3 ms·
Rumour had it that the Nintendo GameCube, which had small discs, used a highly specific reader which would make copying the discs with regular hardware near imp
by smokel 3y ago
Rumour had it that the Nintendo GameCube, which had small discs, used a highly specific reader which would make copying the discs with regular hardware near impossible. This was done by making the discs spin in the other direction than in regular drives.
Fun fact is that most of the times that you opened the lid, the small disc would still be spinning. In perfectly normal clockwise direction (as observed from above).
- bri3d 3y agoThis rumor was completely false, of course. The reality of GameCube discs is that they were standard mini DVDs, but they used a slightly different physical frame layout and a different scrambling seed from standard DVDs, so consumer DVD drivers would instantly reject them because the data frame checksums would fail. By patching out the frame checksum verification in firmware, GameCube discs could be read by some consumer hardware, and once the scrambling seed scheme was reverse engineered, they could be freely descrambled and imaged. The second protection was a unique identifier burned into the Burst Cutting Area (BCA) at the center of the disc. Another popular myth is that GameCube discs were protected by being Constant Angular Velocity (versus Constant Linear Velocity) discs - while this is true, and the GameCube drive is a CAV drive, it's irrelevant to protecting or copying the discs as the data is the same either way.
- hbn 3y agoI liked when Sony claimed the black coating on the PS1 disks' data side was some magic copy protection.
- ClassyJacket 3y agoI've only ever heard this rumour about the Xbox.