lengths to cripple the hardware. Breaking DRM is like finding a cure for insanity ;)
- quakeguy 10y ago
  "Breaking DRM is like finding a cure for insanity ;)" Well said.
  - lunchTime42 10y ago
    Remeber those Arcade Game-Memory manufactured into the battery? You had to break the battery and (suppossedly) cut the powersupply to get to them. Isane.
    - shabble 10y ago
      Are you thinking of Suicide Batteries?[1] 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/ http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/
      - lunchTime42 10y ago
        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. Ten layers of tinfoil can capture pirate-bullets.
- Asooka 10y ago
  It's also insanely illegal. I'm surprised SEGA haven't shut the whole thing down by now.
lmz 10y ago
All that effort from Sega but I remember modchips being available to run pirated Saturn games when I had it.
tomphoolery 10y ago
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.
tomphoolery 10y ago
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.
Ocerge 10y ago
What a legend. This video is absolutely inspiring.
Halienja 10y ago
So the system "just works" without the game disc. Mind blowing!!
orblivion 10y ago
How is the Saturn's protection so much more effective than more modern systems?
- tlrobinson 10y ago
  I'm guessing it was state of the art at the time it was released, but wouldn't hold up nearly as well in a mass market console these days.
  - orblivion 10y ago
    Then why did it take 20 years?
    - ygra 10y ago
      It's not a mass-market console anymore with little interest or incentive to break it.
    - rasz_pl 10y ago
      It didnt. 20 years is a lie/marketing/ignorance. There do exist CD emulators (Rhea) and there did exist modchips during console heyday.
- miah_ 10y ago
  It was impossible to find anyone capable of producing CD's with the wobble when the Saturn was alive. Finding somebody capable today would be possible, but it wouldn't be very profitable because its a dead system. If a new console used the wobble/burst then surely you'd be able to order these CDR's from Alibaba..
tlrobinson 10y ago
Possibly stupid question: why didn't some enterprising person figure out how to produce CD-Rs with the copy protection wobble track? Is the market too small vs the cost of required equipment? Would it have been illegal?
- mech4bg 10y ago
  I found this when looking for more info on the "wobble": http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-copy-protection-and-cdrs-the-conclusive-end.50295/ http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-copy-protection-a... "I hope this lays the matter to rest, and prevents anyone from wasting more time on it (like my day burning useless discs). I'm sure someone will wave their hands around and say that custom burner firmware could do the job, but good luck finding a burner with a programmable DSP in the pregroove tracking loop and managing to modify it to do the job."
city41 10y ago
Not to discount this as it's very impressive work. But replacing CD drives with SD/hard drive based solutions is becoming pretty common. For the Dreamcast there is the GDEmu[0], and the Saturn already has the Rhea and Phoebe[1] (basically the same thing, each is for slightly different models of Saturns). The Playstation also has one, the ps-io[2]. I'm really hoping for someone to step up and do the PC Engine, Neo Geo CD, Sega CD and 3DO. [0]https://gdemu.wordpress.com/about/ https://gdemu.wordpress.com/about/ [1]https://gdemu.wordpress.com/installation/rhea-installation/ https://gdemu.wordpress.com/installation/rhea-installation/ [2]http://ps-io.com/ http://ps-io.com/
- HemanHeartYou 10y ago
  >pc engine You might be interested in the turbo everdrive from http://krikzz.com/ http://krikzz.com/
rasz_pl 10y ago
Same project for original Playstation http://ps-io.com/features/ http://ps-io.com/features/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbWW1VzeRgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbWW1VzeRgI . Started in ~2010 Playstation also had a trapdoor Parallel I/O port exposing raw address/data bus, it was meant for network interface, debugging(PSY-Q) and stuff(ActionReplay/GameShark). Great thing about that port is you can hang your own ROM there and console will execute it while booting, no code signing/drm crap. Afair at the beginning PSIO patched original firmware replacing all CD routines with its own, but later in the project it was discovered a lot of games talked straight to the hardware ignoring SONY requirements for using BIOS routines. This is why current version comes with small board you need to solder inside to reroute chip select signals from the CD controller chip - PSIO emulates that chip completely. You still get data faster than CD due to no seek times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc3rOb7Evxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc3rOb7Evxc Original work from 1999 http://web.archive.org/web/19990220052039/http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/6332/psx.html http://web.archive.org/web/19990220052039/http://www.geociti... Gamecube has IDE-EXI, same thing http://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ide-exi http://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ide-exi
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  The problem with a lot of the modchips is that the companies behind them are secretive (leading to loss of knowledge when they close) and they're just so damn expensive.
bluesign 10y ago
I am not good with electronics tbh but why it is not possible to mitm the connection between CD drive and motherboard? As far as I see from 'swap disk' technique outer protection track is not changing depending on game
- patates 10y ago
  I was thinking about controlling an outside door unlock button by MITMing the electrical cables going out of it, but realized I have no idea how to go about it. I just need to generate the same signal... I thought maybe someone reading this could have some pointers.
- abrasive 10y ago
  You can. That's what traditional modchips do, and there's the Rhea/Phoebe which completely emulates that drive via that interface. Of course, if you sit at that point in the system you have a different set of problems and capabilities. Much easier to build hardware for, but no data output, and of course you need to disassemble the console to get there in the first place.
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  you can, but the drives are starting to fail now.
