I used to do that but with PC games back in 1999 also. I got a Creative 2x CD burner for my birthday. First game I sold was a copy of Sim City 3000. The games were all rented for maximum profit. I had a library of games, software and audio cds. The kids would choose whatever they want and I would bring the copy on the next day. Teachers had absolutely no idea what that was all about. A full blown black market of pirated software LOL I had a really good pc back then I bought with all that dirty cash lol Good times!
I'd like to know about this, especially considering emulation of disc based systems. You see, I'd just assume that the emulator of a disc based console would be able to read discs intended for the console it's emulating, but I do know that Dolphin (Gamecube and Wii) only works with ISOs and I'm not sure about other emnulators eg RPCS3 (PS3) So I'm guessing that copy protection is something emulator authors have to get past not only on ISOs but also on the discs themselves.
I loved the Dreamcast. I will never forget the day I was browsing the contents of the Quake 3 Arena game and found it was using an irc client for chat and edited the config to make it connect to my Quake 3 clan channel. fun times.
Utopia supposedly reverse-engineered Datel’s Action Replay CDX demo disc from DC-UK Magazine to figure out how Datel was able to boot their CD-based cheat disc. Datel had more R&D and could actually pay professionals to break protections. Heck, they owned their own media pressing plant too (Thin Ice Media), which is how they got around protection for the PSX. They went around Nintendo and paid Panasonic/Matsushita for the tech they needed to make bootable GameCube discs too. That said, I suspect that the Utopia members responsible for the DC boot disc were probably Datel employees/contractors. ;)
AfterBurnerTeirusu One would expect them to have access to the dev kit, or at least the software tools, since they had to do more coding. That was the easy part. There’s also a video from the about the hack resulting from a reverse engineered Action Replay CDX demo disc from one of Datel’s former partners (Larry Bundy Jr; 5 Hilariously Idiotic Gaming Screw Ups). Still, I’m interested in this other article. The N64 devkit software was so prevalent at the time that they had to explicitly ban it from coding competitions like POM’99. The DC scene wasn‘t so different.
AfterBurnerTeirusu Yeah, it’s very possible that Datel paid a German group for an exploit they developed entirely on their own, but the AR CDX did predate Utopia Boot Disc. I recall a Datel rep on some of the scene’s IRC channels soliciting Game Boy coders for one of their projects (a programmable multicart that needed some legit content to justify its existence). They’ve definitely been known to reach out. ;)
What ever happened to the people that made the Playstation emulater called Bleem. Those guys reverse engineered the PlayStation so they could get their emulator running without breaking any copyright laws. Sony tried to sue the guys at Bleem but lost. Sony even went as far as to get someone to break into the Bleem office and try to recover sales figures on the emulator. Then came the Bleemcast to stick it to Sony. I wonder how it felt for Sony at the time, watching their games running and looking nicer on the competitions hardware.
@@BoomBox02 You might be mixing some of that up with Sony v. Connectix (Virtual Game Station) but, yeah, Sony sued both. Connectix demonstrated VGS to Sony in an attempt to get them on-board but Sony didn't want any part of it. At that point they were using Sony's BIOS. Sony's refusal sent them back into development to make a functional BIOS substitute that didn't break any copyright laws. Of course, Sony still sued in an attempt to set a precedent and make all similar emulation illegal on the basis that it infringes on IP related to the rest of the platform's technical specifics. Luckily, Connectix wasn't such a small company (makers of VMWare) so they were able to defend themselves. When Sony sued Bleem! it was for "Unfair competition" and the use of screenshots to market it (deemed "Fair Use" by the courts). Imagine if Sony had partnered with Connectix instead and attacked the makers of Bleem! with that earlier lawsuit instead, which would have set a bad precedent for all of emulation. D:
You can actually read the "High Density" part of the GD disks in certain standard PC CD drives. It involves burning a CD-R first, which contains the same type of TOC info that is typical for a Dreamcast disk. You then load the CD-R, let the drive read the TOC, then do a disk swap. Some CD-ROM drives have a wide enough tolerance for the spindle motor speed to allow the disk to spin slow enough, and the "HD" track to be dumped. The trick sometimes involved setting the laser sled switch after the disk swap so that the laser will start reading the HD track first. This can definitely be done, as I did it myself many years ago. The HD track really is just a standard ISO9660 track, just burned at a faster rate. (and the GD drives have custom firmware to read the second TOC, and access the HD track.) ;)
Do you have the other SDK docs, with the "Sega Packet Interface" PDF? There's also the System Architecture PDF, which I refer to as the "Dreamcast Programming Bible". Not that I'm very good at that side of it. lol The closest I got to coding anything for the Dreamcast is when I did the first ever tests of an IDE HDD as a Slave device on the G1 bus (alongside the GD drive). I modified the KOS examples to access the data on the HDD (or CF card), and print the sectors as hex. I then designed a simple passive adapter, sent a few to Mr SWAT, who then added support for IDE devices in Dreamshell. And so, the G1-ATA and IDE mods were born. ;)
Did you even finish watching the video? He clearly stated in the video that you can read GD-ROM disc with certain model PC CD-ROM drives. You aren't sharing any new information here.
@@MrRobarino That was using specific firmware which can allow specific drives to read the HD track without further modification. The method I'm talking about is forcing a generic CD drive to read the track, by moving the laser sled zero-offset switch. Two completely different methods, as the second way involves physically modifying the drive, and can work on many models, not just the ones stated in the vid.
(the wiki article shown in the vid may have contained more info on that method, but the link wasn't included in the vid description at the time of posting, so I couldn't easily check it.)
I'm 19 turning 20 in March, I had a large spindle of CDs collecting dust, so I finally decided to buy a Dreamcast last spring due to the ease of copying. It's become one of my favorite consoles, and 1 Dreamcast grew to 5 Dreamcasts and MUCH more
@@Keepskatin My collection has REALLYYYY shot up since this post. I have almost the entire North American library of the REAL GD-Rom discs, I have limited edition dreamcasts and a demo kiosk console. WOW this comment takes me back to before I built it up
Funny that burned GD-ROM discs still can't be self booted. Of course finding blank GD-ROM discs and setting up a burner really isn't worth the time, but even now if you ever get a hold of a burned GD-ROM the only way to boot it up is using the System Disc 2. The System Disc 2 wasn't reversed either, so you have to track down a legitimate copy of that as well!
you couldn't buy gdroms.. they did that for that reason alone. no one had a gdrom burner.. GD ROMs weren't a viable option anyway but CD's were.. hence why that was the ultimate choice overall.. if people could buy gdroms and a burner.. probably would have been the price of a house.
I wouldn't mind seeing an entire series on this. Not just on how copy protection works and how it was defeated, but on how developers would detect things like mod chips and modify their games if one was installed.
Something you didn't mention - when I first bought my Dreamcast, I was told of the battery removal trick. If you remove the internal battery for the Dreamcast, as well as tie back the clip that detected the GD-Drive door opening, it allowed you to play multi-region or backup games. You would insert a legitimate disk, and the Dreamcast would read the files it needed to boot whilst at the same time asking for the current date/time. You then wait about 2 minutes for the disk drive to timeout and stop spinning the disk. Then you could open the drive door, change the disk to a different one, and then select continue on the data/time menu. Worked really well but I remember you needed to boot different original games depending on the backup you wanted to boot...which makes sense now that you've explained the ip.bin file containing data for the game :)
Piracy as a factor for the Dreamcast's demise is seen by some to be rather debatable as it could be argued that the PlayStation was plagued with pirate and bootleg releases yet that didn't kill the platform.
@Lassi Kinnunen Not to mention that Sega's previous business decisions undermined consumer confidence and made gamers leery about the company. Sony's announcement of the PS2 with its DVD playback capabilities was the final nail in the coffin.
@@BADSeCt0R2XP Sega bungled up with the Genesis addons and the Saturn. The 32X was kind of pointless as most of its games were merely slight facelifts of existing titles even though the hardware does have potential. The Saturn had a lot of flaws both on part of the hardware and how it was marketed. It was infamously rushed to counter the PS1 in the States, and its hardware was and still is a *nightmare* to develop for. That certainly accounted for why they were in dire straits at the time.
