anti-piracy system

[alexmega]

Good afternoon, can someone tell me if they already have a system in basic or similar on electronic protection against piracy? A cod that prevents that if the project gets to turn cartridge it can be copied and posted on the internet? both for bex and second basic.

[Deleted]

If code is shared, it would just be broken.

You have to come up with your own method of protecting your data. Software security is easy to defeat for experienced ROM hackers while hardware security is more difficult.

Your best bet is to research known methods to see what’s done, then find a method that suits your needs or come up with an all new method.

[Deleted]

You basically have to do what Watermelon did with Pier Solar: Make a custom bank switching scheme and maybe gentleman's agreements with emulator and board makers.

..in the end even that was worked around.


It would require coordination between board makers and developers to come up with an acceptable encryption system on the board and someone to maintain a list of keys. Nobody wants to put in the effort due to time, costs and, well, changing things around once the pirates defeat that protection.

[GiGaBiTe]

If you don't plan on having your game work on real hardware, just use as many programming quirks that will cause real hardware to not boot the game or crash.

[Deleted]

Most emulators are very lazy/forgiving about how they handle battery backed RAM. You could save and verify a value in emulated battery backed RAM that wouldn't work in most repro carts.

But, making an emulation only genesis game is kinda silly. You could just make a regular PC game.

[vetea]

Create a ROM > 4 Mb ( for this, juste create some DATALONG Garbage or include a big .BIN File in your code ) and use a spec. EEPROM for, it's a simple solution !

[Deleted]

Aug 31, 2018 11:19:37 GMT -5 vetea said:

Create a ROM > 4 Mb ( for this, juste create some DATALONG Garbage or include a big .BIN File in your code ) and use a spec. EEPROM for, it's a simple solution !

That's one possibility. However, I've had one oversized ROM permanently brick a Chinese genesis clone with SD card support. Obviously the fault of the manufacturer but I don't feel great about potentially bricking hardware.

[Deleted]

Aug 31, 2018 11:19:37 GMT -5 vetea said:

Create a ROM > 4 Mb ( for this, juste create some DATALONG Garbage or include a big .BIN File in your code ) and use a spec. EEPROM for, it's a simple solution !

Once you go larger than 4MB, you need to have a mapper swap banks so the hardware can read it. Depending on your method, it'll be figured out very quickly. You would be better using a hardware method, such as Paprium (uses a special sound chip and bank swapping, I believe). It may eventually get emulated, but nobody would be able to reproduce physical copies.

There's a few quirky software methods you can use (SRAM validation, for example).

Anti-piracy measures (the good ones) aren't cheap to implement, unfortunately.

[Deleted]

Yeah, the two out of the box solutions I can think of are:

1. Make an I2C device and stick it on the second controller port. Use it for save games and some level data. This would require knowledge of accessing I2C devices and research into whether the genesis joystick ports can handle 2 way communication.

2. Take a Krikzz flash board and make a custom firmware that both encrypts the ROM and asks for a handshake of some sort before full decryption. Krikzz ain't gonna help with this.

So, there we go. Anyone who wants DRM has a lot of work to do!

[Deleted]

Sept 6, 2018 8:44:33 GMT -5 @theloon said:

Yeah, the two out of the box solutions I can think of are:

1. Make an I2C device and stick it on the second controller port. Use it for save games and some level data. This would require knowledge of accessing I2C devices and research into whether the genesis joystick ports can handle 2 way communication.

2. Take a Krikzz flash board and make a custom firmware that both encrypts the ROM and asks for a handshake of some sort before full decryption. Krikzz ain't gonna help with this.

So, there we go. Anyone who wants DRM has a lot of work to do!

I had a similar idea as #1, but it would act more like a Sonic & Knuckles expansion cartridge, but would be the save bank for all Second Dimension titles. Of course, who wants to plug in a peripheral to play my games?

Your #2, though, has issues with it. The ROM has to be unencrypted for the hardware to run the code, so if you have a custom firmware on a flash drive, you'll have to distribute that firmware (hint: people will look through it). The other problem is streaming it into the hardware (why else would you need a handshake if you're just dumping it into RAM?)

Then, at the end of the day, while most emulation authors won't implement new mappers, there are some authors that just don't care and will pirate your mapper.

[AdeO]

The world's simplest solution for physical cartridge is a SRAM key...
But, you can use a FPGA to make a data cage, basically, you'll have two EPROMS and a "security chip", one contains the real encrypted game, and the other contains the menu and the warning, first you'll have a complete bypass for the menu ROM, and then the FPGA will keep "listening" the bus, and as soon it realizes for a call, it will read the game ROM, translate the bits and merge the game to the bus, almost like EMV chips on PoS(Point of Sale), so, even if someone does what I did(used an Arduino Mega 2560 to read a cartridge), will get a broken game, since the original game needs to be read "one crossed bit" at a time, and the only way to do that, is by playing the game...
This way, all the "hacker" can get, is for example, a menu that doesn't go anywhere and no sound, no graphics, nothing!

[Deleted]

Sram based protection is not ideal.

[nitrofurano1]

anti piracy systems? the best thing i know is using a ham radio to report such situations to coast guards! ( www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy )