Nothing is unhackable. I like how Nintendo claimed that one of their handhelds was unhackable. Hackers: Challenge accepted. Cracks the security within 3 days.
@@janchristianursuaaguilar7434 My name is Yoshikage Kira. I'm 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the Kame Yu department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don't smoke, but I occasionally drink. I'm in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of warm milk and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. I'm trying to explain that I'm a person who wishes to live a very quiet life. I take care not to trouble myself with any enemies, like winning and losing, that would cause me to lose sleep at night. That is how I deal with society, and I know that is what brings me happiness. Although, if I were to fight I wouldn't lose to anyone.
the first time i ever saw a dreamcast in real life the owner showed me his stack of burned games always thought dreamcast had no copy protection at all because of it
There are a few mistakes in the video: - There are actually one or two models of PC CD Burners that can read GD-ROMs under certain circumstances. - GD-ROM is not 1.2GB but closer to 1GB (actually a tiny bit below) - Most games could fit a normal CD-ROM as only a small minority actually used more than 700MB. Obviously a game like Crazy Taxi won't need even half the space used by Sonic Adventure. - Mil-CD did have a protection against playing games, but that protection was also defeated, probably initially thanks to a stolen devkit. The irony is that Sega realized people would try to use Mil-CD to pirate games, and tried to thwart it, but they were defeated. - In terms of audio taking a hit on bigger games to fit in the 700MB range, they were sometimes recompressed but more often that not, they were downmixed from stereo to mono.
Officially the high density portion is 1020MB (and a few more MB in the CD fallback portion). But even with padding, most games were well short of that. Of course a lot of games just needed the padding trimmed. I didn't know about stolen devkit, but since MIL-CD files are just scrambled (reordered) in 32 byte chunks, it would be pretty obvious to determine enough of a partial order on an existing MIL to achieve ACE and be able to chain boot a bootloader with a couple extra steps. But then it also wouldn't take much to reverse engineer the complete scrambling algorithm, you can just poison the data and see where it ends up...
Sega did actually have more copy protection in place than just the GD-ROM format. It was actually pretty sophisticated. The system would basically "jumble" or "scramble" up the main executable into a random sequence if a non-legit disc was detected, causing it to crash on startup. There was also another measure on top of that: The executable file needed to be located on a specific position on the disc, and if it wasn't, then the game wouldn't start. It was well known hacker group Utopia that discovered the MIL-CD exploit, as well as finding workarounds to those other hurdles, including figuring out how to rip the games. Initially, a boot disc was required when starting the system, which you then swapped for a pirated game, but eventually they found a way to put everything needed onto the game disc and removed the need for the boot disc. Also despite being contained on a disc that could hold over a gigabyte of data, most DC games used less than 700MB, meaning they could fit on a standard CD without any modifications.
I swear Jon is singlehandedly running this channel, rarely do I ever see the other guys do any videos and they're not on the same level of quality as Jon's.
On the GD-ROM audio message. Though I never owned a Dreamcast myself, it does tap into my memory of loading an original Xbox disc in a PC or DVD player and getting a similar clip. The presentation values in anti-piracy back then.
The aim in the Dreamcast case was not to fight piracy, but to prevent people from putting the disc in a hifi (hence the audio track). The issue is that, while any modern hifi will recognize the data as data and not read it, older Hifis from the 80s will try to read the data track as audio, which will turn into random noise that could, in certain cases, damage speakers by going overboard in terms of loudness and pitch.
@@Liam3072Playstation already had that feature before if I recall correctly. Without it we wouldn't have the banging hidden track from Castlevania Symphony of the Night (+ of course Alucards warning itself) after all.
@@Mimi.1001 PlayStation, Saturn... heck, even Mega CD had it, and if I'm not mistaken PC Engine CD games as well, it was a very needed feature (and let to marveouls features like characters warning you as you say!)
That take so SO SPICY. I personally found the Knuckles/Rouge levels more fun in SA2 than Knuckles' levels in SA1. But I can agree that Gamma, Tails, and Amy had more fun levels than Tails and Eggman. Like you said, Big the Cat's levels are short lived and tolerable because of it.
I had a pirated Ecco the Dolphin and the first " bad future" stage had glitched music leading to an incessant "click click clicking" noise instead. Really added to the horrific ambiance of the stage. Thankfully, the rezt of the game played fine.
SA and SA2 is tied for me because they are different games in a way. They both have highs and lows different from each other. I am trying to get into console repairs/restoration as a hobby and collect one of each console I repair. I now really want a Dreamcast.
The dreamcast is very easy to find for repair. I’d suggest looking a lots on buyee for a Japanese console. Japanese games are cheaper unless you’d install an ode like the GD emu
@@scpnoobers oh thanks. I was told about this site a while back but didn't write down!!!! It looks awesome. Looks like an eBay type store. I actually want to collect two of each system I repair. One for preserving as much of the original hardware as possible and the other for playing, which i might mod some to make it easier to access games. So I may mod a Dreamcast or use Jon's method.
@@GVGpiracy was only possible and solved when the Katana SDK (the official Sega SDK for the Dreamcast) was stolen by the hacking team "Utopia" in late 1999.
I prefer the Emerald radar and average size of Knuckles’ stages in SA1, but his control feel in SA2 curb-stomps his prior incarnation into oblivion. And if you don’t agree, I hope your two favorite family members buy you the same cheap hallmark birthday card, and claim it was really tough to find which is why it arrived a day late.
I'm sorry your parents didn't love you as a kid. I know they blew hot air into your ears, but you're better than this. SA1 curbstomps 2 and it is not close
@@hahasamian8010 I appreciate the sentiment, but my use of such an outlandish and oddly specific set of misfortunes was intended to play off my potential outrage as humorous as opposed to serious, and while I obviously can’t speak for Master Gamma, I took their reply in the sane spirit. No bad vibes here, at least on my end.
@@RedKing12000 Alright, yea I felt like your comment was silly while Gamma's was taking it too seriously, but I also kinda feel like it's better off without either of you talking that way I wrote a different comment about SA1 vs. SA2 you might find interesting...!