Not to mention the Wii which was extremely Easy to mod, no chip required and allow it to play downloaded games and rip a game to ROM and be able to then play it from the ROM making it easy to copy games you would rent.
One day, about 17 years ago, my Dreamcast stopped working. It started out first as the discs not playing games properly. Then, it just finally died. No power. Plugged in, power -- nothing. It shorted itself out. The fix is a new disc drive, which I've yet to acquire. But I still have my Dreamcast, which I believe is a first revision...I will never part ways with it!
@@BADSeCt0R2XP Fine? The scrambling was a good idea, but as MVG mentioned Sega screwed up by having it be the same every single time. Easily reversible encryption is about as useless as no encryption at all. It isn't a matter of "giving you the keys", they chose to use a flimsy Master lock that can be easily defeated once you see what is going on.
Great video my dude!!! I forgot about how they circumvented the copy protection. It always amazes me that people discover ways to do these things! I gotta dig out my DC and fix the first controller port.
dude... when you put that verbatim disc in the dreamcast i lost it. im literally sitting here with my dreamcast and a stack of verbatim discs that i've been burning homebrew on
I remember finding out about 12 years ago that Dreamcast could play backup discs with no mods, i went to the market and bought one immediately to see what i'd missed out on. Disc juggler to burn the games, good times
I also had always heard that the Dreamcast simply had no copy protection, and that always sounded odd to me, but I never knew enough about what was going on behind the scenes to be able to do anything other than take the claim at face value. Thank you for making this video to add some clarity to what had been bugging me for these many years. By the way, did someone manage to break the security for that version 2 of the Dreamcast? I remember when I was looking to buy one I had to find a specific version or else most burned copies of the game wouldn't work on it. When I found mine though, it actually didn't have ANY such number printed on its sticker. Turns out I got a demo kiosk unit instead of a regular commercial unit. I really want to know the story of how it got to me, but sadly the person I bought it from doesn't know where it came from originally.
Awesome video, can’t wait for the follow up, Xbox and DC scene is also very close to my heart, Kalisto with the first self-bootable rips, Echelon taking over, using DiscJuggler to burn, those were the days, I remember making a ripkit for The Warriors on Xbox that would automatically resize the game for you to fit depending on if you wanted, SD video or HD standard or widescreen, oh those were the days, keep up the good work MVG and I can’t wait for the next video
v2 can read CDR. Only the US region got the v2.1 BIOS that removed Mil-CD. All PAL and JP region systems could boot CDR copies. We dumped the Non Mil-CD capable systems BIOS which just had a modified Kabuto. only JP made NTSC-U Dreamcast made after October 2000 were subjectable to this. Chinese made systems didn't have this and only way to know for sure was to dump the bios in parallel or simply look on the DC main board to see the 2.1 revision. My main DC was a v2 system that loads CDR just fine. The info you have is a common misconception but my time in the early days of the DC and work with Trurip, TOSEC as well as the DCCM and ReviceDC projects have debunked this a long time ago.
Ah man I hope you can get your collection back. I just got a GDEMU and 128gb SD card for it for my Dreamcast, and am building a DreamPi so I can take it online over modern internet. Really back on a Dreamcast kick like never before.
Fun fact. I was good buddies with some guys at a Japanese game company that were doing a relatively high-profile DC release back in 99 (2000?). The Utopia disc had just hit and piracy was blowing up, and they were freaking out. We came to the conclusion that the only way to keep the game from getting ripped 0-day was to interleave the game data on the disc with junk data and artificially inflate its size to the max capacity of the GD-ROM, and the lead coder said he'd try it. I THINK this worked, because the main DC warez group had "refused" to release it on day one, saying "You guys don't deserve it because you take us for granted" or something along those lines. (Of course, they wound up getting around it a week or two later, as expected.)
What you don't hear is the firmware on the gd rom drive originally contained the master key for games and earlier games where easy to bypass its model 2 and three revisions that stopped piracy quick
I love your videos about copy protection! One thing that I’d like to suggest is that you make a video ranking in your opinion what are the 10 hardest to defeat console copy protection schemes.
Excellent coverage. One thing I'd like to add is that some games had more than 700MB of data on the GDROM (video files mostly) and those couldn't be copied over straight; we had to RE the video format and come up with tools that could transcode the movie and audio files into smaller sizes. In extreme cases, 22KHz ADPCM stereo audio would be turned into mono. The quality suffered, but it worked. The only two games that were too big *and* had no movies/audio to transcode were D-2 and Skies of Arcadia (all cinematics were in-game, and the audio was mostly speech which was already 11KHz mono IIRC). In both cases, the data had to be split onto two CDROMs and instructions were given on when/where to swap discs. Kudos to the developers of those games!
I used to rip games for ReviveDC. D2 is a very curious one that we looked at a lot. The ADX decoder in that game is actually tied to the sample rate of the audio files in the game. Trying to reduce the size of the audio files results in scrambled audio. It's very bizarre and it's the only game (to my knowledge) that had a decoder that was hardcoded to the sample rate.
CDROM Sonic Adventure also had mono and resampled audio. And the music from Sky Deck part 2 was dropped too, i got to hear that song looong after, when owning an original copy haha
ARS DC was so far ahead of its time, especially in Japan where the mouse, broadband adapter, I believe a camera, and (if it was made, a vmu MP3 player. So D.C. Had nearly all widely used PC components (except internal storage). Keyboard, mouse, live audio chat, modem/broadband, web browser and (I've heard rumor of a basic but very functional "Office-type" word processor & spreadsheets), live video chat, web camera. I'm betting some found ways to use the expansion ports on the back to connect printers, and the ILLUSTRIOUS VGA box/cable to play 480p so sharp on a pic monitor. Dreamcast, aside from storage limits had most bells and whistles of a $3,500 pc at the time for $200. Buying all the options adds up some, but not late 90's/early 2k's absurd prices. also had online multi-player. And my favorite: lots of killer games and arcade ports you could play by just pressing "power"- no crazy conflicts and patches and incompatibility that was so sloppy on pc- like physical jumpers, that made me spend days trying to get one crappy pc RPG to work with hours of tech support. Screw that noise: inert disc, press power, and it worked.
@@sideswipe1261 The VGA box was amazing! I had a Gateway VX1120 CRT monitor that was a huge (back then) 22". Shenmue and Shenmue 2 looked absolutely amazing on it.
@@HerecomestheCalavera I still think it's stupid that america didn't want to use SCART for it's media back in the day... RGB (vga) directly from the dreamcast onto your television... no box needed, just the right cable (advanced Scart cable), same for the xbox, 480p60 standard on PalPlus televisions ... (and 576P60 on the xbox)
Basically you wanna look for the Sega enterprises label when they dropped support for mil CD they changed it to Sega corporation I believe. Ive had a number two Dreamcast be able to play back ups and one with a number two that couldn't. If your dream cast is made before November 2000 with a number two I believe that you can play back ups hope this helped . There's an interesting article where I read all of this I'll try to link it tomorrow sometime. Love your videos man!!!! Keep it up!!
Hey, been watching your videos here and there for a while now. They're really great, I appreciate your enthusiasm and the production is good and your voice is nice to listen to. Thanks for making them!
7:09 From what I gather, there was no unscrambler. I think the hackers just scrambled it in such a way that the scrambler would actually fix it. To make this concept easier to understand, let's use the Caesar cipher for comparison with a key of 1. A becomes B, B becomes C, and so on. Let's say the word needed is "HI". That would become "IJ" and therefore invalid. Instead, you could input "GH" which becomes "HI", which _is_ valid.
AztecCroc fair enough, however one could just say the Sega Genesis is a game console that had a peripheral allowing it to play disk based games. That would still make it sega's first.
I remember when I first found out that you can use GameShark on dreamcast to play Japanese Region games. Then I heard you can use the Space Channel 5 game to bypass the protection. Then finally the Utopia disc came out, and then lastly using Discjuggler to burn the games that came pre-loaded with the protection bypass to a point where you just put in the CD-R game and play it with no issues. I also remember playing Half life on the dreamcast.
Fantastic video MVG! I just recently got a Dreamcast for Christmas and I’ve been playing it more then my current gen consoles. The library is just that clean! Question for you though: I noticed you mentioned the SD reader on Dreamcast and as someone new to the whole Dreamcast scene, it’s the first time I’ve heard of it. Where did you get yours and/or are there any plans to cover it in a upcoming video? Love the channel and keep up the good work!
When I read this title I said to myself, "What copy protection?" lol back in the day i remember dreamcast games being easier to copy and play than ps1 games and those were easy as well
Don't forget that SEGA distributed action replay demo disc on their magazines, but that demo disc can boot backup copy of dreamcast games because dreamcast only authenticate demo disc boot process but game that boot from the demo disc itself wasn't checked.
Thanks for posting this. I was always intrigued by the GD copy protection back in the day and reading the release notes from groups. This is kind of random, but there was a note by Echelon on the release of Razor Freestyle Scooter that says: "Protection on this game was a bitch, especially considering it is only $19.99." I copied that out of the original .nfo, but I'm curious if you know what (if any) software tricks developers used as an additional attempt at copy protection? I remember also reading about dummy tracks, but the explanations as to how exactly they worked were vague. Perhaps you could add some info on GD software protection in an upcoming video. Just throwing it out there - anyways, keep up the good work :)
01:30... brings back memories. As kids, we had a Commodore 64 monitor for our NES/SNES. Years later after I got married, I found one and used it for my Saturn, DC, N64, and whatever else I had before it died. Small ass screen, but some of the most vibrant colors I've ever seen from standard AV cables.
So good to see this, I know MANY people assumed it had crap or little to know protection. I still run into people in forums and groups that think you can just copy an original retail game they own on a standard PC optical drive. Knowing the history I was always informing them that even the games they find online now and burn to standard CD-r, they can only do this because those archives of Dreamcast game ISO's were made available because all the work was already done by warez scene groups that already cracked the original through specific means and uploaded them for anyone to use, simply put, they did all the work already for us. Bless their little pirating hearts😆 Yes, it hurt Sega and the Dreamcast but not nearly as much as many think, their past history (releasing the Saturn too soon, the 32x / SegaCD ) and broken bridges with developers (Not having EA on board hurt them more than they or fans cared to admit) as well constant struggles between the wishes of Sega USA / Sega Japan. Lastly, even though it was a pretty big hit when it debuted they were already hurting financially, too many potential consumers held back in anticipation of Sony's much hyped PS2, and once that released....with the addition of DVD capabilities, well...the rest was history. It really would have been nice to get a couple additional years out of Dreamcast, it still has some of the best arcade ports, some really quirky titles and was only just reaching it's potential when Sega abandoned it. :p
"It's funny because one of the main cause of Dreamcast's copy protection breach was because some Action Replay demo disc" YES this is what i heard , i bought the magazine that the Action Replay came on , it allowed any backups to boot , as i heard the Action Replay demo ( free disc ) with mag had the boot codes on it unprotected
Awesome video, I've known a little bit about the copy protection on the Dreamcast since the early 2000's but this video actually showed me some new stuff. Keep up the good work MVG!
My understanding was the key to this process being discovered when Gameshark(or other similar software) sent out a demo disk in a magazine. It allowed you to boot and play burn disks. This was the first crack in the armor.
Could you please do a video on PlayStation 2 copy protection. As well as softmods that don't require the harddrive adapter Would be much appreciated! THX 👌
@@yoshi314 he did it on the original PlayStation, not PS2 which is way more secure.. and yet not because of external media booting. But hey you cant play burned games by just burning a certain image from stock so they did one up on sega
I remember compiling and burning a few games on the Dreamcast shortly after getting my first PC and having no idea what I was doing, just learning how to navigate folders. It was that simple.
Gawd, I loved my Dreamcast, but a large reason for that was indeed that it was 'open', so I could discover and play many different games. Here in Holland, the Dreamcast and its games were only officially sold in special gaming stores, which often were only in the larger cities, so for many gamers, including me, piracy was actually the only way to even get our hands on these games (this was in the still early days of the internet, so web-shopping was rare).
I absolutely love these video's. I don't have any game consoles, only had the Master System when I was very young. I never play games on a console, I'm not much of a gamer even. But I trully love your videos about it. It's great to hear someone with the amount of knowledge you have talking about these things. While keeping it all comprehensive for everyone too. Great work. I can only dream of making such good video's. I review SBC's. But I've got sooo much more to learn, and even if I can learn it, it will never have your standards. Thank you for all the great content, greetings. NicoD
Really enjoying these copy protection videos you're doing. They make me want to get one of each of the consoles and mod /exploit them for the sake of it. Great work!
The first track wasn't always audio, sometimes it was a data track. Usually the data track just contained a few text files with copyright info, but sometimes they contained extras intended for PC users like wallpapers, screensavers, or other such apps. I remember a demo disk with some puzzle game containing a PC version of said game on that data track. Also, I don't think there is the full story of how the coy protection was defeated. I recall that one of the first was actually a demo disk for a Dreamcast Gameshark of all things, they found that the Gameshark demo disk unintentionally somehow let you boot any CD, not just a GD-ROM. They were pulled from shelves and when the full version of Gameshark came out it didn't have this "feature".... but people were able to look into it to see how it was done. Later copies I believes silently put the feature back after it was everywhere. But that's not also the end of it. From what I remember, you didn't even need to mess with the 1st_boot file at all. The Utopia CD was a first step, but people ultimately found a way to make a disk self-booting... and it didn't require messing with the 1st_boot at all. I remember seeing it in depth multiple times, but it's been two decades. I recall that it required writing an audio track that was at least 4 seconds long as the first track, but don't remember any other details. It didn't involve messing with 1st_boot at all though. Also, it was rare for a Dreamcast game to be too large to fit on a CD, and thus require compressing the audio/video data further/removing data/or splitting the game across two disks. The vast majority of Dreamcast games were smaller than the size of a CD-R, so there were no modifications needed.
If a dev kit has a memory viewer, deciphering a scrambler is only a few RAM dumps away. To be fair, it was much more sophisticated than the BCA of the Saturn discs...
But took a lot longer to get a mod that worked around the "fortress" of a cd drive controller. My favourite is the mega cd which has no copy protection at all.
Saturn was better. Sophia ran Checksums and Lockjacking. Dreamcast used GD-ROM. GD ROM is basically HC CD ROM with all TOC packed on one layer. Dreamcast Copy Protection was all Software in the Whitebook of GDROM itself.
I'd love you to cover the Sega Saturn. That is in my opinion the most complex console to mod and no softmod was ever developed (although the PS2 was incredibly difficult to work in and mod, the messiah modchip was the first mainstream chip - launching a year after the PS2, and it worked virtually perfect - the PS2 was eventually softmoded in all its variants.)
i love dreamcast i remember that time i was play crazy taxi i play tesident evil code veronica soul calibur 18 wheeler that was fun time now i'm old nuh...😣 well awesome video anyway peace
Omg. I remember using Mirc to download rar files, unpack and burn them to a CD, and popping it into the Dreamcast and be playing right away! It's been about 20 years ago, but I still have fond memories of Mirc and how to list files a d "get" files from others. This was probably year 2000 when my roommate had dialup. I had no computer at the time and convinced him to upgrade to this new "high speed internet"! I had to call at&t and get a pci card high speed modem. Geez, I remember just sitting there watching the files download bc 128 kBps was mind blowing to me! I'd sit there and watch the progress bar thinking "the internet can't get any faster than this at home!" Without that experience, I would have never played power stone, and part 2. Power stone 2 was awesome!
This video made me go to Giant Bombcast again to relisten to that part about their experience with the demise of the dreamcast, which in turn made me come BACK to this video.
Nice vid! ps: there's no one better than you mr. MVG to bring us a series of "games locked on a single platform" and how to play 'em in 2019. CXBX emulation, x360, ps3 and wiiu are getting better and better. Would be kickass to see how these perform (properly played, controllers and all) versus original hardware. You're the man up to this task, mvg!
Great video, not a lot of people would know this stuff, if they where not in the scene. :) I remember buying Chiller by Mastertronic for the Commodore 64, I tried to make a backup for a friend of mine and the backup wouldn't load, I used a sector editing program and figured out that on the 5 1/4" diskette there was a sector error that caused the head of the drive to jump to another sector and continue to load the game. So all I had to do was make a duplicate of the game and then recreate the sector error on the backup version and voila it loaded just fine, and no internet back then to lookup this stuff :)
"Security 101, don't make any kind of encryption reversible"... really? That kind of defeats the usefulness of encryption. Perhaps you were talking about hashing? Perhaps you need to take a security 101 course.
Usually your channel is of the upmost quality but this video has been quite disappointing. First of all you don't talk about the GD-ROM copy protection (something I bet is wobble coded in the Sega ring, but I'm not sure, the GDEMU guy surely knows), only the Mil-CD ridiculously simple one. Then what you say about it is also incorrect, as it is just a simple scrambling of the executable so it doesn't pass the checksums. A CD-R copy of a Mil-CD would still boot, that's why Bleemcast! implemented their own copy protection. You were near but no. And finally reading GD-ROM using a custom firmware in a Plextor? No, you don't need a custom firmware, neither a Plextor, you're just following the recommended guidelines from the Redump project that recommend a Plextor because they can read data sectors as audio (that is scrambled) and they see some advantages to that. A lot of drives (even in their guide you screenshoot they show TSST ones) can read it using a simple disc swap (aka trap disc) that makes the drive's firmware believe the disc goes up to 120min (and the drives that fail is mostly because the Yellow Book never specified what happens when you go farther than 99min 59sec 74frm, so some drives do not understand what the subchannel, and sector headers, of the GD-ROM, have stored there). And this is something I know because I have created a dumping software and I've been collaborating with the Redump and VGPC projects for a long time. I hope when you do the GameCube/Wii copy protection videos you don't say "it spins in reverse direction", but do your homework there.
Which means this video obviously wasn't made for you. By no means am I advanced with this knowledge, but I knew some of the info was slightly off. But going to your level of detail & explanation would lose more than 90% of the people viewing the video.
thanks for your feedback. I do read most comments and i do agree some more research could have been done. But i think the overarching topic was covered. This video isnt necessarily about dumping gd-roms with Plextor drives. but having said that I always want to do better so i do appreciate the feedback. thank you
@@ModernVintageGamer and that is what disappointed me. Because your videos are always quality and well informed, specially when talking about SDKs and porting software. Whenever you need information about physical storage format characteristics, copy protections, or preservation of software, you can drop by the Video Game Preservation Collective discord server, or to my IRC channel, where me, the Redump team, or all the collaborators there, would be happy to help.
Also just been told of this patent: patents.google.com/patent/EP0935242A1/ that apparently describes the GD-ROM. So TL;DR if this patent is exactly what they did, the GD-ROM contains two copy protections: Hidden data in both TOCs and data position measurement in the non-readable logo area.
9:19 Not necessarily 100%, as I have a revision 2, which boots backups. Ironically, I have a rev 0, and a rev 2 Dreamcast, and not a rev 1, meaning I can't use gdrom emulators atm, unfortunately. Nice vid as usual though. Was a nice watch.
@@sabata414 If you have a NTSC:U/C or PAL console, then look for a number in a circle on the label - that's the revision. If you have a NTSC:J console, you have to take it apart.
Utopia was sent a dev kit by accident and it had a bootcd that allowed dev's to boot any code with any dreamcast,Utopia just added the raindear like most crack intro's
the disc you're referring to that came with devkits is a SYSTEM DISC 2, but that is not at all like the utopia boot disc and is not how the utopia disc was made. You can see that the Utopia disc uses the exact same little endian/big endian binary obfuscation trick on the disc that the GameShark/Action Replay discs used, because they jacked code from that.
Great video as always.. just wanted to point out, some early model 2 Dreamcasts still support MIL-CD. I used to have one, and seem to remember units released before Nov 2000 being compatible.
good lawd.... the 4K video is so sharp that looking at your beard I see all of the shimmering of the little speckles of your stubble .... bwahahahaha if this is how the future looks, I don't want it. lolololololol jk jk jk
> Use a proprietary disc format to prevent piracy
> Enable a backdoor because karaoke
dumb phoneposter
@@Koseiku ???
Doesnt just develop a Karaoke GD-ROM
Deoxal 4chan terminology.
You know... it's just Japan and its unconditionnal love for Karaoke. That's the weakness.
I admire anyone who has the patience to transfer 1GB of data over a serial connection
Yeah like damn, that's dedication to "preservation"
@WolframaticAlpha Yeah, it is but as we know, USB technology is always improving in terms of data transfer speed.
@WolframaticAlpha Wow, thats very interesting, are there pics of it in google? i may try to find it.
Usb is not a serial or a bus. No fucking clue why it's called universal serial hus
But you only have to do it once
I will say, Sega NAILED the at home arcade experience with the Dreamcast. Hands down my favorite optical drive console from my childhood.
Aah the memories of "Definitely not selling backups of the games on the school yard to pay for the console itself"
I used to do that but with PC games back in 1999 also. I got a Creative 2x CD burner for my birthday. First game I sold was a copy of Sim City 3000. The games were all rented for maximum profit. I had a library of games, software and audio cds. The kids would choose whatever they want and I would bring the copy on the next day. Teachers had absolutely no idea what that was all about. A full blown black market of pirated software LOL I had a really good pc back then I bought with all that dirty cash lol Good times!
@@fullmetaljacket7 Did you have trench coat?
Deoxal would have been really useful
@@deoxal7947 If drug wars taught me anything, it's to have a trench coat with 12,500 pockets.
Sega used one of the most effective copy protectios: by using a physical medium, that cannot be cheaply read and written.
And them, they included a version of a media, the could be cheaply read and written, and this become their fall.
well no because MIL-CD meant you could use regular CDs lmao. now the Saturn...the Saturn took _decades_ to crack the protection of
Damn its crazy people take time out of day to crack codes on video game consoles. How do they learn how to hack?
Very happy to hear that you will be covering copy protection. i've always been curious about how it works on different systems!
The best part about copy protection is the fun we all used to have defeating it! 😉
I'd like to know about this, especially considering emulation of disc based systems. You see, I'd just assume that the emulator of a disc based console would be able to read discs intended for the console it's emulating, but I do know that Dolphin (Gamecube and Wii) only works with ISOs and I'm not sure about other emnulators eg RPCS3 (PS3)
So I'm guessing that copy protection is something emulator authors have to get past not only on ISOs but also on the discs themselves.
LambdaCalculus379 I can bet any amount of money you had no part in any copy protection hacking 😂🖕
@@LambdaCalculus379 That saturn was a bitch....
Checking in one year later, he’s made some absolutely amazing videos on it!
I loved the Dreamcast. I will never forget the day I was browsing the contents of the Quake 3 Arena game and found it was using an irc client for chat and edited the config to make it connect to my Quake 3 clan channel. fun times.
The good old days, when everything wasn't 100% gatekeeper'd by companies.
@@datriaxsondor590 That's the best part
@@JitSlayer true
Utopia supposedly reverse-engineered Datel’s Action Replay CDX demo disc from DC-UK Magazine to figure out how Datel was able to boot their CD-based cheat disc. Datel had more R&D and could actually pay professionals to break protections. Heck, they owned their own media pressing plant too (Thin Ice Media), which is how they got around protection for the PSX. They went around Nintendo and paid Panasonic/Matsushita for the tech they needed to make bootable GameCube discs too.
That said, I suspect that the Utopia members responsible for the DC boot disc were probably Datel employees/contractors. ;)
Some good points here.
AfterBurnerTeirusu One would expect them to have access to the dev kit, or at least the software tools, since they had to do more coding. That was the easy part. There’s also a video from the about the hack resulting from a reverse engineered Action Replay CDX demo disc from one of Datel’s former partners (Larry Bundy Jr; 5 Hilariously Idiotic Gaming Screw Ups). Still, I’m interested in this other article.
The N64 devkit software was so prevalent at the time that they had to explicitly ban it from coding competitions like POM’99. The DC scene wasn‘t so different.
AfterBurnerTeirusu Yeah, it’s very possible that Datel paid a German group for an exploit they developed entirely on their own, but the AR CDX did predate Utopia Boot Disc. I recall a Datel rep on some of the scene’s IRC channels soliciting Game Boy coders for one of their projects (a programmable multicart that needed some legit content to justify its existence). They’ve definitely been known to reach out. ;)
What ever happened to the people that made the Playstation emulater called Bleem. Those guys reverse engineered the PlayStation so they could get their emulator running without breaking any copyright laws. Sony tried to sue the guys at Bleem but lost. Sony even went as far as to get someone to break into the Bleem office and try to recover sales figures on the emulator. Then came the Bleemcast to stick it to Sony. I wonder how it felt for Sony at the time, watching their games running and looking nicer on the competitions hardware.
@@BoomBox02 You might be mixing some of that up with Sony v. Connectix (Virtual Game Station) but, yeah, Sony sued both.
Connectix demonstrated VGS to Sony in an attempt to get them on-board but Sony didn't want any part of it. At that point they were using Sony's BIOS. Sony's refusal sent them back into development to make a functional BIOS substitute that didn't break any copyright laws. Of course, Sony still sued in an attempt to set a precedent and make all similar emulation illegal on the basis that it infringes on IP related to the rest of the platform's technical specifics. Luckily, Connectix wasn't such a small company (makers of VMWare) so they were able to defend themselves. When Sony sued Bleem! it was for "Unfair competition" and the use of screenshots to market it (deemed "Fair Use" by the courts). Imagine if Sony had partnered with Connectix instead and attacked the makers of Bleem! with that earlier lawsuit instead, which would have set a bad precedent for all of emulation. D:
You can actually read the "High Density" part of the GD disks in certain standard PC CD drives.
It involves burning a CD-R first, which contains the same type of TOC info that is typical for a Dreamcast disk.
You then load the CD-R, let the drive read the TOC, then do a disk swap.
Some CD-ROM drives have a wide enough tolerance for the spindle motor speed to allow the disk to spin slow enough, and the "HD" track to be dumped.
The trick sometimes involved setting the laser sled switch after the disk swap so that the laser will start reading the HD track first.
This can definitely be done, as I did it myself many years ago. The HD track really is just a standard ISO9660 track, just burned at a faster rate.
(and the GD drives have custom firmware to read the second TOC, and access the HD track.) ;)
Do you have the other SDK docs, with the "Sega Packet Interface" PDF?
There's also the System Architecture PDF, which I refer to as the "Dreamcast Programming Bible". Not that I'm very good at that side of it. lol
The closest I got to coding anything for the Dreamcast is when I did the first ever tests of an IDE HDD as a Slave device on the G1 bus (alongside the GD drive).
I modified the KOS examples to access the data on the HDD (or CF card), and print the sectors as hex.
I then designed a simple passive adapter, sent a few to Mr SWAT, who then added support for IDE devices in Dreamshell.
And so, the G1-ATA and IDE mods were born. ;)
You could disc swap to rip Xbox 360 games in img burn too. Or you needed a kreon drive
Did you even finish watching the video? He clearly stated in the video that you can read GD-ROM disc with certain model PC CD-ROM drives. You aren't sharing any new information here.
@@MrRobarino
That was using specific firmware which can allow specific drives to read the HD track without further modification.
The method I'm talking about is forcing a generic CD drive to read the track, by moving the laser sled zero-offset switch.
Two completely different methods, as the second way involves physically modifying the drive, and can work on many models, not just the ones stated in the vid.
(the wiki article shown in the vid may have contained more info on that method, but the link wasn't included in the vid description at the time of posting, so I couldn't easily check it.)
I'm 19 turning 20 in March, I had a large spindle of CDs collecting dust, so I finally decided to buy a Dreamcast last spring due to the ease of copying. It's become one of my favorite consoles, and 1 Dreamcast grew to 5 Dreamcasts and MUCH more
I have 3 Dreamcast in public storage
@@Keepskatin My collection has REALLYYYY shot up since this post. I have almost the entire North American library of the REAL GD-Rom discs, I have limited edition dreamcasts and a demo kiosk console. WOW this comment takes me back to before I built it up
@@jk-474yoo that's so cool!!
@@KeepskatinI don't get it what do you use >1 Dreamcast for?
@@ThatPianoNoob Spare parts and backup hardware
Funny that burned GD-ROM discs still can't be self booted. Of course finding blank GD-ROM discs and setting up a burner really isn't worth the time, but even now if you ever get a hold of a burned GD-ROM the only way to boot it up is using the System Disc 2. The System Disc 2 wasn't reversed either, so you have to track down a legitimate copy of that as well!
You can swap a retail gd-rom for a burned gd-rom or a gdr and if you get the timing right it will boot
@@MrXiandra Gotta Love Them Hot-Swaps!
I had self booting back ups later on in the dreamcasts life about a year after the boot disc appeared
@@carlopepi sorry for confusion, the above is referencing gd-roms not CD-Rs
you couldn't buy gdroms.. they did that for that reason alone. no one had a gdrom burner..
GD ROMs weren't a viable option anyway but CD's were.. hence why that was the ultimate choice overall..
if people could buy gdroms and a burner.. probably would have been the price of a house.
That "Warning..." message when you put a Dreamcast disc in a CD player was SUCH a hit of nostalgia!!!
I wouldn't mind seeing an entire series on this. Not just on how copy protection works and how it was defeated, but on how developers would detect things like mod chips and modify their games if one was installed.
Something you didn't mention - when I first bought my Dreamcast, I was told of the battery removal trick. If you remove the internal battery for the Dreamcast, as well as tie back the clip that detected the GD-Drive door opening, it allowed you to play multi-region or backup games. You would insert a legitimate disk, and the Dreamcast would read the files it needed to boot whilst at the same time asking for the current date/time. You then wait about 2 minutes for the disk drive to timeout and stop spinning the disk. Then you could open the drive door, change the disk to a different one, and then select continue on the data/time menu. Worked really well but I remember you needed to boot different original games depending on the backup you wanted to boot...which makes sense now that you've explained the ip.bin file containing data for the game :)
Piracy as a factor for the Dreamcast's demise is seen by some to be rather debatable as it could be argued that the PlayStation was plagued with pirate and bootleg releases yet that didn't kill the platform.
Annie Warbucks it was sega making way for Microsoft I believe. Sega was running out of money at the time where Microsoft was not.
@Lassi Kinnunen Not to mention that Sega's previous business decisions undermined consumer confidence and made gamers leery about the company. Sony's announcement of the PS2 with its DVD playback capabilities was the final nail in the coffin.
@@BADSeCt0R2XP Sega bungled up with the Genesis addons and the Saturn. The 32X was kind of pointless as most of its games were merely slight facelifts of existing titles even though the hardware does have potential. The Saturn had a lot of flaws both on part of the hardware and how it was marketed. It was infamously rushed to counter the PS1 in the States, and its hardware was and still is a *nightmare* to develop for. That certainly accounted for why they were in dire straits at the time.
The UK TV advert i saw was obscure as not to explain it was a console advert
Not to mention the Wii which was extremely Easy to mod, no chip required and allow it to play downloaded games and rip a game to ROM and be able to then play it from the ROM making it easy to copy games you would rent.
"How did the Dreamcast Copy Protection worked?" "It didn't"
One day, about 17 years ago, my Dreamcast stopped working. It started out first as the discs not playing games properly. Then, it just finally died. No power. Plugged in, power -- nothing. It shorted itself out.
The fix is a new disc drive, which I've yet to acquire. But I still have my Dreamcast, which I believe is a first revision...I will never part ways with it!
Dreamcast copy protection, was about as effective as using a twist tie to Lock your bicycle up in the middle of Brooklyn!
They left the bike lock at home
Aaron Greenfield Dreamcast copy protection was fine. If someone gives you the keys to unlock something is not necessarily the locker at fault.
@@BADSeCt0R2XPDreamcast fanboys are the most closed minded of all system fanboys.
the GDs were safe, for many years no one was able to crack them, but the mild-cd support killed the dreamcast, who the fuck thought of that?
@@BADSeCt0R2XP Fine? The scrambling was a good idea, but as MVG mentioned Sega screwed up by having it be the same every single time.
Easily reversible encryption is about as useless as no encryption at all. It isn't a matter of "giving you the keys", they chose to use a flimsy Master lock that can be easily defeated once you see what is going on.
