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How the Dreamcast Copy Protection Was Defeated
- jezfromfuture 8y agoNot sure how he managed to miss that the protection was actually broken due to the Dreamcast allowing a special type of cd which skipped the protection to run music video player discs. Additionally we just used a Special DVD Drive with some special firmware to extract the data from the discs on a PC... But hey I guess who cares about accuracy when your trying to blog. http://forum.redump.org/topic/2620/dreamcastnaomi-gdrom-dumping-instructions/ http://forum.redump.org/topic/2620/dreamcastnaomi-gdrom-dump...
- kencausey 8y agoMaybe I'm confused (regarding your first paragraph), isn't the section "Second protection level: Scrambler" about just that?
- SlashmanX 8y ago> The "foot in the door" came from a seemingly obscure capability of the Dreamcast to boot not from a GD-ROM but from a CD-ROM. Originally intended to add multimedia functions to music CDs, the functionality called "MIL-CD" was never used much, accounting for a mere seven karaoke applications. Isn't the first sentence of the "SECOND PROTECTION LEVEL" section exactly what you described?
- paraboul 8y agoDid you actually read the blog post? Also, i'm pretty sure that such "special dvd drive" you're mentioning didn't exist back in 1999 as I remember using my Dreamcast as a reading device connected to my PC. Seems 100% accurate to me.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- glaberficken 8y agodown-voted for not reading the article and still thinking you are entitled to snark
- jezfromfuture 8y agoRead the article , but these things were referred to differently at the time.... And sorry it was a cd drive not a dvd drive Ill take a photo and post u a pic one day but hey you all were there so why do I need to bother..
- dsco 8y agoRelated and _very_ inspiring; how the Sega Saturn CD was cracked after 20 years. Even my very non-technical girlfriend sat through this thing, being intrigued by the dedication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E
- dana321 8y agoI love this video, i've watched it more than once!
- jandrese 8y agoDid the Saturn hold out for so long only because nobody cared enough to crack it? The Saturn was stillborn as far as I can tell. Sega rushed it to market to try to recapture that early Genesis magic and discovered too late that launch titles/partners are important.
- batty_alex 8y agoHere's what I remember from the history of it all: The Saturn was Sega's best-selling console outside of Japan. It did terribly in America, mostly because they screwed-over retailers and developers with a surprise early release. Some retailers would straight-up not carry it, American third-party support was pulled, and this all carried forward to the Dreamcast. Sega of Japan was undermining Sega of America and there's a whole tragic story behind it. The Sega of America CEO, who helped the Genesis be successful in the US, quit over this nonsense. As far as not hacking it, it was so easy to mod the CD drive to play back-ups (1 wire and a ribbon cable) - there probably wasn't much incentive.
- rasz 8y agoIts a great story, told in a video with high production value, too bad its "innacurate". Saturn was cracked 20 years ago, you could mod it easily and play copied games. There also did exist complete CD emulators before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12075653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12075653
- londons_explore 8y agoThe fact this was broken by stealing a developer's SDK is disappointing. Real hackers would have disassembled the machine to reverse engineer it, rather than using black market/social engineering tricks.
- robin_reala 8y agoNo true Scotsman in full play here.
- CapacitorSet 8y agoI feel like "gatekeeping" is a more appropriate term, but yeah.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIn that case, I think you'd be genuinely surprised to discover just how many things have been hacked in this way over the years.
- wolfgke 8y ago> The fact this was broken by stealing a developer's SDK is disappointing. Real hackers would have disassembled the machine to reverse engineer it, rather than using black market/social engineering tricks. You cannot assume that an attacker will have an "honor code" or that you can keep information secret from an attacker. Because of the latter one, there exists Kerckhoff's principle > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kerckhoffs%27s_principle&oldid=871573989 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kerckhoffs%27s_pr... which on a high level states that security by obscurity will in the long run become broken (and as a corollary DRM does not work).
- londons_explore 8y agoDid the breaking of the copy protection on the Dreamcast really play a big part in Sega's downfall? If so, it would be one of the only cases I know of where IP piracy led to financial ruin of the content creator.
- jsiepkes 8y agoWell the hack had a really low entry barrier. As in; no hardware modifications needed. You could just download an ISO from the net and you were good to go with your unmodified Dreamcast. In contrast the other consoles in that era Xbox, PlayStation, etc. all needed hardware modifications in order to run copied content.
- Ntrails 8y agoBut, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Thinking back to when the dreamcast was a big console - I don't feel like it was common enough to really make a dent in dreamcast owners? Also, and again only from vague memory, wasn't the dreamcast itself underselling drastically. If it was game sales that broke the manufacturer then maybe - but I recall the console itself being a bit of a flop?
