DS #2107: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Rings Of Fate (USA)

[Feels Good Man]

eh... cant find the older versions of the firmware. The one in the downloads section doesnt work for some reason : \

EDIT: nvm found it. brb in an half an hour or so

 

[Crescent]

any progress bob?

EDIT: sorry, didnt see the edit

 

[asuri]

if you didnt see-from a different forum possibilities:

Or it could be just a firmware problem...

at Dashroms.com

Kotlol said this..

"Ok lets get this straight IT IS NOT A COPY PROTECTION! Since at the beginning of the game I couldnt even start it. I updated my firmware and encounter the same thing.... But.... my friend who has a cycloDS never encountered this problem. So far its been dated with R4 and M3 but not CycloDS. Apperently this is a firmware bug....R4 and M3 are almost the same firmware there for the bugs.

It could also be the ones getting are European DSes wich is also a bug I noticed in M3s. Sometimes when your DS is european and the ROM is USA. The game freezes or gives weird bugs.... I hardly think this is a copy protection its a bug that inniates the end of the game wich I hade with Star Fox 2 on an emulator once. If you held start during a level change you suddenly got END SCORE ENTRY and CREDITS... So this is a FULL BUG in the ROM."

At DSfanboy

"ryan_90 said...

Actually it's not anti-piracy as many including myself first thought, its just a bug in the firmware that makes the game skip back to the ending, which would obviously take you back to the loading screens, anyone with an emulator has surely experienced this, it would happen in starfox 64 everytime you pushed the start button, so its simply a flaw in the R4 and M3 Firmwares although i should just say R4 since M3 is just a copy of the firmware, A fix should be out within the next few days anyways.

Truth is theres in absolutely no way Nintendo can stop the piracy since its impossible for them to tell if your using a flash cart or not, they both operate in the exact same way."

 

[iisdev]

post deleted by author.
reason: CNET affiliation

 

[sillypatterson]

if you didnt see-from a different forum possibilities:

Or it could be just a firmware problem...

at Dashroms.com

Kotlol said this..

"Ok lets get this straight IT IS NOT A COPY PROTECTION! Since at the beginning of the game I couldnt even start it. I updated my firmware and encounter the same thing.... But.... my friend who has a cycloDS never encountered this problem. So far its been dated with R4 and M3 but not CycloDS. Apperently this is a firmware bug....R4 and M3 are almost the same firmware there for the bugs.

It could also be the ones getting are European DSes wich is also a bug I noticed in M3s. Sometimes when your DS is european and the ROM is USA. The game freezes or gives weird bugs.... I hardly think this is a copy protection its a bug that inniates the end of the game wich I hade with Star Fox 2 on an emulator once. If you held start during a level change you suddenly got END SCORE ENTRY and CREDITS... So this is a FULL BUG in the ROM."

At DSfanboy

"ryan_90 said...

Actually it's not anti-piracy as many including myself first thought, its just a bug in the firmware that makes the game skip back to the ending, which would obviously take you back to the loading screens, anyone with an emulator has surely experienced this, it would happen in starfox 64 everytime you pushed the start button, so its simply a flaw in the R4 and M3 Firmwares although i should just say R4 since M3 is just a copy of the firmware, A fix should be out within the next few days anyways.

Truth is theres in absolutely no way Nintendo can stop the piracy since its impossible for them to tell if your using a flash cart or not, they both operate in the exact same way."

These are not possibilities.
As I said on DSFanboy:

The vast majority of DS flashcarts in circulation patch the ROMs to get them to boot on the DS, whether it's on-the-fly or before it's even loaded onto the cart. Every twenty minutes or so, the game compares its CRC to its expected CRC. If it's running on a legitimate cart (or one of the flashcarts that has true clean ROM support, like the CycloDS), it passes the check and the game continues. If the CRC differs (which it will when patched as the R4 and many others do), it displays the screen and restarts.

I honestly can't see how anyone could think it's a 'firmware bug' causing the game to 'glitch out'. Anyone with even the smallest amount of real-world programming experience, or hell, even common sense and an eye for discrepancy, can see that it's a calculated anti-piracy measure.

Anyone looking to 'fix' this problem has a few options available to them:

1) The firmware could be modified so that when patched, the proper CRC is produced. This method is nigh impossible as far as I understand CRCs.

2) The firmware could be modified to patch the ROM at a very low level so that the CRC produced post-patching is considered correct. This is possible, but would be damn difficult to implement, considering what they've got to work with.

3) The firmware could be modified to boot this particular ROM image 'clean', allowing the piracy check to be bypassed as it is on legit carts and clean-rom flashcarts. I'm not sure if this is possible, however; I'm not familiar with the documentation of the R4 et al.

However it's done, I expect it'll be done soon... don't discount human ingenuity.

Regardless, any of these methods will take time. The copy protection is brilliant in that it's giving a serious delay to being playable on the majority of flashcarts (and don't misunderstand, this is what copy protection is generally for: delay), while still giving players a taste of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if many end up buying it before it's fixed.

 

[Deleted member 110780]

Anyone tried and look at the scripts with dslazy? Maybe that line of code is easily found and killed?

I've had a look at it. No the main data is encrypted in a 68MB file the rest is made of the two sound.dat's which are about 50MB altogether. The rest is just the headers and arm9.bin etc. Someone could try hex-edit and could probably look into it. I've been playing the game with my R4 for 30mins, so far with "that screen" not appearing. I am using a DS phat though so maybe the problem could be in the newer firmwares in DS lite's that nintendo can manipulate to add protection.