Great video my dude!!! I forgot about how they circumvented the copy protection. It always amazes me that people discover ways to do these things! I gotta dig out my DC and fix the first controller port.
“This disk for use only on secs Dreamcast” my favorite album, listen to it daily. It’s really good, that voiceover... perfection
dude... when you put that verbatim disc in the dreamcast i lost it. im literally sitting here with my dreamcast and a stack of verbatim discs that i've been burning homebrew on
I have to admit I went into this thinking it had zero copy protection! The speed in which I saw copies available was incredible back then.
I remember finding out about 12 years ago that Dreamcast could play backup discs with no mods, i went to the market and bought one immediately to see what i'd missed out on. Disc juggler to burn the games, good times
"This is the copyright protection"
**Two Minutes Later**
"This is how it was broken"
I'm excited for the next video in this series.
I also had always heard that the Dreamcast simply had no copy protection, and that always sounded odd to me, but I never knew enough about what was going on behind the scenes to be able to do anything other than take the claim at face value. Thank you for making this video to add some clarity to what had been bugging me for these many years.
By the way, did someone manage to break the security for that version 2 of the Dreamcast?
I remember when I was looking to buy one I had to find a specific version or else most burned copies of the game wouldn't work on it. When I found mine though, it actually didn't have ANY such number printed on its sticker. Turns out I got a demo kiosk unit instead of a regular commercial unit. I really want to know the story of how it got to me, but sadly the person I bought it from doesn't know where it came from originally.
I've always wanted a Dreamcast unfortunately I only had a Polystation.
I feel sorry you didnt even get a Playstation, but a Polystation, whatever chinese ripoff that is :'-D
Did your ears bleed?
Is that like, multiple Playstations combined??
@@davecarsley8773 it's a fake ps1 with a gun as the controller lol
Yeah u should do a copy protection series.
Awesome video, can’t wait for the follow up, Xbox and DC scene is also very close to my heart, Kalisto with the first self-bootable rips, Echelon taking over, using DiscJuggler to burn, those were the days, I remember making a ripkit for The Warriors on Xbox that would automatically resize the game for you to fit depending on if you wanted, SD video or HD standard or widescreen, oh those were the days, keep up the good work MVG and I can’t wait for the next video
v2 can read CDR. Only the US region got the v2.1 BIOS that removed Mil-CD. All PAL and JP region systems could boot CDR copies. We dumped the Non Mil-CD capable systems BIOS which just had a modified Kabuto. only JP made NTSC-U Dreamcast made after October 2000 were subjectable to this. Chinese made systems didn't have this and only way to know for sure was to dump the bios in parallel or simply look on the DC main board to see the 2.1 revision. My main DC was a v2 system that loads CDR just fine. The info you have is a common misconception but my time in the early days of the DC and work with Trurip, TOSEC as well as the DCCM and ReviceDC projects have debunked this a long time ago.
Well let me guess, this is my old pal Atreyu187? So we meet again!
BFKAnthony817 that would be me hehe hey Anthony817
Hah I knew it! Nothing much man, same old same old. Where have you been not seen you in the DC community much, and only once on that PS3 subreddit.
BFKAnthony817 NM I don't have any systems ATM due to some stuff so I just lurk and help.
Ah man I hope you can get your collection back. I just got a GDEMU and 128gb SD card for it for my Dreamcast, and am building a DreamPi so I can take it online over modern internet. Really back on a Dreamcast kick like never before.
Fun fact. I was good buddies with some guys at a Japanese game company that were doing a relatively high-profile DC release back in 99 (2000?). The Utopia disc had just hit and piracy was blowing up, and they were freaking out. We came to the conclusion that the only way to keep the game from getting ripped 0-day was to interleave the game data on the disc with junk data and artificially inflate its size to the max capacity of the GD-ROM, and the lead coder said he'd try it. I THINK this worked, because the main DC warez group had "refused" to release it on day one, saying "You guys don't deserve it because you take us for granted" or something along those lines. (Of course, they wound up getting around it a week or two later, as expected.)
What you don't hear is the firmware on the gd rom drive originally contained the master key for games and earlier games where easy to bypass its model 2 and three revisions that stopped piracy quick
I love your videos about copy protection! One thing that I’d like to suggest is that you make a video ranking in your opinion what are the 10 hardest to defeat console copy protection schemes.
good suggestion! i may look into that for a future vid. thanks :)
I always thought that the Dreamcast's copy protection was bad. This video showed me otherwise.
i personally thought it was non-existant, now I know for a fact it was bad.
Excellent coverage. One thing I'd like to add is that some games had more than 700MB of data on the GDROM (video files mostly) and those couldn't be copied over straight; we had to RE the video format and come up with tools that could transcode the movie and audio files into smaller sizes. In extreme cases, 22KHz ADPCM stereo audio would be turned into mono. The quality suffered, but it worked. The only two games that were too big *and* had no movies/audio to transcode were D-2 and Skies of Arcadia (all cinematics were in-game, and the audio was mostly speech which was already 11KHz mono IIRC). In both cases, the data had to be split onto two CDROMs and instructions were given on when/where to swap discs. Kudos to the developers of those games!
I used to rip games for ReviveDC. D2 is a very curious one that we looked at a lot. The ADX decoder in that game is actually tied to the sample rate of the audio files in the game. Trying to reduce the size of the audio files results in scrambled audio. It's very bizarre and it's the only game (to my knowledge) that had a decoder that was hardcoded to the sample rate.
@@ComradeJared Nice, what was your handle back then?
comradesnarky
CDROM Sonic Adventure also had mono and resampled audio. And the music from Sky Deck part 2 was dropped too, i got to hear that song looong after, when owning an original copy haha
Great video mate, you're killing it!!
when the dreamcast supports mice but the iPad Pro doesn't
ARS DC was so far ahead of its time, especially in Japan where the mouse, broadband adapter, I believe a camera, and (if it was made, a vmu MP3 player. So D.C. Had nearly all widely used PC components (except internal storage). Keyboard, mouse, live audio chat, modem/broadband, web browser and (I've heard rumor of a basic but very functional "Office-type" word processor & spreadsheets), live video chat, web camera. I'm betting some found ways to use the expansion ports on the back to connect printers, and the ILLUSTRIOUS VGA box/cable to play 480p so sharp on a pic monitor. Dreamcast, aside from storage limits had most bells and whistles of a $3,500 pc at the time for $200. Buying all the options adds up some, but not late 90's/early 2k's absurd prices. also had online multi-player. And my favorite: lots of killer games and arcade ports you could play by just pressing "power"- no crazy conflicts and patches and incompatibility that was so sloppy on pc- like physical jumpers, that made me spend days trying to get one crappy pc RPG to work with hours of tech support. Screw that noise: inert disc, press power, and it worked.
@@sideswipe1261 The VGA box was amazing! I had a Gateway VX1120 CRT monitor that was a huge (back then) 22". Shenmue and Shenmue 2 looked absolutely amazing on it.
@@HerecomestheCalavera I still think it's stupid that america didn't want to use SCART for it's media back in the day... RGB (vga) directly from the dreamcast onto your television... no box needed, just the right cable (advanced Scart cable), same for the xbox, 480p60 standard on PalPlus televisions ... (and 576P60 on the xbox)
@@BoGy1980 there were actually a couple NTSC TVs with scart, not many though, i know because I owned one
Even the N64 was capable of using a mouse. They even developed one specifically for it!
Basically you wanna look for the Sega enterprises label when they dropped support for mil CD they changed it to Sega corporation I believe. Ive had a number two Dreamcast be able to play back ups and one with a number two that couldn't. If your dream cast is made before November 2000 with a number two I believe that you can play back ups hope this helped . There's an interesting article where I read all of this I'll try to link it tomorrow sometime. Love your videos man!!!! Keep it up!!
Hey, been watching your videos here and there for a while now. They're really great, I appreciate your enthusiasm and the production is good and your voice is nice to listen to. Thanks for making them!
That sweet Max Payne 2 soundtrack at 6:27 tho.
You have ears of a bat, mate. Good catch. I caught it at 7:03
7:09 From what I gather, there was no unscrambler. I think the hackers just scrambled it in such a way that the scrambler would actually fix it.
To make this concept easier to understand, let's use the Caesar cipher for comparison with a key of 1. A becomes B, B becomes C, and so on.