- cesarb 8y ago> But, and maybe I'm mis-remembering, how many people were actually active netizens at this point in history, able to find the ISO? Does it matter? You only need a few people to download and burn the CDs, and sell them in stalls or out of a backpack. From what I remember from that era, physical distribution of warez through burned CDs was very common.
- izacus 8y agoThis was also the case for PC games and those made healthy profits in that era too. So blaming piracy seems to be more pushing a certain idea than the actual cause of Dreamcast issues. Especially since the hardware itself sold poorly - if piracy would be to blame, you'd see a lot of unit sales and low game sales. Which did not happen.
- ngcc_hk 8y agoSad story. Steal. And bring down the shop.
- GaryNumanVevo 8y agoUnsure if you have the context. The Dreamcast didn't sell very well at all. The game they use as an example was released a year after the Dreamcast was discontinued.
- mysterydip 8y agoSemi-related, there's a piece of hardware being made (some parts 3D printed even) called GDEmu that replaces the optical drive components with an SD card reader, allowing people to play (backups of legally owned games) on their original hardware without wearing out the drive mechanism.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIn my case I got fed up of replacing drive mechanisms after about the third one so I invested in one of these. It has the side benefits of much faster loading times and a much quieter console all round, too. I won't deny that there is also a piracy aspect to it - I have a fairly large collection of boxed original Dreamcast games but there are a few on my GDEmu that couldn't be classed as "backups". The unreleased Half-Life beta is well worth checking out, for example.
- new299 8y agoThere are two points to note. The first is piracy probably didn’t lead to the failure of the Dreamcast. They didn’t sell many of the consoles... if it was a piracy issue then you’d expect they’d sell many consoles, but few games (the line up of games was really good). The article mentions Ikaruga a lot. It worth noting that Ikaruga for the Dreamcast was released a year after the Dreamcast was cancelled. They probably weren’t hugely concerned about piracy at this point. From memory it was an easy port for them, because the arcade board that Ikaruga ran on is also the same as the Dreamcast.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoIn the UK at least it was more than likely due to Sony's far superior marketing of the original PlayStation. The arrival of the PS2 and the Xbox sealed the deal. That said, I've always seen the original Xbox as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast.
- wolfgke 8y ago> That said, I've always seen the original Xbox as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast. In what sense? The architecture between these two consoles is IMHO quite different.
- atVelocet 8y agoBut it really was. Sega and Microsoft worked closely together or why do you think they implented the Windows CE option? Also all Sega arcades afterwards shipped with Xbox hardware.
- masto 8y agoI remember those days. I was working at a small company, and a coworker and I had Dreamcasts. He also had small children and felt that the cost of games and their short attention span was a good excuse for piracy. He downloaded everything posted to a Usenet group for Dreamcast games and burned two copies. Every morning I’d come in to a pile of CDs on my desk. I only recently threw them out, several spindles full of them. Hundreds of games, many I never even tried playing. It was bizzarre.
- anjc 8y agoI don't think this contributed to the Dreamcast's downfall. Given the state/speed of CD Writers at the time, quality of CDs, difficulty of finding ISOs, download speeds, and the temperamental Dreamcast laser, it was far easier to just buy games imo. It was even easier to chip your Dreamcast to region unlock it and buy cheap, legitimate Jap/US games, rather than wasting CD after CD trying to burn them.
- izacus 8y agoYeah, PC games did well in that era and were as easy to copy as Dreamcast ones. It's more that the console just wasn't competitive with others.
- DanBC 8y agoThere was an active Usenet news group for Dreamcast binaries and that would have almost all content available.
- chriscappuccio 8y agoUhh, CDs were of high quality and burners were cheap, easy to use, fast and reliable.
- syspec 8y agoI remember downloading ISOs as rar file collections overnight off of IRC channels while in high school. I remember the magic of PAR files, being able to replace any particular file I was missing. One thing i also remember is how it taught me an upside of actually purchasing games. I ended up having so many DC games I barely played any, because I became more interested in simply collecting them. I would later decide against missing my consoles for that same reason. Although those Wii mods looked pretty sweet, with their home screen replacement and launchers
- rtpg 8y agoFor me by the time I got a Dreamcast games were hard to come by, but I was still pretty limited by slow download speeds at home / not that many CD-Rs so I got to experience most of the great games at a fun pace. I think it’s hard to overestimate how important privacy is for building wide fanbases. Games are expensive, kids have time but no money.... of course now that I have a job I can just get stuff off of Amazon and not worry about patches.