GD-ROM discs were actually made by Yamaha for Sega, They were used for Dreamcast, Naomi 1 & 2, Triforce and Sega Chihiro 🙂 Also with larger games they weren't just compressing stuff, They were also removing stuff in order to get it onto a CD-R such as FMV's etc. Stupid Invaders is one of the worst I've seen for this as almost all of the FMV's are removed and it's an FMV heavy game so it really makes the game harder and causes it to make no sense, I consider the CDI of it unplayable for this reason.
Fun fact: around 99/2000, my buddy found a program that copied dreamcast games to a CD-R, and the burned game worked on unmodded hardware. I have a first generation dreamcast console and they worked on it. We weren't ripping the games to a pc, the program was literally mirror image copying the disc. I distinctly recall playing metropolis street racer, power stone, and a few others, all on CD-R lol
Yeah, I heavily disagree with that hot take lol. The non-speed stages felt much more undercooked in SA1 to me. The stages were largely way too short, simplistic and easy. Most of them felt more like mini-games rather than full-fledged playstyles. What SA2 did was focus on three of the playstyles from SA1 (Sonic, Knuckles and Gamma, the three best ones) and refine them into something more complete, intricate and challenging. Granted, I do wish they had kept SA1's emerald radar for the Knuckles/Rouge styles, but other than that I definitely felt SA2 was a more polished product as far as the non-speed stages went. To each his own though. :) (Also, SA2 also has much less repetition. Fighting Chaos 4 three times in SA1 was hell lol)
I honestly don't care which game offers the best main-campaign experience at this point, because SA2 was so much more than that whereas SA1 simply... wasn't. Like... all the extra missions in SA1 amounted to "do a little better", and while emblem finding was neat and the Chao garden... kinda existed, there just wasn't that much to do. SA2 offered unique alternate missions in every stage, all with A-Ranks to shoot for, had extensive Chao Garden mechanics, secrets to find inside of the levels, and multiplayer mode! There are so many ways to play Sonic Adventure 2, appealing to many different kinds of people, and every one of these ways encourages you to do what most Sonic games are about: replay stages and get better at them!
I've never heard of this guy before, this is the first video I've ever seen of him. Great work btw, I'll be returning. But that voice, very pleasing on the ears. Off topic I know, I just had to mention it.
Back in the day, people would use the serial port or broadband adapter to rip their games. Scene groups probably had access to development systems with which they could read the discs (just guessing). Not only were audio and video files recompressed/downsampled, sometimes they would be ripped out entirely (or blanked by using an essentially empty but valid file). While MIL-CD support was removed, scene groups figured out that you could still use data/data style multisessesion images to autoboot (instead of audio/data that MIL-CD used). Bleem was originally going to release packs that would support multiple games. A beta version of this that worked for any game was leaked, and that's what people used to emulate other titles.
Would be cool to see a similar video covering the GDEMU and similar ODEs. I set one up recently and it opens up stuff that isn’t really possible with mil-cds, like getting access to old Dreamcast demo discs from different regions and running atomiswave arcade games.
Back when the Dreamcast was still relevant but not quite new, my dad got me one from a flea market. He was always going to those things and sometimes he saw things he thought I might like. It came with a whole bunch of games, most of them burnt discs. I always assumed someone had mod chipped it, but apparently not!
I think the huge question would be, would we trade the continued support post-death of the Dreamcast for a healthy, long running commercial life with games not being cancelled as there was no business to be had on the DC once the security was busted open?
I am an early adopter of custom made Dreamcast CDs since early 2000. Most of the ones I made were for emulators. I still have the discs too. Fun times.
@@malant2719 Yes, that was the holiday version of DreamSNES. Eventually I learned how to customized all the discs with my own background, music, sounds, ect.. I don't remember how to create them though since it's been so long.
No matter how many times I've heard this information I will always click on a video of a new person to tell me all about it! The dreamcast is simply a fascinating console to talk about and I will always watch a new video on the subject!
If you are wondering how the GD-Rom fit double the data on the disk it was because they used the media more efficiently, instead of spinning the disc at a constant speed the RPM was increased as the read head moved out from the center which allowed the pits that make up the ones and zeros to be packed more closely together. Or another way of saying it, the relative density of the data stayed more or less the same as the head moved away from the center where with a normal CD the data gets less dense the further out from center you go.
Do you mean it spins slower on the outside? Because the outside path is longer per revolution and only then the density along the same length of path would be constant. But Audio CDs do just that. Watch any CD player spin slower on the outside tracks because the density along the track length does not decrease, but the path per revolution is longer on the outside.
This is incorrect. Dreamcast uses a standard CAV drive that is trimmed for approximately 8x-Max CD speed. This means RPM is the same across the whole stroke, while data density per revolution and thus per second varies across the disc. This is however different from prior consoles, which had used a standard CLV drive, that had a varying RPM and constant data rate per second. CLV drives have CD Audio player lineage and also used in VCD players and other early multimedia devices; while CAV drives have PC heritage, so controller and pickup on Dreamcast are derived from PC drives, indeed the G1 bus is just a slightly tortured IDE/ATAPI. Optical discs generally have a single continuous spiral track, unlike say floppies or classic hard drives which have track-sector addressing. The timecode of the spiral track is spaced such that it has approximately the same tangential data density across the whole track. Of course high density portion of the GD-ROM is a separate track that starts at a fixed lateral offset a little further out, to make sure normal drives don't pick it up.
I'm glad you didn't overblow the effects of piracy on the dreamcast like everyone else always does. Like, yeah it was there, and people were doing it... but in 2001 the majority of people who even had internet were still on dial up FFS and did not have exposure to well informed communities on a scale like today. The vast, vast, vast majority of Dreamcast owners had no idea this was even a thing. They just bought their games at Electronics Boutique and made empty wishes about playing DVD's on it.
It really depended on both internet adoption and how common piracy was in the region. To use my own country as an example, the Netherlands, in 2000 ADSL became a thing and most people were still on dail-up but you'd be you'd be hard-pressed to buy a second hand dreamcast from a first time owner (even back in 2003) that didn't came with a giant box of burned discs and maybe one or 2 non-pirated copies. Because if you didn't download and burned your own you could just as easily for less then a 10th of the cost of a new game by pirated copies on flea markets and other such events. And of course the more tech savy also rented games and dumped them, compressed them and burned them. Granted Sega made some idiotic choices back then. While the 6 game break even point for the console was fine, piracy kicked that idea in the teeth. But then you had such peak financial choices like funding Shenmue the way they did, requiring every existing Dreamcast owner to buy the game twice to make a profit on it and still funding a sequel for it. So even without piracy the Dreamcast probably would have killed Sega as a console manufacturer regardless, just a bit less quickly or less painfully.
Thank you!! I thought I was the only one who liked Sonic Adventure better than the sequel. Sonic Adventure 2 will always have a special place in my heart but there was just something magical about the first game.
My God. Where are you breathing from, your balls? On a serious note, great video. This is coming from a Sega fan who lived through the 6th generation. Always great to find someone new doing justice on that era of gaming.
Best thing about Sonic Adventure 1 was that you spent most of the game playing as Sonic, the other characters stories were shorter and not very intrusive, if you wanted to explore with Knuckles you could, if you didn't want that you could just have Tikal point you in the direction of the emerald pieces, Big's first level is awful, but the rest is passable, and soon you played Sonic again for the last story section.
That's very interesting to learn, also your hot take is not much of hot take but almost common sense at this point, I like Adventure 2, I think it has a great story, themes, visuals and soundtracks but overall Adventure 1 feels more rounded out and complete fun product all around, while in SA2 playing with Tails or Eggman is chore, in SA1 you only gotta deal with Big as a chore, the rest are super fun to play as.
Thank you for your hot take! I believe the same thing: The first Sonic Adventure is better, for the reasons you gave, in addition that you have the explorable zones, and the fun and chill vibes as well.
Mad respect for Bleem! and its dev. Taking one for the team and granting the legality of emulation for the rest of us. @EDIT: The Sonic Adventure 1 thing being better than SA2 is a pretty vanilla take tbhtbh. I am not sure if I agree or not, but yeah. It's popular.
Bleem did no such thing, Connectix was the actual case that established the president that Bleem actually used in its case. Bleems remaining arguments were about comparative advertising in selling its products using screenshots showing Bleem's emulation was better than what Sony did.
i remember going onto the news group's & downloading the dreamcast games left & right. i used to buy a mess load of cd-r by the spool. then burn the games off. if & when there was a game that just hit the market it would in the news groups with in 1 or 2 days. good times
A couple missed details: there was also an encryption key that was needed, and its still unknown how it was obtained. Also, nost model 2 Dreamcasts can't play Mil CD's, but some can. The general consensus is that when SEGA was putting out the final batch, the switched back to older firmware. Possibly for compatibility with thier Mil Cd's. Or possibly to let people have thier way with the console.
This is not an actually good encryption, it's a simple scrambling algorithm which moves data around. So say you have an image of a valid MIL-CD, you can just poison the data by overwriting some bytes, and see where they end up in RAM by attaching a debugger (devkit needed) or using a logic analyser or a bit of custom hardware on the bus. From that the scrambling algorithm is easy to divine. Or you can find descrambling algorithm in the system ROM, it's easily reversible. You can also just figure out some partial sequence in which data must be in, and achieve minimal arbitrary code execution, just enough to reset the drive and run the next bootloader stage.
You seem to own the same PAL copy of Phantasy Star Online that I have! Try popping that into your PC and opening it as a folder. It's got some cool wallpapers as a bonus on it!
As someone who has no technological clue (wouldn’t know how to emulate if I tried) the idea that a CD that wasn’t a major featured bypassed the security of the hardware fascinates me!
Even if they didn't give CD-R ability to the Dreamcast, people would have hacked it eventually. 1) The expansion port on the side where the modem/broadband unit goes is extremely similar to x86 PCI, to the point where some people were hooking up PCI ethernet cards to it successfully with some minor additional hardware 2) The rear serial port was extremely simple to break into with modified NAOMI arcade firmware. 3) The GD-ROM uses a standard x86 IDE interface, so making a Optical Drive Emulator was a foregone conclusion, but nobody did it because burned CDs were easier.
With the Bllemcast discs it's my understanding that each of the 3 released bleemcast discs had each their own version of the bleem emulator optimized for that specific game, it's why other games don't run so well on these
I always wanted a Dreamcast or other SEGA consoles when I was a kid, but everyone I knew was anti-SEGA for some reason, and they all had either Nintendos or Playstations, and sure there were a lot of fun games for those systems, but I really wanted to play Sonic games as I thought the commercials were cool, and the couple of times I did try SEGA consoles in stores and stuff, I always thought the controller layouts were cool and at a Walmart I actually preferred the Saturn Controller to play stuff like Street Fighter, and now as an Adult where I have access to awesome controllers like the 8BitDo M30, I can appreciate everything that SEGA did especially since they are the ones who invented Hall effect sensors, which the industry only started to use lately and I feel that SEGA was smart when they stopped making consoles, because their games are available in multiple systems and nowadays I honestly think that consoles should just not exist anymore, because after the Nintendo Switch which is a handheld portable hybrid which was made very affordable, you can see that companies like Steam and ASUS or even Lenovo have followed suit, and they have made their own handhelds which offer a lot more stuff since they are PCs, and they are very affordable devices as well so the old excuse people liked to use where consoles were "cheaper" or more "user friendly", is no longer the case since modern consoles with the way they have updates and a bunch of other stuff behave very similarly to PCs, but being on PC you have many advantages such as being able to buy keys from many different shops instead of just STEAM, which makes it so that you can get a lot of discounts for games and such, letting yourself be able to play games online without any sort of subscription in most cases, being allowed to backup your own game save files and stuff instead of having to pay for a subscription with lame cloud saving, and a bunch of other things that I could mention, which is why SONY and Nintendo should just focus on maybe making game controllers and releasing their games on PC/Smartphones, but I doubt that it will ever happen since Nintendo is very greedy and they are obsessive over control, which is one of the reasons why they made their own worst enemy the Playstation, as their deal with SONY would have meant that they wouldn't have exclusive distributing rights to the CD technology, and that's why they partnered up with Philips instead to try and backstab SONY and we all know where that led to.
There are two further layers of protection that someone probably thought was sufficienct: MIL-CD executable is "scrambled", while GD-ROM executables are not. Unfortunately for SEGA, it was VERY easy to reverse engineer the encoding scheme, which simply moved 32 byte chunks of the executable around. Even before one figured out the complete scrambling algorithm, it was easy enough to achieve arbitrary code execution and create a loader stub. The second layer of protection is that once MIL-CD executable is loaded, the drive isn't actually working except CD Audio playback, its data features are locked out. But it turned out, it can be reset without losing the system state. The figure of 1.2 GB GD-ROM capacity is plain wrong, stop repeating it. It's 1020MB for double density portion of the GD-ROM plus several odd megabytes on the CD portion, depends on the structure but not a lot.