  - bluesign 10y ago
    I meant mitm on CD rom side, as the protection track unique, could be simpler approach (which later you can remove optic drive with SD or usb)
apecat 10y ago
Wow. I certainly hope someone with a lot of power over company culture at, say, Apple is watching this. And that they get inspired to think about cultural preservation. I really think it should be a standard act of corporate responsibility and platform stewardship to make it so that work like that of Professor Abrasive's, is not the only spare key we have to current culture a few decades down the road. We as a global culture just might be really, really lost and bereft of history if that was to be the case. I frankly think that Apple under Tim Cook is in a historically unique position of making cultural preservation of games and software feasible and something built into the whole social and legal contract of proprietary, locked down platforms. It's not like Sony is going to lead the way with the PlayStation? I mean, to really make preservation legit, there needs to be some sort of useful official emulation and data extraction capability down the road. For all we know now, there might be terrible legislation that prohibits reverse engineering in a lot of jurisdictions. There's of course a lot problems to solve, with all the crypto and stuff, and licensing, but someone should be on this. Especially since software distribution is becoming all ephemeral and download based! Not to mention the cloud fragmentation of personal data.
- thomasfl 10y ago
  Yes, there will be a day when nobody is using iPhones anymore. Hopefully our ancestor will still be able to run some of the apps in the future. Social media apps are off course thin clients.
- shmerl 10y ago
  To fix it, people should stop using DRM. Or as a first step to repeal crooked corrupted laws which declared breaking DRM illegal even for legitimate purposes. http://www.fixthedmca.org http://www.fixthedmca.org
  - apecat 10y ago
    Yeah, well, I agree that people should stop using DRM, but it's not like it seems to be happening. And from a business point of view, it can be really hard to make that case. Anyway, the world looks really bleak for open platforms right now. The main example is Android. If you have like one toe dipped into a role related to infosec at the moment, you can't serioulsy recommend that people you work with or care for even touch mainstream Android phones. Because the patching situation is such a dumpster fire. Even Google's Nexus crap that is getting patched, seems to be set on a 2 year lifecycle, with 2014 phones getting end of lifed a few months from now. Pretty weak sauce if Google's intention is to set any kind of example for vendor security support on Android. My sister runs my first iPhone, a 2012 iPhone 5, fully patched. It's going to be supported for another year or two, probably. https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705#nexus_devices https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705#nexus_device... ### I don't particularly want it to be this way, but I have to almost force people I care about to buy iPhones. It feels bad, especially in cases when they'd have better use for their money. So with Apple, specifically, they're really good at the closed platform game and I don't see them getting out of that, especially if they're getting more into things like payment services or automotive. Their crypto stance really implies that they want institutional-level trust from their customers. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-the-money-apple-vs-the-.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-t... ### Game consoles are unlikely to quit DRM too: the only thing that'd make them stop with DRM per se is probably to make all games just streamed from the, uh, cloud. Doable... maybe soonish but that'd rule out a lot of people and use cases where the connectivity just isn't there. That's kind of why I suggested my half-baked idea to pressure, force and shame closed platform vendors into proper legacy support as part of the "social contract". Or whatever. Not that certain "social contracts", like the ones Western countries have with banks are working out all that great at the moment. ### But as I said, this idea of mine is half baked. Someone like Apple is only part of the puzzle, since apps and games increasingly rely on server backends to work properly. It's not like Apple could save the gaming world's cultural heritage in 2030 just by offering a binary blob that runs all iPhone apps from 2010.
Unklejoe 10y ago
Great work. These crazy reverse engineering projects kind of make me feel insecure about my own abilities, as weird as it sounds. I wonder if I would have been able to come up with the same solution if I worked at it. My fear is that I would not, but who knows. A lot of it is purely analytical, but there is a portion that relies on pure creativity and problem solving abilities. I understand the process he went through as well as the technical details behind it, but following along is much easier than looking at a circuit board with a blank face, wondering where to begin. I spent the last 2 hours last night just reading about Sega Saturn…
- centizen 10y ago
  If it took 20 years for the reverse engineer community to get to this point I wouldn't sweat it if you don't think you could do it on your own.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rsync 10y ago
It may interest folks to know that all Sega Saturn games have their audio encoded as plain old CD audio tracks. You can put your Sega Saturn disc into any old CD player and play all of the music tracks. You can also rip a sega saturn CD in your computer. I particularly enjoy the music from Sega Rally Championship and Virtua Fighter 2.
- space_ghost 10y ago
  This was pretty common with original Playstation games as well. CD Track 1 was the game data, the following tracks were music.
- bydo 10y ago
  Many, but certainly not all. Redbook audio (along with tons of grainy low resolution FMV) was more common in the earlier days of the CD-ROM, when creators were trying to justify the format, but hadn't figured out more interesting ways to make use of the space.
SonicSoul 10y ago
wow! THIS is what hacking looks like. these days the term seems to have been muddled and interchanged with "programming". True art of reverse engineering something you don't have a full manual for (and can't ask StackOverflow).