Let's say the word needed is "HI". That would become "IJ" and therefore invalid. Instead, you could input "GH" which becomes "HI", which _is_ valid.
1:32 - 2nd Console?
1 - Mega CD (Sega CD in US)
2 - Saturn
3 - Dreamcast
The Sega CD was a peripheral, not a console.
AztecCroc fair enough, however one could just say the Sega Genesis is a game console that had a peripheral allowing it to play disk based games. That would still make it sega's first.
@@AztecCroc How's about Sega Wondermega, then? The HWM-5010 from Sega, not the Victor's variants. And the MultiMega/CDX ones?
It's an add on
Wondermega isn't addon, MultiMega isn't addon, either.
I remember when I first found out that you can use GameShark on dreamcast to play Japanese Region games. Then I heard you can use the Space Channel 5 game to bypass the protection. Then finally the Utopia disc came out, and then lastly using Discjuggler to burn the games that came pre-loaded with the protection bypass to a point where you just put in the CD-R game and play it with no issues. I also remember playing Half life on the dreamcast.
Wow, I didn't know about ripping GD-ROM discs. Yay, once I get a GDEMU console, imma get all those fully ripped dreamcast images!
Fantastic video MVG! I just recently got a Dreamcast for Christmas and I’ve been playing it more then my current gen consoles. The library is just that clean!
Question for you though: I noticed you mentioned the SD reader on Dreamcast and as someone new to the whole Dreamcast scene, it’s the first time I’ve heard of it. Where did you get yours and/or are there any plans to cover it in a upcoming video?
Love the channel and keep up the good work!
When I read this title I said to myself, "What copy protection?" lol back in the day i remember dreamcast games being easier to copy and play than ps1 games and those were easy as well
Don't forget that SEGA distributed action replay demo disc on their magazines, but that demo disc can boot backup copy of dreamcast games because dreamcast only authenticate demo disc boot process but game that boot from the demo disc itself wasn't checked.
Thanks for posting this. I was always intrigued by the GD copy protection back in the day and reading the release notes from groups. This is kind of random, but there was a note by Echelon on the release of Razor Freestyle Scooter that says: "Protection on this game was a bitch, especially considering it is only
$19.99."
I copied that out of the original .nfo, but I'm curious if you know what (if any) software tricks developers used as an additional attempt at copy protection? I remember also reading about dummy tracks, but the explanations as to how exactly they worked were vague. Perhaps you could add some info on GD software protection in an upcoming video. Just throwing it out there - anyways, keep up the good work :)
01:30... brings back memories. As kids, we had a Commodore 64 monitor for our NES/SNES. Years later after I got married, I found one and used it for my Saturn, DC, N64, and whatever else I had before it died. Small ass screen, but some of the most vibrant colors I've ever seen from standard AV cables.
*SEGA wants to know your location.*
So good to see this, I know MANY people assumed it had crap or little to know protection. I still run into people in forums and groups that think you can just copy an original retail game they own on a standard PC optical drive. Knowing the history I was always informing them that even the games they find online now and burn to standard CD-r, they can only do this because those archives of Dreamcast game ISO's were made available because all the work was already done by warez scene groups that already cracked the original through specific means and uploaded them for anyone to use, simply put, they did all the work already for us. Bless their little pirating hearts😆 Yes, it hurt Sega and the Dreamcast but not nearly as much as many think, their past history (releasing the Saturn too soon, the 32x / SegaCD ) and broken bridges with developers (Not having EA on board hurt them more than they or fans cared to admit) as well constant struggles between the wishes of Sega USA / Sega Japan. Lastly, even though it was a pretty big hit when it debuted they were already hurting financially, too many potential consumers held back in anticipation of Sony's much hyped PS2, and once that released....with the addition of DVD capabilities, well...the rest was history. It really would have been nice to get a couple additional years out of Dreamcast, it still has some of the best arcade ports, some really quirky titles and was only just reaching it's potential when Sega abandoned it. :p
"It's funny because one of the main cause of Dreamcast's copy protection breach was because some Action Replay demo disc"
YES this is what i heard , i bought the magazine that the Action Replay came on , it allowed any backups to boot , as i heard the Action Replay demo ( free disc ) with mag had the boot codes on it unprotected
Awesome video, I've known a little bit about the copy protection on the Dreamcast since the early 2000's but this video actually showed me some new stuff. Keep up the good work MVG!
I never really got to do much with the DC, but this was still to learn about nonetheless.
My understanding was the key to this process being discovered when Gameshark(or other similar software) sent out a demo disk in a magazine. It allowed you to boot and play burn disks. This was the first crack in the armor.
Could you please do a video on PlayStation 2 copy protection. As well as softmods that don't require the harddrive adapter
Would be much appreciated! THX 👌
Still got my Swap Magic 2 disc 😎😊
@@chadbrick67 Got the FreeMcBoot on the memory card as well. HDD the old IDE connection? Got a couple of spare ones I could use from my old PC
Technology Connections channel already did it, worth a view.
@@yoshi314 he did it on the original PlayStation, not PS2 which is way more secure.. and yet not because of external media booting. But hey you cant play burned games by just burning a certain image from stock so they did one up on sega
@@NaokisRCafaik the core protection is the same, the ps2 additionally decrypts the ps2logo from the disc for extra validation.
I remember compiling and burning a few games on the Dreamcast shortly after getting my first PC and having no idea what I was doing, just learning how to navigate folders. It was that simple.
"...If you 'BOUGTH' this CD you have been Cheated..." I love how EVERYONE missed the Typo
Sega and Yamaha had developed the GD-ROM format in order to avoid the general expense of the DVD-ROM format usage.
My dreamcast plays burnt discs without a boot disc
This is because Echelons method of booting was released and most DC game downloads today used a prepared ISO with the exploit already in place.
Gawd, I loved my Dreamcast, but a large reason for that was indeed that it was 'open', so I could discover and play many different games. Here in Holland, the Dreamcast and its games were only officially sold in special gaming stores, which often were only in the larger cities, so for many gamers, including me, piracy was actually the only way to even get our hands on these games (this was in the still early days of the internet, so web-shopping was rare).
Modern Vintage Gamer, Dreamcast, thumbs up!
I absolutely love these video's. I don't have any game consoles, only had the Master System when I was very young. I never play games on a console, I'm not much of a gamer even. But I trully love your videos about it. It's great to hear someone with the amount of knowledge you have talking about these things. While keeping it all comprehensive for everyone too. Great work.
I can only dream of making such good video's. I review SBC's. But I've got sooo much more to learn, and even if I can learn it, it will never have your standards. Thank you for all the great content, greetings. NicoD
6:26
Max Payne 2 OST, huh?
Really enjoying these copy protection videos you're doing. They make me want to get one of each of the consoles and mod /exploit them for the sake of it.
Great work!
The second console to use CD's, are you sure you're not forgetting about the Mega CD?
really enjoyed this - please continue making technical vids like this
1:28 If you really know your SEGA consoles you'll know the Dreamcast was actually the 3rd SEGA console to use an optical drive...
technically the 4rth if you count the portable sega cdx
@@swfreeD why would cdx and sega cd be counted as 2 distinct consoles?
The first track wasn't always audio, sometimes it was a data track. Usually the data track just contained a few text files with copyright info, but sometimes they contained extras intended for PC users like wallpapers, screensavers, or other such apps. I remember a demo disk with some puzzle game containing a PC version of said game on that data track.
Also, I don't think there is the full story of how the coy protection was defeated. I recall that one of the first was actually a demo disk for a Dreamcast Gameshark of all things, they found that the Gameshark demo disk unintentionally somehow let you boot any CD, not just a GD-ROM. They were pulled from shelves and when the full version of Gameshark came out it didn't have this "feature".... but people were able to look into it to see how it was done. Later copies I believes silently put the feature back after it was everywhere.
But that's not also the end of it. From what I remember, you didn't even need to mess with the 1st_boot file at all. The Utopia CD was a first step, but people ultimately found a way to make a disk self-booting... and it didn't require messing with the 1st_boot at all. I remember seeing it in depth multiple times, but it's been two decades. I recall that it required writing an audio track that was at least 4 seconds long as the first track, but don't remember any other details. It didn't involve messing with 1st_boot at all though.