My main problem with 2 is the required playthroughs of other characters just to get the next Sonic-Shadow stage. In 1 you only had to play the other characters to get the final battle and complete ending
SA2 took everything that worked in SA1 and improved it. They trimmed the fat and iterated on the meat. The Speed, hunting, mech, and chao gardens are better in SA2.
yeah sa1 shitters are delusional. sa2 battle beats sa1 hands down. better everything, plus better gardens, plus being able to take your chao around on your gba.
At 3:52 => in order to check if your dreamcast is compatible with backups, it's better to check the number on the left of "PAL E". If it's "0" or "1": good to go. If it's "2": bye :)
@9:46 100% agreed on everything except the Chao garden. Also bc I don't see it pointed out that often, imo even sonic's movement in 2 felt like a downgrade compared to 1 because the somersault breaks all momentum.
Outside of annoying swap tricks, the Saturn's security required internal modifications to be breeched for three DECADES. And modchips for Model 1's became RARE. Only very recently have people found better ways around it and even then it requires a PAR-type cart with custom software. GD-ROMs weren't that special. They were a high-density variant of common CDs from Yamaha. Certain "CD" drive models can even be firmware modded to read GD-ROMs (possibly write GD-R's too from what I recall). By comparison, the security ring the Saturn discs used were lightyears more useful. Heck some games even had in-game ring checks to all but thwart swap tricks. For the DC they could have included sample code to do this easily and included it with every devkit. Sega should have used security rings like the Saturn, but rather than disable the system completely... any disc NOT possessing the ring would lock you out of full hardware access. Like stop you from accessing full VRAM or cutting the PVR clockspeed by half - if you can't verify the security ring. This would allow things like MIL-CDs to run and rudimentary homebrew... while effectively locking out piracy. Oh, and the problem with Bleem! is that it had no ability to discern between a legit PSX game and a proper 1:1 copy. So while I'm glad Sony lost, it *did* make piracy easier.
Pretty sure (100%) that it was so easy to download and play games on CDROM that everyone knew about it. It's the only reason they sold any units, but also one of the reasons is bombed (jack software sales).
Yeah I agree, SA1 is substantially better than SA2, specially when it comes to the overall experience. As a sequel SA2 does the typical "bigger and better" when it comes to its stages but that often makes them worse, higher highs but also much lower lows. It's most noticeable in the treasure hunting levels, SA1 has the common sense to avoid claustrophobic sections whenever possible because the camera struggles with them unless you're moving in one predetermined direction (which isn't the case for Knuckles because we're searching around the place), but SA2 loves its small spaces and the camera just spasms trying to keep up.
I agree that Adventure 1 is the better game, i also liked the "adventure" element of exploring to find the next stage, wasn't perfect but i found it sorely missing from the second game.
you can just look at these videos and know in the first 10 seconds you'll hear HEY EVERYONE, JON HERE
For me, it was the title. He seems to be the hacker of the GVG team
Just looking at the title tells me what’s a John video
@@LS-td4yf that's what I mean, looking at the video before actually clicking it to watch
A Scott the Woz reference!
@@chosenone3137 I'm fairly certain scott didn't invent greetings
Nothing is unhackable. I like how Nintendo claimed that one of their handhelds was unhackable.
Hackers: Challenge accepted.
Cracks the security within 3 days.
That's kira yoshikage saying sheer heart attack has no weakness
@@janchristianursuaaguilar7434 My name is Yoshikage Kira. I'm 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the Kame Yu department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don't smoke, but I occasionally drink. I'm in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of warm milk and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. I'm trying to explain that I'm a person who wishes to live a very quiet life. I take care not to trouble myself with any enemies, like winning and losing, that would cause me to lose sleep at night. That is how I deal with society, and I know that is what brings me happiness. Although, if I were to fight I wouldn't lose to anyone.
Well the Xbox ones haven't been hacked so far I think 🤔
@@danielroos5993 Really? Not even the original?
@@zachtwilightwindwaker596 as far as I know the Xbox one series hasn't been hacked
the first time i ever saw a dreamcast in real life
the owner showed me his stack of burned games
always thought dreamcast had no copy protection at all because of it
Jon’s on his Modern Vintage Gamer arc, I’m here for it.
Mistakes were made...
I was 100% sure I clicked an MVG video
I CANNOT help but think "GD ROM" Stands for "God Damn ROM"
There are a few mistakes in the video:
- There are actually one or two models of PC CD Burners that can read GD-ROMs under certain circumstances.
- GD-ROM is not 1.2GB but closer to 1GB (actually a tiny bit below)
- Most games could fit a normal CD-ROM as only a small minority actually used more than 700MB. Obviously a game like Crazy Taxi won't need even half the space used by Sonic Adventure.
- Mil-CD did have a protection against playing games, but that protection was also defeated, probably initially thanks to a stolen devkit. The irony is that Sega realized people would try to use Mil-CD to pirate games, and tried to thwart it, but they were defeated.
- In terms of audio taking a hit on bigger games to fit in the 700MB range, they were sometimes recompressed but more often that not, they were downmixed from stereo to mono.
Officially the high density portion is 1020MB (and a few more MB in the CD fallback portion). But even with padding, most games were well short of that. Of course a lot of games just needed the padding trimmed.
I didn't know about stolen devkit, but since MIL-CD files are just scrambled (reordered) in 32 byte chunks, it would be pretty obvious to determine enough of a partial order on an existing MIL to achieve ACE and be able to chain boot a bootloader with a couple extra steps. But then it also wouldn't take much to reverse engineer the complete scrambling algorithm, you can just poison the data and see where it ends up...