- stevespang 8y agoMatey, Give me my long sword, ho!
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoI was heavily into burning DC ROMs back in the day. Its most valuable utility was making backups of the games we owned, as our first copy of Sonic Adventure 2 became scratched and nearly unreadable after awhile. The backups allowed me to keep our "critical" games like Soul Calibur, MvC2, and Power Stone 2 (that one cost a pretty penny) in their cases while we used the backups. It also allowed a handful of custom soundtrack-editions of games to float around on the web, like one which changed MvC2's (IMO, awful) soundtrack. One thing I lament in hindsight was that the CD's we burned were not GD-ROMs, and so the backups or ROMs we burned often had their assets compressed in order to fit on the smaller disk. Further pity is that even 15ish years later, many people in the ROM collection scene are still relying on those early, compressed CDI rips that were made over a decade ago. The higher-fidelity GDI dumps are comparatively rare and hard-to-find, especially with such reliable repositories as Emuparadise shutting down. If I had the proper equipment, I would probably try to make proper GDI dumps of my collection.
- andrewmackrodt 8y agoI found the complete GDI set quite easy to find, I believe it's available via torrent from archive.org
- busterarm 8y agoWhat!? "I wanna take you for a ride!" The music is one of the most memorable parts of MvC2. It pretty much sat as the capstone of a decade of fusion jazz soundtracks that seemed to dominate Japanese games, fighting games and Capcom games in particular.
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoContext: Once upon a time I had a stomach virus. The virus left me running to the bathroom frequently, and at its worst stage left me hunched over in the bathroom for the better part of an hour. Additionally, the only separation between the adjacent bedroom and the bathroom was not even a proper door as much as a stall door--it was very easy to hear whatever was going on in the next room. During this time, my younger brother was in the next room playing MvC2 on the Dreamcast. My brother had this annoying habit of just leaving the system on and walking away when he went to go do something else, rather than turning off the system or the TV. So he did as he usually does and walked away after a match, leaving the game running at the versus menu character selection screen. And so for the next 40 minutes, I was trapped in the bathroom, too nauseated to move, and listening to this on repeat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY-CeeQLCE4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY-CeeQLCE4 It was after this incident that I decided to change MvC2's soundtrack.
- laurent123456 8y agoInteresting that they've invested so much in designing a new unique type of CD-ROM, even being the only one to manufacture it, and then being caught by a feature they didn't even need. The obfuscating trick was also kind of lazy from the dev team who added it. But I don't think this hacking was the reason for the end of Sega, because nearly all consoles at that time could be modded to play hacked games. Sega had been messing up for years before that, with all the useless hardware (Sega-CD, Sega 32X, and even the Game Gear and Saturn weren't big successes) they had been releasing after the Megadrive. The Dreamcast was good but just no good enough to save the company, they basically would have needed a console that completely dominate the market to recover, and to compete against Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo.
- ljf 8y agoIt is easy to say 'didn't even need' - as this misses the huge draw that karaoke devices had in Japan and beyond at the time. Plus VCD had a huge draw across many Asian markets. These could have been the Dreamcast's 'killer app' in an alternative path.
- rasz 8y agoThey didnt, GDROM is a slight tweak to CDROM standard, just enough to make it not readable in standard drives.
- gwbas1c 8y ago> SEGA engineers knew that MIL-CD booting could be used as an attack vector so they added a protection. > The mashed potatoes problem was solved when a Katana SDK (the official Sega SDK for the Dreamcast) was stolen[6] by the hacking team "Utopia" in late 1999. It turned out that the scrambler was nothing more than "security through obscurity". I doubt this was security through obscurity. Most likely, it was hard (or impossible) to burn a GD-ROM for internal testing. Thus, this mechanism was probably used to burn games onto CDR for internal testing. I haven't seen anything that explains how scrambling and descrambling work; but it's important to understand that, at a certain level, all encryption is "security by obscurity." It just comes down to how easy or hard it is to figure out how to bypass. In this case, hacking to get ahold of the scrambler is no different than getting ahold of the private part of a key pair. Edit: > SEGA quickly released a DC v2 which disabled MIL-CD altogether but unfortunately damage had been done. With revenues plummeting and the PS2 ogre coming out, developers abandoned the Dreamcast and SEGA retired from the hardware manufacturing business in order to focus on software. I also wonder if disabling this system was "the straw that broke the camel's back?" If I were a developer and it suddenly became much harder to test, I'd probably think very critically if it's "worth it" to jump through so many hoops for such a small market.