1126 points by flurpitude 10y ago

majke 10y ago

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.

Gracana 10y ago
Micah Scott's toastermelt videos are another great example of reverse engineering workflow/techniques. More technical and detailed but still very accessible.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  I tried looking for those videos but haven't found them yet, do you have a link?
  - reitoei 10y ago
    Poster meant 'Coastermelt': http://www.misc.name/coastermelt/ http://www.misc.name/coastermelt/
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      Thank you.
    - Gracana 10y ago
      Whoops, yeah, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks.

dmix 10y ago

TLDR (or TLDW*)?

rwc 10y ago
No, just no. This one is worth savoring.
slg 10y ago
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.
- simplemath 10y ago
  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. Super impressive stuff
  - Neeek 10y ago
    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.

kilroy123 10y ago

Holy hell what an amazing hack. This guy must have spent hundreds of hours on this.

nacs 10y ago
He mentions at one point that he's been working on it off and on for a few years so definitely at least 100s if not thousands of hours.
- MichaelApproved 10y ago
  Since 2013.
- janvdberg 10y ago
  In this [1] forum post, from yesterday, he says: "I've put thousands of hours into this project" [1] http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dumped.52419/page-13#post-891851 http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...

donatj 10y ago

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.

mjevans 10y ago
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).
- ekianjo 10y ago
  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 :)
  - creshal 10y ago
    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.
arprocter 10y ago
I want to re-play Panzer Dragoon Saga so badly
- xyience 10y ago
  Panzer Dragoon Orta was on the x-box. :) 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.
  - Grazester 10y ago

MrTortoise 10y ago

haha awesome I applaud crazy fuckers like you. The world needs more of you. Well done sir.

fernandopj 10y ago

This is by far the best showcase of an assembly code I've ever seen. Kudos for the editor.

speps 10y ago
It seems to be IDA, not sure what you meant by "the editor".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Keyframe 10y ago
  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...

DeepYogurt 10y ago

Awesome video. Thanks for sharing.

mmastrac 10y ago

This appears to be where he actually dumped the ROM a few years back... http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dumped.52419/ http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...

peterwwillis 10y ago

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.

Grazester 10y ago
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

hyperion2010 10y ago

Echoing what others have said, I never knew about just how amazing the engineering on the Saturn was in terms of incredibly tight timing.

Bromskloss 10y ago
Was that a good thing?
- em3rgent0rdr 10y ago
  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. Harder to program of course.

Bromskloss 10y ago

Does Sega gain anything from not just releasing all the information?

grawlinson 10y ago
There's zero benefit in doing anything like this. Not to mention that all the relevant information may not exist anymore, or is in a storage facility somewhere growing mold.
- Bromskloss 10y ago
  > There's zero benefit in doing anything like this. I don't know. Winning people's hearts? For the fun of it?
  - grawlinson 10y ago
    >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.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      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.
    - jonhohle 10y ago
      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.