Uh, whoa. Has this happened before? Deja vu...

 

[GH0ST]

My god what a waste of time ... Arm7 is the common one ... nothing is really crypted... this is a nice game finally I think i will buy it when the european version is out. By the way don't expect something different for EU version since it is already inside the US version ... One ring ...;-)

I know you're afraid of ghosts--
but are you afraid of the dark,
too?

Je sais que tu as peur des fantômes mais
est-ce que tu as peur du noir aussi ?

Ich weiß, dass du dich vor Gespenstern
fürchtes, aber hast du vielleicht auch
Angst vor der Dunkelheit ?

Ya sé que tienes miedo a
los fantasmas pero... También
te da miedo la oscuridad?

 

[GXice]

So can someone explain to me, is this the Final Fantasy 4 released in Japan a while ago or is this a completely different game?

 

[Hadrian]

So can someone explain to me, is this the Final Fantasy 4 released in Japan a while ago or is this a completely different game?

No it's part of the Crystal Chronicles series, hence why its not called Final Fantasy 4.

 

[yunarREDblue]

hi everyone..

i'd read from page 1 till 17 and got confused of many CRCs, AFAP or else..

i just wanna ask , i use DS1 SDHC with 2GB Sandisk. page 1 says i just hv to 'disable patching'. It sure says that clearly..

but after i played it past 56min, that moogles bastard shows!

anyone encountered same problem with me here? need help.. what should i do?

 

[GXice]

No it's part of the Crystal Chronicles series, hence why its not called Final Fantasy 4.

Good to know. Shows how much I know about FF. Now all I need to wait for is the R4 support..

 

[damon666]

CODEquote from m3wiki.com :

Works on M3 Perfect SD with firmware 2.0 [I was able to play 1 and a half hour without the screen]

...

i cant confirm this quote , may you with an M3 Perfect try it and give some feedback .

 

[BlueStar]

noxnono - r4 team introduced autopatching in 1.10

R4 firmware has always autopatched games. V 1.10 introduced auto DLDI patching for homebrew, something which has no bearing on commercial games at all.

 

[_Oz_]

CODEquote from m3wiki.com :

Works on M3 Perfect SD with firmware 2.0 [I was able to play 1 and a half hour without the screen]

...

i cant confirm this quote , may you with an M3 Perfect try it and give some feedback .

Can as well give it a try, the problem is that this chunk of hope is a little vague - would be nice to know which versions of FW/GM were used exactly. So far, looking at http://www.linfoxdomain.com/nintendo/ds/ I can see the following combinations to try:

GM v20, FW v20
GM v2.0, FW v11
GM v1.1, FW v02

 

[Crazy-S]

it works fine!!!
its not a demo!!
i am playing for three hours yet with no Thanks for playing anti priacy thingy
i`ve got an me ds simply v.1.12 (the newest) it works when you update your m3 ds

before i updated i`ve got 1.11 and got an "White screen" then update it and POOOF it works!!

p.s. after the caves go into the town don`t go anywhere else because if you go anywhere else the game says thanks for playing!


Cheers!!

 

[Nehle]

it works fine!!!
its not a demo!!
i am playing for three hours yet with no Thanks for playing anti priacy thingy
i`ve got an me ds simply v.1.12 (the newest) it works when you update your m3 ds

before i updated i`ve got 1.11 and got an "White screen" then update it and POOOF it works!!

p.s. after the caves go into the town don`t go anywhere else because if you go anywhere else the game says thanks for playing!


Cheers!!

You're stupid.

Please, PLEASE read the thread, this is what we have been discussing for the last 30 pages!

 

[blu9987]

Im at the boss right now... no crashes... M3 Simply
What I did:
Trimmed using NDS Tokyo
Arm7 fix using DS Lazy
Thats it...
works great so far...

Edit: SIGH nvm, got it after i beat boss

 

[Bob Evil]

Im at the boss right now... no crashes... M3 Simply
What I did:
Trimmed using NDS Tokyo
Arm7 fix using DS Lazy
Thats it...
works great so far...

Edit: SIGH nvm, got it after i beat boss

Don't feel too bad, I played for 4 hours the other night before I got it ... that was a real kick in the sack.

 

[ShadowXP]

I think it's mainly protection aimed at R4/M3 Simply and other similar carts since they all run extremely similar firmware and have been broadcast in the media so much lately. Hell, it may even be able to detect whether the cart is running the R4 etc. firmware. Since it's working on other carts perfectly, there must be something only in the R4/M3 Simply etc. firmwares that the protection can pick up. If you find out what that is and either patch it or remove it, then maybe the screen won't show up.

 

[ne1]

Anyone looking to 'fix' this problem has a few options available to them:

1) The firmware could be modified so that when patched, the proper CRC is produced. This method is nigh impossible as far as I understand CRCs.

IIRC CRC is actually quite broken, and linear, and it should be no big problem to control what's produced, especially since there's usually some useless data in the ROM.
But then again I'm no programmer and there could be other security measures as well.

wikipedia crc
"CRCs are not, by themselves, suitable for protecting against intentional alteration of data (for example, in authentication applications for data security), because their convenient mathematical properties make it easy to compute the CRC adjustment required to match any given change to the data."