Sega Saturn CD - Cracked after 20 years

[merge]

 

[DeFiBkIlLeR]

Great vid, thanks for that.

 

What struck me though is how you would have thought after 20yrs the people at Sega would step forward and release the CD encryption routines to the dev community rather than make guys like this jump through hoops so as to preserve access to the Saturn as all the CD drives start to die.

 

Even if not officially from Sega, there have to be people around who worked on the Saturn hardware during the design stage, or the actual coders of the encryption routines able to help as well.

 

..unless of course no one who actually worked on the hardware remembers how they did it themselves

[Sfan]

Haribo

[Lorfarius]

8 minutes ago, DeFiBkIlLeR said:

Great vid, thanks for that.

 

What struck me though is how you would have thought after 20yrs the people at Sega would step forward and release the CD encryption routines to the dev community rather than make guys like this jump through hoops so as to preserve access to the Saturn as all the CD drives start to die.

 

Even if not officially from Sega, there have to be people around who worked on the Saturn hardware during the design stage, or the actual coders of the encryption routines able to help as well.

 

..unless of course no one who actually worked on the hardware remembers how they did it themselves

 

But then don't they run the risk of interfering with copyright/trademark law? Dropping protection actively on long running series just for a very small minority. Plus they never kept the original source code so the chances of them even knowing how to break it is tiny.

[Ninja Doctor]

I think this has been talked about on the assemblergames forum. Nice to see some working hardware.

[gone fishin']

Wow, this is brilliant news. Hopefully this USB CD replacement gets released past prototype, because Saturns are notorious for having shit CD drives (cough, like mine, cough).

[Mr. Gerbik]

Jusr as exciting is him sharing all this knowledge with the Yabause team, it could lead to better emulation. Fascinating stuff even if I didn't know what he was going on about half the time. Thanks for posting that!

[pastry]

This is really wonderful news.

 

When the vid ended I immediately tweeted him to offer help with the GUI!

 

 

---

 

I thought Saturn was known to have one of the most robust CD drives of all? But after all these years they will inevitably fail.

 

9 hours ago, moora said:

Saturns are notorious for having shit CD drives

[schmojo]

17 hours ago, moora said:

Wow, this is brilliant news. Hopefully this USB CD replacement gets released past prototype, because Saturns are notorious for having shit CD drives (cough, like mine, cough).

 

IIRC, there's a guy who already produces limited run Saturn SD adapters for isos, if that's of any use.

[Ninja Doctor]

rhea it's called and that's an ODE (optical drive emulator). Deunan is the Polish fellow who makes them.

[Darhkwing]

I remember going round a tiawan friends house whilst i was at college and he "modded" my saturn to play copied games. I can't remember exactly but involved covering the lid trigger inside so when you put an original game in then swap it for a copy then it would work. He was going back home so he gave me a bagfull of japanese silvers. 

 

I spent a weekend trying them all, it was like a lucky dip on what the game would be. There were some interesting games in their but i didn't really play many of them due to them being mostly all japanese.

[NEG]

Awesome.

 

Time to look into getting one of these Saturns, as it would actually make gaming on one actually affordable! Plus the large Japan-only library to dive into.

[MikeBeaver]

Where is the Kickstarter already

[yashiro]

That's some nerd power in action. Amazing.

[Purin]

Maybe one day I could run a "backup" of Panzer Dragoon Saga with this mod!

[Ninja Doctor]

Flash an action replay with pseudosaturn for backups

 

[spanky debrest]

That's probably the cheapest option. You don't even need an action replay - and any official memory cart can work.

[pastry]

I hadn't heard of that actually, but i suppose the flaw is that you still need a functional CD drive. I still think they're pretty solid but time will get the better of them eventually. And of course, it's a bit less convenient. I don't even have the means to burn a CDR!

[Ninja Doctor]

an alternative option is a Rhea from Deunan.

[Goemon]

Just watched this video - super cool. 

Will this allow you to load multi-region games too?

[Droo]

Was this ever widely released?

[spanky debrest]

13 minutes ago, Droo said:

Was this ever widely released?

 

It's coming, I think beta testers might be getting prototypes soon.

 

https://www.patreon.com/prof_abrasive/posts

[Goemon]

Wow, this was 3 years ago.

Does look like a great option, similar to the PSIO.

 

The guy needs to make sure the chips are protected. Otherwise it will end up getting hacked and you’ll see Chinese knock offs all over the place. The guy who made the GDEMU for the DC didn’t do this and now you can buy them all over eBay at half the price.

[Droo]

56 minutes ago, Goemon said:

Wow, this was 3 years ago.

Does look like a great option, similar to the PSIO.

 

The guy needs to make sure the chips are protected. Otherwise it will end up getting hacked and you’ll see Chinese knock offs all over the place. The guy who made the GDEMU for the DC didn’t do this and now you can buy them all over eBay at half the price.

 

Isn't it somewhat hypocritical if you protect a chip that hacks a device?

[Goemon]

I don’t think so, personally. The guy has put over 3 years work into this. He didn’t start the project to rip off Sega, it was a way for people to play their games without needing to use the CD drive. He’s not responsible for how people choose to use it.

 

However, having someone come along and literally copy what you just spent 3 years making and selling it at a reduced cost is BS.

[Ghost]

On 04/08/2019 at 11:12, Goemon said:

Wow, this was 3 years ago.

Does look like a great option, similar to the PSIO.

 

The guy needs to make sure the chips are protected. Otherwise it will end up getting hacked and you’ll see Chinese knock offs all over the place. The guy who made the GDEMU for the DC didn’t do this and now you can buy them all over eBay at half the price.

 

Thats not necessarily a bad thing, GDEMU is way over priced and constantly out of stock because of scalpers. If it wasnt for the chinese knock offs most people wouldn't have a chance to get one.

[DeciderVT]

9 minutes ago, Ghost said:

 

Thats not necessarily a bad thing, GDEMU is way over priced and constantly out of stock because of scalpers. If it wasnt for the chinese knock offs most people wouldn't have a chance to get one.

It's also constantly out of stock because Deunan is unable to scale to meet demand, either through lack of ability or lack of interest. His capriciousness under pressure also puts me off ordering one, frankly.

[Ghost]

9 hours ago, DeciderVT said:

It's also constantly out of stock because Deunan is unable to scale to meet demand, either through lack of ability or lack of interest. His capriciousness under pressure also puts me off ordering one, frankly.

 

Yeah, his attitude stinks. He did fantastic work developing a really great product that people actually want but he has absolutely no business sense whatsoever. My only worry is that if there is a clear demand the Chinese will ramp up their prices like they did with ags-101 screens, prices for those tripled over a period of 6 months.