83457 10y ago

If only the Dreamcast protection had been that good. Was really disappointed when it died :(

djsumdog 10y ago
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.
Grazester 10y ago
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.
- PostOnce 10y ago
  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?
  - ricksplat 10y ago
    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 ...
  - toast0 10y ago
    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.

supernintendo 10y ago

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.

uxp100 10y ago
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?
- christoph 10y ago
  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.
  - Grazester 10y ago
    I believe they did no such thing(proof would be greatly appreciated). What they did was downsample the audio files and the pvr game textures. To achieve what you claim would more than likely mean game engine modification and without the source code I dont see that happening.

tsao 10y ago

One of the YT comments is about how he is not releasing the "ROM dump". Any idea of why he isn't doing this?

jrockway 10y ago
Copyright? Although Sega Saturn is a dead system with zero commercial value, the ROM remains copyrighted.
0x0 10y ago
The ROM is probably under copyright?
ben174 10y ago
Just a guess: might get some serious attention from Sega's Lawyers if he releases that.
- mikepavone 10y ago
  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. [0] http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dumped.52419/page-13 http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-cd-block-rom-dump...
voltagex_ 10y ago
From jhl in the forum thread: >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.

donpdonp 10y ago

Here I thought the title was describing how plastic CD media became brittle after 20 years. The hack is way more interesting.

zouhair 10y ago

Only 20 years to go and Denuvo is done for.

voltagex_ 10y ago
http://www.pcgamesn.com/rise-of-the-tomb-raider/denuvo-drm-crack-torrent http://www.pcgamesn.com/rise-of-the-tomb-raider/denuvo-drm-c... 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?)
- zouhair 10y ago
  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.
unsignedqword 10y ago
Intel SGX worries me much more than Denuvo.

voltagex_ 10y ago

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.

jonhohle 10y ago
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.
- Griever 10y ago
  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.
  - phjesusthatguy3 10y ago
    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.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  If you care, dont support Sony. I have stopped buying consoles because of DRM abuse.

pedrocr 10y ago

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?

ekianjo 10y ago
Yabause already exists but it's not a perfect emulator yet. So right now the best way to enjoy games as they were is still the original hardware.
- pedrocr 10y ago
  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.
- erikj 10y ago
  SSF exists and is much better than Yabause, although it's not open source.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    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.
    - oldmanjay 10y ago
      I would imagine a fair few emulator writers don't much care about maintaining the "backups" fiction, even under the classier name "archiving"
      - 10y ago

jryan49 10y ago

Anyone know what program he is using to view the dumps?

machinagod 10y ago
IDA Pro.

shmerl 10y ago

Amazing work. Also highlights how paranoid DRM proponents often are going to such lengths to cripple the hardware. Breaking DRM is like finding a cure for insanity ;)

quakeguy 10y ago
"Breaking DRM is like finding a cure for insanity ;)" Well said.
- lunchTime42 10y ago
  Remeber those Arcade Game-Memory manufactured into the battery? You had to break the battery and (suppossedly) cut the powersupply to get to them. Isane.
  - shabble 10y ago
    Are you thinking of Suicide Batteries?[1] 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/ http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/
    - lunchTime42 10y ago
      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. Ten layers of tinfoil can capture pirate-bullets.
Asooka 10y ago
It's also insanely illegal. I'm surprised SEGA haven't shut the whole thing down by now.

lmz 10y ago

All that effort from Sega but I remember modchips being available to run pirated Saturn games when I had it.

tomphoolery 10y ago

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.

tomphoolery 10y ago

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.

Ocerge 10y ago

What a legend. This video is absolutely inspiring.

Halienja 10y ago

So the system "just works" without the game disc. Mind blowing!!

orblivion 10y ago

How is the Saturn's protection so much more effective than more modern systems?

tlrobinson 10y ago
I'm guessing it was state of the art at the time it was released, but wouldn't hold up nearly as well in a mass market console these days.
- orblivion 10y ago
  Then why did it take 20 years?
  - ygra 10y ago
    It's not a mass-market console anymore with little interest or incentive to break it.
  - rasz_pl 10y ago
    It didnt. 20 years is a lie/marketing/ignorance. There do exist CD emulators (Rhea) and there did exist modchips during console heyday.
miah_ 10y ago
It was impossible to find anyone capable of producing CD's with the wobble when the Saturn was alive. Finding somebody capable today would be possible, but it wouldn't be very profitable because its a dead system. If a new console used the wobble/burst then surely you'd be able to order these CDR's from Alibaba..