Sega did actually have more copy protection in place than just the GD-ROM format. It was actually pretty sophisticated. The system would basically "jumble" or "scramble" up the main executable into a random sequence if a non-legit disc was detected, causing it to crash on startup. There was also another measure on top of that: The executable file needed to be located on a specific position on the disc, and if it wasn't, then the game wouldn't start. It was well known hacker group Utopia that discovered the MIL-CD exploit, as well as finding workarounds to those other hurdles, including figuring out how to rip the games. Initially, a boot disc was required when starting the system, which you then swapped for a pirated game, but eventually they found a way to put everything needed onto the game disc and removed the need for the boot disc. Also despite being contained on a disc that could hold over a gigabyte of data, most DC games used less than 700MB, meaning they could fit on a standard CD without any modifications.
I swear Jon is singlehandedly running this channel, rarely do I ever see the other guys do any videos and they're not on the same level of quality as Jon's.
Yeah it feels like they're often just reading their script for 10 minutes and call it a video :/
I feel like every other member always says “I’m working so hard on a video” then we get 10 Jon videos in a row
This used to be his personal channel before it got rebranded to GVG around late-2020 just shortly before his daughter was born.
Thats not true! Derrick’s Retrospectives are great and really high quality.
@@roastbowlsI mean videos do take time 😅
Seeing so much footage from our Puyo Puyo~n patch makes me happy
On the GD-ROM audio message. Though I never owned a Dreamcast myself, it does tap into my memory of loading an original Xbox disc in a PC or DVD player and getting a similar clip. The presentation values in anti-piracy back then.
The aim in the Dreamcast case was not to fight piracy, but to prevent people from putting the disc in a hifi (hence the audio track). The issue is that, while any modern hifi will recognize the data as data and not read it, older Hifis from the 80s will try to read the data track as audio, which will turn into random noise that could, in certain cases, damage speakers by going overboard in terms of loudness and pitch.
@@Liam3072Playstation already had that feature before if I recall correctly. Without it we wouldn't have the banging hidden track from Castlevania Symphony of the Night (+ of course Alucards warning itself) after all.
@@Liam3072 Would I be correct in assuming that if the data did play, it would sorta sound like the old internet dial up noise?
@@Mimi.1001 PlayStation, Saturn... heck, even Mega CD had it, and if I'm not mistaken PC Engine CD games as well, it was a very needed feature (and let to marveouls features like characters warning you as you say!)
@Pixelman546 It's worse, waaaay worse, something like robots in agonising pain while scratching blackboards with a screeching blender at full power
The section on bleem was very cool.
The fact it wasn't unhackable is why we still enjoy it today
the title felt like reading “the titanic was ALMOST unsinkable” yes, and then it notoriously wasn’t 😂
That take so SO SPICY. I personally found the Knuckles/Rouge levels more fun in SA2 than Knuckles' levels in SA1. But I can agree that Gamma, Tails, and Amy had more fun levels than Tails and Eggman.
Like you said, Big the Cat's levels are short lived and tolerable because of it.
Happy birthday Jon!! Hope you had a good day :). Very grateful for of the work you’ve done!
I think you guys in the UK might've had cooler disc art than us. That PSO disc especially!
Geek Critique spotted
Happy birthday Jon!!
Also great video as usual!
I had a pirated Ecco the Dolphin and the first " bad future" stage had glitched music leading to an incessant "click click clicking" noise instead. Really added to the horrific ambiance of the stage. Thankfully, the rezt of the game played fine.
SA and SA2 is tied for me because they are different games in a way. They both have highs and lows different from each other.
I am trying to get into console repairs/restoration as a hobby and collect one of each console I repair. I now really want a Dreamcast.
The dreamcast is very easy to find for repair. I’d suggest looking a lots on buyee for a Japanese console. Japanese games are cheaper unless you’d install an ode like the GD emu
@@scpnoobers oh thanks. I was told about this site a while back but didn't write down!!!! It looks awesome. Looks like an eBay type store.
I actually want to collect two of each system I repair. One for preserving as much of the original hardware as possible and the other for playing, which i might mod some to make it easier to access games. So I may mod a Dreamcast or use Jon's method.
Jon's interests and the videos he makes somehow perfectly align with mine every time. Plus his voice is fabulous
FYI: Apple only endorced the Virtual Game Station by Connectix, not Bleem.
You're 100% right appreciate the correction
@@GVGpiracy was only possible and solved when the Katana SDK (the official Sega SDK for the Dreamcast) was stolen by the hacking team "Utopia" in late 1999.
@@mikeuk666 it always the hackers that had to get little dirty
I prefer the Emerald radar and average size of Knuckles’ stages in SA1, but his control feel in SA2 curb-stomps his prior incarnation into oblivion.
And if you don’t agree, I hope your two favorite family members buy you the same cheap hallmark birthday card, and claim it was really tough to find which is why it arrived a day late.
I'm sorry your parents didn't love you as a kid. I know they blew hot air into your ears, but you're better than this. SA1 curbstomps 2 and it is not close
No need to be meanspirited guys, this is Good Vibes Gaming :(
@@hahasamian8010
I appreciate the sentiment, but my use of such an outlandish and oddly specific set of misfortunes was intended to play off my potential outrage as humorous as opposed to serious, and while I obviously can’t speak for Master Gamma, I took their reply in the sane spirit. No bad vibes here, at least on my end.
@@RedKing12000 Alright, yea I felt like your comment was silly while Gamma's was taking it too seriously, but I also kinda feel like it's better off without either of you talking that way
I wrote a different comment about SA1 vs. SA2 you might find interesting...!
GD-ROM discs were actually made by Yamaha for Sega, They were used for Dreamcast, Naomi 1 & 2, Triforce and Sega Chihiro 🙂
Also with larger games they weren't just compressing stuff, They were also removing stuff in order to get it onto a CD-R such as FMV's etc.
Stupid Invaders is one of the worst I've seen for this as almost all of the FMV's are removed and it's an FMV heavy game so it really makes the game harder and causes it to make no sense, I consider the CDI of it unplayable for this reason.
They also now let you play Atomiswave arcade games on the Dreamcast, most of which never originally had a port on the system!
Phantasy Star Online. Best game ever
I am terrible at platformers but grew in the heyday of them. Big the Cat is how i fell in love with Sonic.