Also, it was rare for a Dreamcast game to be too large to fit on a CD, and thus require compressing the audio/video data further/removing data/or splitting the game across two disks. The vast majority of Dreamcast games were smaller than the size of a CD-R, so there were no modifications needed.
It's funny because one of the main cause of Dreamcast's copy protection breach was because some Action Replay demo disc
Ahh my favourite console of all time. So many memories playing shenmue 1 and 2 and a bunch of other great games
just had a very stressful day but you uploaded you made my day. thank you mvg.
The dreamcast aww the memories I love that we now have phantasy star online back hacked and online again on the dreamcast
Love the Dreamcast!
You definitely deserve that 100k RUclips plaque. I always enjoy your content because every video is so unique and interesting! Keep it up 👍😄
2:32 Sounds like she's flirting with the player.
I can just see the player responding: "Will you sleep with me if I play it on a Dreamcast?"
I'm feeling very happy that I live in Australia, as the PAL version had no copy protection whatsoever...
If a dev kit has a memory viewer, deciphering a scrambler is only a few RAM dumps away.
To be fair, it was much more sophisticated than the BCA of the Saturn discs...
But took a lot longer to get a mod that worked around the "fortress" of a cd drive controller. My favourite is the mega cd which has no copy protection at all.
Saturn was better. Sophia ran Checksums and Lockjacking. Dreamcast used GD-ROM. GD ROM is basically HC CD ROM with all TOC packed on one layer. Dreamcast Copy Protection was all Software in the Whitebook of GDROM itself.
I'd love you to cover the Sega Saturn. That is in my opinion the most complex console to mod and no softmod was ever developed (although the PS2 was incredibly difficult to work in and mod, the messiah modchip was the first mainstream chip - launching a year after the PS2, and it worked virtually perfect - the PS2 was eventually softmoded in all its variants.)
i love dreamcast i remember that time i was play crazy taxi i play tesident evil code veronica soul calibur 18 wheeler that was fun time now i'm old nuh...😣 well awesome video anyway peace
Omg. I remember using Mirc to download rar files, unpack and burn them to a CD, and popping it into the Dreamcast and be playing right away! It's been about 20 years ago, but I still have fond memories of Mirc and how to list files a d "get" files from others. This was probably year 2000 when my roommate had dialup. I had no computer at the time and convinced him to upgrade to this new "high speed internet"! I had to call at&t and get a pci card high speed modem. Geez, I remember just sitting there watching the files download bc 128 kBps was mind blowing to me! I'd sit there and watch the progress bar thinking "the internet can't get any faster than this at home!" Without that experience, I would have never played power stone, and part 2. Power stone 2 was awesome!
So jealous of your Saturn.
Oh my that clear Saturn looks amazing!!
So basically these where the original r4 cards?
This video made me go to Giant Bombcast again to relisten to that part about their experience with the demise of the dreamcast, which in turn made me come BACK to this video.
BTW about Dreamcast anyone know where I can find Dreamcast Homebrew community ? There many result in Google but I don't know which one still active.
Nice vid!
ps: there's no one better than you mr. MVG to bring us a series of "games locked on a single platform" and how to play 'em in 2019. CXBX emulation, x360, ps3 and wiiu are getting better and better. Would be kickass to see how these perform (properly played, controllers and all) versus original hardware. You're the man up to this task, mvg!
Dreamcast version 2 is still unhackable to this day and most likely forever.
Great video, not a lot of people would know this stuff, if they where not in the scene. :) I remember buying Chiller by Mastertronic for the Commodore 64, I tried to make a backup for a friend of mine and the backup wouldn't load, I used a sector editing program and figured out that on the 5 1/4" diskette there was a sector error that caused the head of the drive to jump to another sector and continue to load the game. So all I had to do was make a duplicate of the game and then recreate the sector error on the backup version and voila it loaded just fine, and no internet back then to lookup this stuff :)
"Security 101, don't make any kind of encryption reversible"... really? That kind of defeats the usefulness of encryption. Perhaps you were talking about hashing? Perhaps you need to take a security 101 course.
Love that MP2 theme, i'm happy that you use quality themes from great games for you videos
Usually your channel is of the upmost quality but this video has been quite disappointing. First of all you don't talk about the GD-ROM copy protection (something I bet is wobble coded in the Sega ring, but I'm not sure, the GDEMU guy surely knows), only the Mil-CD ridiculously simple one. Then what you say about it is also incorrect, as it is just a simple scrambling of the executable so it doesn't pass the checksums. A CD-R copy of a Mil-CD would still boot, that's why Bleemcast! implemented their own copy protection. You were near but no. And finally reading GD-ROM using a custom firmware in a Plextor? No, you don't need a custom firmware, neither a Plextor, you're just following the recommended guidelines from the Redump project that recommend a Plextor because they can read data sectors as audio (that is scrambled) and they see some advantages to that. A lot of drives (even in their guide you screenshoot they show TSST ones) can read it using a simple disc swap (aka trap disc) that makes the drive's firmware believe the disc goes up to 120min (and the drives that fail is mostly because the Yellow Book never specified what happens when you go farther than 99min 59sec 74frm, so some drives do not understand what the subchannel, and sector headers, of the GD-ROM, have stored there). And this is something I know because I have created a dumping software and I've been collaborating with the Redump and VGPC projects for a long time. I hope when you do the GameCube/Wii copy protection videos you don't say "it spins in reverse direction", but do your homework there.
Which means this video obviously wasn't made for you. By no means am I advanced with this knowledge, but I knew some of the info was slightly off. But going to your level of detail & explanation would lose more than 90% of the people viewing the video.
@@lamario yet the video is deceiving as the information is not so much incomplete as it is wrong
thanks for your feedback. I do read most comments and i do agree some more research could have been done. But i think the overarching topic was covered. This video isnt necessarily about dumping gd-roms with Plextor drives. but having said that I always want to do better so i do appreciate the feedback. thank you
@@ModernVintageGamer and that is what disappointed me. Because your videos are always quality and well informed, specially when talking about SDKs and porting software. Whenever you need information about physical storage format characteristics, copy protections, or preservation of software, you can drop by the Video Game Preservation Collective discord server, or to my IRC channel, where me, the Redump team, or all the collaborators there, would be happy to help.
Also just been told of this patent: patents.google.com/patent/EP0935242A1/ that apparently describes the GD-ROM. So TL;DR if this patent is exactly what they did, the GD-ROM contains two copy protections: Hidden data in both TOCs and data position measurement in the non-readable logo area.
You explain this so well I had to include a link to this in my video about the Australian launch of the Drerramcast.
9:19 Not necessarily 100%, as I have a revision 2, which boots backups.
Ironically, I have a rev 0, and a rev 2 Dreamcast, and not a rev 1, meaning I can't use gdrom emulators atm, unfortunately.
Nice vid as usual though. Was a nice watch.
How do you tell the revision of DC?
@@sabata414 If you have a NTSC:U/C or PAL console, then look for a number in a circle on the label - that's the revision. If you have a NTSC:J console, you have to take it apart.
@@TrimeshSZ thanks
I find all this hacker, releases and scene stuff VERY interesting, keep making videos about it!
6:28 max payne 2 soundtraack
Always love when I see a new MVG video on my sub feed, great stuff dude! Very informative.
Utopia was sent a dev kit by accident and it had a bootcd that allowed dev's to boot any code with any dreamcast,Utopia just added the raindear like most crack intro's
the disc you're referring to that came with devkits is a SYSTEM DISC 2, but that is not at all like the utopia boot disc and is not how the utopia disc was made. You can see that the Utopia disc uses the exact same little endian/big endian binary obfuscation trick on the disc that the GameShark/Action Replay discs used, because they jacked code from that.
Great video as always.. just wanted to point out, some early model 2 Dreamcasts still support MIL-CD. I used to have one, and seem to remember units released before Nov 2000 being compatible.
My model 2 also will read CD-Rs
good lawd.... the 4K video is so sharp that looking at your beard I see all of the shimmering of the little speckles of your stubble .... bwahahahaha if this is how the future looks, I don't want it. lolololololol jk jk jk
Damn, Dreamcast. This brings back so many memories