tlrobinson 10y ago

Possibly stupid question: why didn't some enterprising person figure out how to produce CD-Rs with the copy protection wobble track? Is the market too small vs the cost of required equipment? Would it have been illegal?

mech4bg 10y ago
I found this when looking for more info on the "wobble": http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-copy-protection-and-cdrs-the-conclusive-end.50295/ http://assemblergames.com/l/threads/saturn-copy-protection-a... "I hope this lays the matter to rest, and prevents anyone from wasting more time on it (like my day burning useless discs). I'm sure someone will wave their hands around and say that custom burner firmware could do the job, but good luck finding a burner with a programmable DSP in the pregroove tracking loop and managing to modify it to do the job."

city41 10y ago

Not to discount this as it's very impressive work. But replacing CD drives with SD/hard drive based solutions is becoming pretty common. For the Dreamcast there is the GDEmu[0], and the Saturn already has the Rhea and Phoebe[1] (basically the same thing, each is for slightly different models of Saturns). The Playstation also has one, the ps-io[2]. I'm really hoping for someone to step up and do the PC Engine, Neo Geo CD, Sega CD and 3DO. [0]https://gdemu.wordpress.com/about/ https://gdemu.wordpress.com/about/ [1]https://gdemu.wordpress.com/installation/rhea-installation/ https://gdemu.wordpress.com/installation/rhea-installation/ [2]http://ps-io.com/ http://ps-io.com/

HemanHeartYou 10y ago
>pc engine You might be interested in the turbo everdrive from http://krikzz.com/ http://krikzz.com/

rasz_pl 10y ago

Same project for original Playstation http://ps-io.com/features/ http://ps-io.com/features/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbWW1VzeRgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbWW1VzeRgI . Started in ~2010 Playstation also had a trapdoor Parallel I/O port exposing raw address/data bus, it was meant for network interface, debugging(PSY-Q) and stuff(ActionReplay/GameShark). Great thing about that port is you can hang your own ROM there and console will execute it while booting, no code signing/drm crap. Afair at the beginning PSIO patched original firmware replacing all CD routines with its own, but later in the project it was discovered a lot of games talked straight to the hardware ignoring SONY requirements for using BIOS routines. This is why current version comes with small board you need to solder inside to reroute chip select signals from the CD controller chip - PSIO emulates that chip completely. You still get data faster than CD due to no seek times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc3rOb7Evxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wc3rOb7Evxc Original work from 1999 http://web.archive.org/web/19990220052039/http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lab/6332/psx.html http://web.archive.org/web/19990220052039/http://www.geociti... Gamecube has IDE-EXI, same thing http://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ide-exi http://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ide-exi

voltagex_ 10y ago
The problem with a lot of the modchips is that the companies behind them are secretive (leading to loss of knowledge when they close) and they're just so damn expensive.

bluesign 10y ago

I am not good with electronics tbh but why it is not possible to mitm the connection between CD drive and motherboard? As far as I see from 'swap disk' technique outer protection track is not changing depending on game

patates 10y ago
I was thinking about controlling an outside door unlock button by MITMing the electrical cables going out of it, but realized I have no idea how to go about it. I just need to generate the same signal... I thought maybe someone reading this could have some pointers.
abrasive 10y ago
You can. That's what traditional modchips do, and there's the Rhea/Phoebe which completely emulates that drive via that interface. Of course, if you sit at that point in the system you have a different set of problems and capabilities. Much easier to build hardware for, but no data output, and of course you need to disassemble the console to get there in the first place.
DigitalJack 10y ago
you can, but the drives are starting to fail now.
- bluesign 10y ago
  I meant mitm on CD rom side, as the protection track unique, could be simpler approach (which later you can remove optic drive with SD or usb)

apecat 10y ago

Wow. I certainly hope someone with a lot of power over company culture at, say, Apple is watching this. And that they get inspired to think about cultural preservation. I really think it should be a standard act of corporate responsibility and platform stewardship to make it so that work like that of Professor Abrasive's, is not the only spare key we have to current culture a few decades down the road. We as a global culture just might be really, really lost and bereft of history if that was to be the case. I frankly think that Apple under Tim Cook is in a historically unique position of making cultural preservation of games and software feasible and something built into the whole social and legal contract of proprietary, locked down platforms. It's not like Sony is going to lead the way with the PlayStation? I mean, to really make preservation legit, there needs to be some sort of useful official emulation and data extraction capability down the road. For all we know now, there might be terrible legislation that prohibits reverse engineering in a lot of jurisdictions. There's of course a lot problems to solve, with all the crypto and stuff, and licensing, but someone should be on this. Especially since software distribution is becoming all ephemeral and download based! Not to mention the cloud fragmentation of personal data.