Fun fact: around 99/2000, my buddy found a program that copied dreamcast games to a CD-R, and the burned game worked on unmodded hardware. I have a first generation dreamcast console and they worked on it. We weren't ripping the games to a pc, the program was literally mirror image copying the disc. I distinctly recall playing metropolis street racer, power stone, and a few others, all on CD-R lol
9:56 You are so real for this
*says the thing everyone says*
Yeah, I heavily disagree with that hot take lol. The non-speed stages felt much more undercooked in SA1 to me. The stages were largely way too short, simplistic and easy. Most of them felt more like mini-games rather than full-fledged playstyles. What SA2 did was focus on three of the playstyles from SA1 (Sonic, Knuckles and Gamma, the three best ones) and refine them into something more complete, intricate and challenging. Granted, I do wish they had kept SA1's emerald radar for the Knuckles/Rouge styles, but other than that I definitely felt SA2 was a more polished product as far as the non-speed stages went. To each his own though. :)
(Also, SA2 also has much less repetition. Fighting Chaos 4 three times in SA1 was hell lol)
I honestly don't care which game offers the best main-campaign experience at this point, because SA2 was so much more than that whereas SA1 simply... wasn't. Like... all the extra missions in SA1 amounted to "do a little better", and while emblem finding was neat and the Chao garden... kinda existed, there just wasn't that much to do. SA2 offered unique alternate missions in every stage, all with A-Ranks to shoot for, had extensive Chao Garden mechanics, secrets to find inside of the levels, and multiplayer mode! There are so many ways to play Sonic Adventure 2, appealing to many different kinds of people, and every one of these ways encourages you to do what most Sonic games are about: replay stages and get better at them!
I've never heard of this guy before, this is the first video I've ever seen of him. Great work btw, I'll be returning.
But that voice, very pleasing on the ears. Off topic I know, I just had to mention it.
Apple actually bragged about Connectix Virtual Game Station, not Bleem - I’m not sure Bleem ever released for Mac.
Back in the day, people would use the serial port or broadband adapter to rip their games. Scene groups probably had access to development systems with which they could read the discs (just guessing). Not only were audio and video files recompressed/downsampled, sometimes they would be ripped out entirely (or blanked by using an essentially empty but valid file). While MIL-CD support was removed, scene groups figured out that you could still use data/data style multisessesion images to autoboot (instead of audio/data that MIL-CD used). Bleem was originally going to release packs that would support multiple games. A beta version of this that worked for any game was leaked, and that's what people used to emulate other titles.
that bootloader CD with the spinning 3d reindeer graphic.
My stack of Dreamcast games burned onto CD-Rs says otherwise
Correct
Didn't watch the whole video, did you?
@@linkvagar2336Didn't even press play lol
Happy Birthday man! Love your work and of course your voice. (And of course the take is correct :) )
Would be cool to see a similar video covering the GDEMU and similar ODEs. I set one up recently and it opens up stuff that isn’t really possible with mil-cds, like getting access to old Dreamcast demo discs from different regions and running atomiswave arcade games.
Back when the Dreamcast was still relevant but not quite new, my dad got me one from a flea market. He was always going to those things and sometimes he saw things he thought I might like. It came with a whole bunch of games, most of them burnt discs. I always assumed someone had mod chipped it, but apparently not!
*Sees thumnail* This is going to be a Jon joint ain't it? I see Sega and I click.
I think the huge question would be, would we trade the continued support post-death of the Dreamcast for a healthy, long running commercial life with games not being cancelled as there was no business to be had on the DC once the security was busted open?
i remember being able to just straight copy the cds, no technique, nothing. and it worked like a dream
I am an early adopter of custom made Dreamcast CDs since early 2000. Most of the ones I made were for emulators. I still have the discs too. Fun times.
Same, did u ever have a snes disc or megadrive disc compilation and the intro menu had a funky 'merry Christmas' song running in the background
@@malant2719 Yes, that was the holiday version of DreamSNES. Eventually I learned how to customized all the discs with my own background, music, sounds, ect.. I don't remember how to create them though since it's been so long.
You have a great voice for narration. Subscribed 👍
No matter how many times I've heard this information I will always click on a video of a new person to tell me all about it!
The dreamcast is simply a fascinating console to talk about and I will always watch a new video on the subject!
If you are wondering how the GD-Rom fit double the data on the disk it was because they used the media more efficiently, instead of spinning the disc at a constant speed the RPM was increased as the read head moved out from the center which allowed the pits that make up the ones and zeros to be packed more closely together. Or another way of saying it, the relative density of the data stayed more or less the same as the head moved away from the center where with a normal CD the data gets less dense the further out from center you go.
Do you mean it spins slower on the outside? Because the outside path is longer per revolution and only then the density along the same length of path would be constant.
But Audio CDs do just that. Watch any CD player spin slower on the outside tracks because the density along the track length does not decrease, but the path per revolution is longer on the outside.
This is incorrect. Dreamcast uses a standard CAV drive that is trimmed for approximately 8x-Max CD speed. This means RPM is the same across the whole stroke, while data density per revolution and thus per second varies across the disc. This is however different from prior consoles, which had used a standard CLV drive, that had a varying RPM and constant data rate per second. CLV drives have CD Audio player lineage and also used in VCD players and other early multimedia devices; while CAV drives have PC heritage, so controller and pickup on Dreamcast are derived from PC drives, indeed the G1 bus is just a slightly tortured IDE/ATAPI.
Optical discs generally have a single continuous spiral track, unlike say floppies or classic hard drives which have track-sector addressing. The timecode of the spiral track is spaced such that it has approximately the same tangential data density across the whole track.
Of course high density portion of the GD-ROM is a separate track that starts at a fixed lateral offset a little further out, to make sure normal drives don't pick it up.
Didnt even know there were other people on this channel besides Jon tbh
I'm glad you didn't overblow the effects of piracy on the dreamcast like everyone else always does. Like, yeah it was there, and people were doing it... but in 2001 the majority of people who even had internet were still on dial up FFS and did not have exposure to well informed communities on a scale like today. The vast, vast, vast majority of Dreamcast owners had no idea this was even a thing. They just bought their games at Electronics Boutique and made empty wishes about playing DVD's on it.
It really depended on both internet adoption and how common piracy was in the region. To use my own country as an example, the Netherlands, in 2000 ADSL became a thing and most people were still on dail-up but you'd be you'd be hard-pressed to buy a second hand dreamcast from a first time owner (even back in 2003) that didn't came with a giant box of burned discs and maybe one or 2 non-pirated copies. Because if you didn't download and burned your own you could just as easily for less then a 10th of the cost of a new game by pirated copies on flea markets and other such events.