- benchaney 8y ago> I haven't seen anything that explains how scrambling and descrambling work; but it's important to understand that, at a certain level, all encryption is "security by obscurity." It just comes down to how easy or hard it is to figure out how to bypass. In this case, hacking to get ahold of the scrambler is no different than getting ahold of the private part of a key pair. This isn’t true at all. There is a very significant fundamental difference between obscure information and secret information. Obscure information is by its nature known to many people. There are likely hundreds (if not thousands) of engineers who had access to the code or design documents that describe the scrambler. Information about it was probably given to sales people and representatives at other companies, and transmitted insecurely over a variety of communication mediums. Compare that to secret information, which is known only to the parties using it to authenticate. Perhaps you could argue that in this case, security by obscurity was not the reason that the system failed, but that isn’t the same as saying all encryption isn’t security by obscurity.
- chriscappuccio 8y agoSega closed DC because publishers abandoned the platform. The incredibly easy and plentiful pirating was absolutely the primary reason for this. It was widely known and said at the time, when publishers were actively dropping the platform. Sad because it was a really nice platform.
- RyanShook 8y agoCrazy that the entire OS used by the game was loaded from the disc. Also interesting that the backdoor needed to make pirate copies viable was built-in and known from the beginning. Seems like vulnerabilities usually come from the edge use cases that sound like features but are actually attack vectors.
- LeftTurnSignal 8y ago> Also interesting that the backdoor needed to make pirate copies viable was built-in and known from the beginning On assemblerforums, I remember reading a post from someone who claimed to be from Sega about the DC. He also said they knew from the beginning, but did it anyway. He said most people knew or had an idea that this would be Sega's last console, so they didn't put as much time into DRM and such as they would have. Could never verify that it was a Sega person, but the way they spoke about stuff led me to believe it was legit. Back in the early 2000's once it was canned, I always liked to think that it was put there by someone intentionally who knew the system was going to fail. This way piracy would keep the system alive longer than any manufacture would. That piracy part is at least true since some company released a new DC game in the past year or two. /I want to believe
- sergiotapia 8y agoSo piracy literally killed my favorite console. What a shame!
- rasz 8y agoIt didnt.
- phusion 8y agoI loved doing this on my Dreamcast back in '99. It was the first console I ever managed to "mod" -- even though it's completely a software mod. At first we had to download loader discs, just a few hundred Kb on a disc, then pop in the 1:1 burned game. Eventually they managed to put the loader on the game ISOs and you could just burn a game and pop it in. Plenty of fun, lots of great games and it primed me to eventually crack open my Xbox for the 007 Nightfire exploit.
- amatecha 8y agoI just wanted to drop in and point out this author has published a couple excellent books analyzing the engines behind the popular first-person-shooter games Wolfenstein 3D[0] and DOOM[1]. Excellent reads if you're interested in the inner workings of these games (and by extension, others like them)! (Yes, he links the DOOM one in the article, but wanted to call them out specifically as being awesome ;)) [0] http://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/ http://fabiensanglard.net/gebbwolf3d/ [1] http://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/ http://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
- timwaagh 8y agointeresting. it seems a minor factor though. dreamcast had good gfx but a lineup kids did not like (i know, i was one of them).
- baochan 8y agoAre there articles out there about how modern copy protection works? I'm interested in why there aren't Switch flash carts, or why there aren't shady companies with BD-ROM pressers making bootleg copies of PS4/XB1 discs.
- AgentME 8y agoI think the copy protection on the original Xbox, the 360, and probably most modern consoles worked like this: executables must be signed, executables must list what types of media they can be run from, the system supports a special type of disk that CD burners and regular disk pressers can't produce, and all game executables specify they can only be run from the special type of disk. With the 360, you can do a firmware hack to the system's disk drive to make it report every disk is the special type of disk to allow you to play games from burned disks. There are some known utility/demo disks containing executables signed to be executable from burned disks, so they can be copied (and have resources modified if the executable doesn't verify the signatures of everything it loads).
- astrostl 8y agoThis is easily the easiest piracy situation I've ever seen: if you had an unmodified Dreamcast, a CD burner, and broadband your only steps were to pirate DiscJuggler, then the games themselves. I knew many people with Dreamcasts in this era, who bought them around launch day without even a thought of pirating, then went on to buy zero (0) additional games because it was so easy. The conversation here seems to settle on the idea that piracy wasn't a primary cause of the system's failure, and I could hardly disagree more from what I widely observed (local + gigantic internet communities).