thomasfl 10y ago
Yes, there will be a day when nobody is using iPhones anymore. Hopefully our ancestor will still be able to run some of the apps in the future. Social media apps are off course thin clients.
shmerl 10y ago
To fix it, people should stop using DRM. Or as a first step to repeal crooked corrupted laws which declared breaking DRM illegal even for legitimate purposes. http://www.fixthedmca.org http://www.fixthedmca.org
- apecat 10y ago
  Yeah, well, I agree that people should stop using DRM, but it's not like it seems to be happening. And from a business point of view, it can be really hard to make that case. Anyway, the world looks really bleak for open platforms right now. The main example is Android. If you have like one toe dipped into a role related to infosec at the moment, you can't serioulsy recommend that people you work with or care for even touch mainstream Android phones. Because the patching situation is such a dumpster fire. Even Google's Nexus crap that is getting patched, seems to be set on a 2 year lifecycle, with 2014 phones getting end of lifed a few months from now. Pretty weak sauce if Google's intention is to set any kind of example for vendor security support on Android. My sister runs my first iPhone, a 2012 iPhone 5, fully patched. It's going to be supported for another year or two, probably. https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705#nexus_devices https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705#nexus_device... ### I don't particularly want it to be this way, but I have to almost force people I care about to buy iPhones. It feels bad, especially in cases when they'd have better use for their money. So with Apple, specifically, they're really good at the closed platform game and I don't see them getting out of that, especially if they're getting more into things like payment services or automotive. Their crypto stance really implies that they want institutional-level trust from their customers. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-the-money-apple-vs-the-.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/03/follow-t... ### Game consoles are unlikely to quit DRM too: the only thing that'd make them stop with DRM per se is probably to make all games just streamed from the, uh, cloud. Doable... maybe soonish but that'd rule out a lot of people and use cases where the connectivity just isn't there. That's kind of why I suggested my half-baked idea to pressure, force and shame closed platform vendors into proper legacy support as part of the "social contract". Or whatever. Not that certain "social contracts", like the ones Western countries have with banks are working out all that great at the moment. ### But as I said, this idea of mine is half baked. Someone like Apple is only part of the puzzle, since apps and games increasingly rely on server backends to work properly. It's not like Apple could save the gaming world's cultural heritage in 2030 just by offering a binary blob that runs all iPhone apps from 2010.

Unklejoe 10y ago

Great work. These crazy reverse engineering projects kind of make me feel insecure about my own abilities, as weird as it sounds. I wonder if I would have been able to come up with the same solution if I worked at it. My fear is that I would not, but who knows. A lot of it is purely analytical, but there is a portion that relies on pure creativity and problem solving abilities. I understand the process he went through as well as the technical details behind it, but following along is much easier than looking at a circuit board with a blank face, wondering where to begin. I spent the last 2 hours last night just reading about Sega Saturn…

centizen 10y ago
If it took 20 years for the reverse engineer community to get to this point I wouldn't sweat it if you don't think you could do it on your own.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

rsync 10y ago

It may interest folks to know that all Sega Saturn games have their audio encoded as plain old CD audio tracks. You can put your Sega Saturn disc into any old CD player and play all of the music tracks. You can also rip a sega saturn CD in your computer. I particularly enjoy the music from Sega Rally Championship and Virtua Fighter 2.

space_ghost 10y ago
This was pretty common with original Playstation games as well. CD Track 1 was the game data, the following tracks were music.
bydo 10y ago
Many, but certainly not all. Redbook audio (along with tons of grainy low resolution FMV) was more common in the earlier days of the CD-ROM, when creators were trying to justify the format, but hadn't figured out more interesting ways to make use of the space.

SonicSoul 10y ago

wow! THIS is what hacking looks like. these days the term seems to have been muddled and interchanged with "programming". True art of reverse engineering something you don't have a full manual for (and can't ask StackOverflow).