And of course the more tech savy also rented games and dumped them, compressed them and burned them.
Granted Sega made some idiotic choices back then. While the 6 game break even point for the console was fine, piracy kicked that idea in the teeth. But then you had such peak financial choices like funding Shenmue the way they did, requiring every existing Dreamcast owner to buy the game twice to make a profit on it and still funding a sequel for it. So even without piracy the Dreamcast probably would have killed Sega as a console manufacturer regardless, just a bit less quickly or less painfully.
No, they didn't. I was the only person back then around with a DC with burned games. Downloading CD's on 56k sucked ass though.
Thank you!! I thought I was the only one who liked Sonic Adventure better than the sequel. Sonic Adventure 2 will always have a special place in my heart but there was just something magical about the first game.
I bought a Dreamcast, didn't have money for games so sold it shortly after... And now I'm buying it again after watching this. Thanks John!
My God. Where are you breathing from, your balls? On a serious note, great video. This is coming from a Sega fan who lived through the 6th generation. Always great to find someone new doing justice on that era of gaming.
Holy moly, I completely forgot about the bleemcast! That thing blew my mind when I was a kid.
Best thing about Sonic Adventure 1 was that you spent most of the game playing as Sonic, the other characters stories were shorter and not very intrusive, if you wanted to explore with Knuckles you could, if you didn't want that you could just have Tikal point you in the direction of the emerald pieces, Big's first level is awful, but the rest is passable, and soon you played Sonic again for the last story section.
Jon, how do you capture most of your retro consoles? Like the Wii, the GC and now your DC.
I'm a simple man, I see the Dreamcast and Jon, it's an instant-like
9:46 Objectively correct opinion here
Wow never new this and had a Dreamcast in 1999 and just bought a modded one. I can't wait till it gets delivered. 👍
That's very interesting to learn, also your hot take is not much of hot take but almost common sense at this point, I like Adventure 2, I think it has a great story, themes, visuals and soundtracks but overall Adventure 1 feels more rounded out and complete fun product all around, while in SA2 playing with Tails or Eggman is chore, in SA1 you only gotta deal with Big as a chore, the rest are super fun to play as.
Thank you for your hot take! I believe the same thing: The first Sonic Adventure is better, for the reasons you gave, in addition that you have the explorable zones, and the fun and chill vibes as well.
SegaCDs copy protection was the fact it was on CD. There weren't a lot of consumer CD copiers at the time.
Mad respect for Bleem! and its dev. Taking one for the team and granting the legality of emulation for the rest of us.
@EDIT: The Sonic Adventure 1 thing being better than SA2 is a pretty vanilla take tbhtbh. I am not sure if I agree or not, but yeah. It's popular.
Bleem did no such thing, Connectix was the actual case that established the president that Bleem actually used in its case. Bleems remaining arguments were about comparative advertising in selling its products using screenshots showing Bleem's emulation was better than what Sony did.
i remember going onto the news group's & downloading the dreamcast games left & right. i used to buy a mess load of cd-r by the spool. then burn the games off. if & when there was a game that just hit the market it would in the news groups with in 1 or 2 days. good times
A couple missed details: there was also an encryption key that was needed, and its still unknown how it was obtained. Also, nost model 2 Dreamcasts can't play Mil CD's, but some can. The general consensus is that when SEGA was putting out the final batch, the switched back to older firmware. Possibly for compatibility with thier Mil Cd's. Or possibly to let people have thier way with the console.
This is not an actually good encryption, it's a simple scrambling algorithm which moves data around.
So say you have an image of a valid MIL-CD, you can just poison the data by overwriting some bytes, and see where they end up in RAM by attaching a debugger (devkit needed) or using a logic analyser or a bit of custom hardware on the bus. From that the scrambling algorithm is easy to divine. Or you can find descrambling algorithm in the system ROM, it's easily reversible.
You can also just figure out some partial sequence in which data must be in, and achieve minimal arbitrary code execution, just enough to reset the drive and run the next bootloader stage.
You seem to own the same PAL copy of Phantasy Star Online that I have!
Try popping that into your PC and opening it as a folder. It's got some cool wallpapers as a bonus on it!
Everything that's unhackable will eventually be hackable.
Things take time.
As someone who has no technological clue (wouldn’t know how to emulate if I tried) the idea that a CD that wasn’t a major featured bypassed the security of the hardware fascinates me!
I would just like to add that you can also dump a dreamcast gd rom using certain Liteon, Plextor drives and a trap disc
Why? From factory you could burn a cd and play it without modchip
0:24
This is like saying Boeing whistleblowers are almost unkillable
Even if they didn't give CD-R ability to the Dreamcast, people would have hacked it eventually.
1) The expansion port on the side where the modem/broadband unit goes is extremely similar to x86 PCI, to the point where some people were hooking up PCI ethernet cards to it successfully with some minor additional hardware
2) The rear serial port was extremely simple to break into with modified NAOMI arcade firmware.
3) The GD-ROM uses a standard x86 IDE interface, so making a Optical Drive Emulator was a foregone conclusion, but nobody did it because burned CDs were easier.
Man Jon videos are awesome
another great this about the dreamcast was the option to play 60hz in pal regions
With the Bllemcast discs it's my understanding that each of the 3 released bleemcast discs had each their own version of the bleem emulator optimized for that specific game, it's why other games don't run so well on these
I agree think that SA1 is better than 2. I also like the overworld and missed it in 2.
Fascinating video. So much I didn't know.
