PS1/2 How did the pirates do it?

[Lukein3D]

yes i have a lot of questions in this sub-forum i'm just really interested in this stuff

So after watching videos of glitches from Paradox's broken crack of Spyro 3, I've noticed people in the comments saying "my parents had accidentally bought me this version" and "I used to have this copy as a kid".

It's come to my attention in one word:
How?

Usually with these bootlegs, you would either need:

• A modchip
• A boot disc
• An Action Replay/Gameshark

What do these pirated copies have that usual cd-r burns don't have? The PS1 checks if its an official disc.


If anybody has any answers or has experienced with pirated copies, please reply here as I'm fascinated with this stuff.

 

[Autz]

There are a number of ways that games detect piracy, and many of them are specific to each game. I can't tell exactly what kind of anti-piracy measure they made for that, but there's a lot of examples:

- If the drm was tampered with, the game shows the mentioned behavior. Note that this is not the same as DRM or copy protection, because it only checks if the game files have been tampered with, not wether the user has the privileges to execute the game.

-Creating dummy "ghost" files in the CD during mastering, which are not accessible from the CD filesystem, but do exist, and can be read if you know where to find them. This data is absent on file-by-file disc copies. Copying the entire disc image will copy these files though.

-Another way is to intentionally insert errors in the disc. CDs contain error correction codes. By inserting errors in the data, which can be transparently corrected by a disc reader, the disc will work normally, but the errors won't be copied to the CD-R. By looking for these intentional errors, a game can consider a CD to be an original pressed copy. RAW disc image copies defeat this though.

-Measuring the actual position of the pits in the CD. Once again, duplicating a CD with the pits in the same positions is very difficult.

ETC...

 

[Lukein3D]

There are a number of ways that games detect piracy, and many of them are specific to each game. I can't tell exactly what kind of anti-piracy measure they made for that, but there's a lot of examples:

- If the drm was tampered with, the game shows the mentioned behavior. Note that this is not the same as DRM or copy protection, because it only checks if the game files have been tampered with, not wether the user has the privileges to execute the game.

-Creating dummy "ghost" files in the CD during mastering, which are not accessible from the CD filesystem, but do exist, and can be read if you know where to find them. This data is absent on file-by-file disc copies. Copying the entire disc image will copy these files though.

-Another way is to intentionally insert errors in the disc. CDs contain error correction codes. By inserting errors in the data, which can be transparently corrected by a disc reader, the disc will work normally, but the errors won't be copied to the CD-R. By looking for these intentional errors, a game can consider a CD to be an original pressed copy. RAW disc image copies defeat this though.

-Measuring the actual position of the pits in the CD. Once again, duplicating a CD with the pits in the same positions is very difficult.

ETC...

Wow, these pirates were smart, I wonder how many years of practice it took them before they actually mastered doing those things to the CDs before they started selling them in markets, online etc.

 

[jpx86]

Here is the story about it: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131439/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php

 

[Lukein3D]

Here is the story about it: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131439/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php

The effort the pirates went through to corrupt the files to make it work then sell it off, I wonder if its possible to get your hands on one of these bootlegs today.

 

[stompysan]

A lot of anti-piracy measures can also be triggered by damaged media. The most notorious is Donkey Kong Country on SNES. It was extremely easy to trigger this with legitimate hardware and legitimate software.