I remember seeing many Dreamcast games on burned CDs in 2009 in various thrift stores! 😂
I always wanted a Dreamcast or other SEGA consoles when I was a kid, but everyone I knew was anti-SEGA for some reason, and they all had either Nintendos or Playstations, and sure there were a lot of fun games for those systems, but I really wanted to play Sonic games as I thought the commercials were cool, and the couple of times I did try SEGA consoles in stores and stuff, I always thought the controller layouts were cool and at a Walmart I actually preferred the Saturn Controller to play stuff like Street Fighter, and now as an Adult where I have access to awesome controllers like the 8BitDo M30, I can appreciate everything that SEGA did especially since they are the ones who invented Hall effect sensors, which the industry only started to use lately and I feel that SEGA was smart when they stopped making consoles, because their games are available in multiple systems and nowadays I honestly think that consoles should just not exist anymore, because after the Nintendo Switch which is a handheld portable hybrid which was made very affordable, you can see that companies like Steam and ASUS or even Lenovo have followed suit, and they have made their own handhelds which offer a lot more stuff since they are PCs, and they are very affordable devices as well so the old excuse people liked to use where consoles were "cheaper" or more "user friendly", is no longer the case since modern consoles with the way they have updates and a bunch of other stuff behave very similarly to PCs, but being on PC you have many advantages such as being able to buy keys from many different shops instead of just STEAM, which makes it so that you can get a lot of discounts for games and such, letting yourself be able to play games online without any sort of subscription in most cases, being allowed to backup your own game save files and stuff instead of having to pay for a subscription with lame cloud saving, and a bunch of other things that I could mention, which is why SONY and Nintendo should just focus on maybe making game controllers and releasing their games on PC/Smartphones, but I doubt that it will ever happen since Nintendo is very greedy and they are obsessive over control, which is one of the reasons why they made their own worst enemy the Playstation, as their deal with SONY would have meant that they wouldn't have exclusive distributing rights to the CD technology, and that's why they partnered up with Philips instead to try and backstab SONY and we all know where that led to.
And it’s me, Terry Wogan here on radio two next I’m gonna play Shadi Wadi
Excellent video very helpful and informative...thank you. 👍
There are two further layers of protection that someone probably thought was sufficienct: MIL-CD executable is "scrambled", while GD-ROM executables are not. Unfortunately for SEGA, it was VERY easy to reverse engineer the encoding scheme, which simply moved 32 byte chunks of the executable around. Even before one figured out the complete scrambling algorithm, it was easy enough to achieve arbitrary code execution and create a loader stub.
The second layer of protection is that once MIL-CD executable is loaded, the drive isn't actually working except CD Audio playback, its data features are locked out. But it turned out, it can be reset without losing the system state.
The figure of 1.2 GB GD-ROM capacity is plain wrong, stop repeating it. It's 1020MB for double density portion of the GD-ROM plus several odd megabytes on the CD portion, depends on the structure but not a lot.
Totally agree on Adventure 1 vs Adventure 2. The second one was okay, but the first was more consistently fun.
You could play hacked or back up games on it and VCD on it too.
My friend had a hacked dreamcast back in the day and had every game on burnt cd's dunno how, just know it was geared up by our mutual hacker friend.
“This disc is for use only on Sega Dreamcast”
I bet that one guy who argued for the inclusion of MIL-CD support was really popular around Sega.
I agree in that I have more nostalgia for Sonic Adventure 1 over 2 at least.
Were it not for that demo disc, we may have seen Sega hang around for another generation. The moment my friend showed my that, I knew it was dead. 😢
My hot take: treasure hunting & mech shooting are better in SA2 than SA1
I don't think those are in SA1.
@koolaid33 Knuckles did the treasure hunting in SA1, and Gamma was basically the mechs in SA1
My main problem with 2 is the required playthroughs of other characters just to get the next Sonic-Shadow stage. In 1 you only had to play the other characters to get the final battle and complete ending
SA2 took everything that worked in SA1 and improved it. They trimmed the fat and iterated on the meat. The Speed, hunting, mech, and chao gardens are better in SA2.
yeah sa1 shitters are delusional.
sa2 battle beats sa1 hands down. better everything, plus better gardens, plus being able to take your chao around on your gba.
Everything ? What about the the exploration part about level that made the Adventure part felt so special ?
@@nathleflutiste you mean hubworld? It's ok.
At 3:52 => in order to check if your dreamcast is compatible with backups, it's better to check the number on the left of "PAL E".
If it's "0" or "1": good to go. If it's "2": bye :)
@9:46 100% agreed on everything except the Chao garden. Also bc I don't see it pointed out that often, imo even sonic's movement in 2 felt like a downgrade compared to 1 because the somersault breaks all momentum.
I agree with your opinion about Sonic Adventure 1! 😁
Outside of annoying swap tricks, the Saturn's security required internal modifications to be breeched for three DECADES. And modchips for Model 1's became RARE. Only very recently have people found better ways around it and even then it requires a PAR-type cart with custom software. GD-ROMs weren't that special. They were a high-density variant of common CDs from Yamaha. Certain "CD" drive models can even be firmware modded to read GD-ROMs (possibly write GD-R's too from what I recall). By comparison, the security ring the Saturn discs used were lightyears more useful. Heck some games even had in-game ring checks to all but thwart swap tricks. For the DC they could have included sample code to do this easily and included it with every devkit.
Sega should have used security rings like the Saturn, but rather than disable the system completely... any disc NOT possessing the ring would lock you out of full hardware access. Like stop you from accessing full VRAM or cutting the PVR clockspeed by half - if you can't verify the security ring. This would allow things like MIL-CDs to run and rudimentary homebrew... while effectively locking out piracy.
Oh, and the problem with Bleem! is that it had no ability to discern between a legit PSX game and a proper 1:1 copy. So while I'm glad Sony lost, it *did* make piracy easier.
I agree about Sonic Adventure 1. The adventure fields were really dear to me
Interesting. I was wondering why the Naomi wasn't cracked at the disk level when it happened so fast with the Dreamcast.
Pretty sure (100%) that it was so easy to download and play games on CDROM that everyone knew about it. It's the only reason they sold any units, but also one of the reasons is bombed (jack software sales).
really wish we could produce GDRoms now. some of mine need replacing.
Tbh I'd like to have heard more about what it did take to crack it and get things like disk drive emulators working.
It was easier to get 'backup' games on Dreamcast than on the Wii.
Yeah I agree, SA1 is substantially better than SA2, specially when it comes to the overall experience. As a sequel SA2 does the typical "bigger and better" when it comes to its stages but that often makes them worse, higher highs but also much lower lows. It's most noticeable in the treasure hunting levels, SA1 has the common sense to avoid claustrophobic sections whenever possible because the camera struggles with them unless you're moving in one predetermined direction (which isn't the case for Knuckles because we're searching around the place), but SA2 loves its small spaces and the camera just spasms trying to keep up.
I agree that Adventure 1 is the better game, i also liked the "adventure" element of exploring to find the next stage, wasn't perfect but i found it sorely missing from the second game.
The dreamcast would have been fully unhackable if it weren’t based on a windows operating system