New ROM Anti-Piracy Software

[TheRealDude]

If you do the math, you'll see that the genuine key code is bound for failure. Every game that gets released often runs on a 20k print. That means 20k keys to be made and programmed on a first run. Now take the number of games released in a month (about two or three). That totals out to 40 to 60 thousand individual keys. Coding wise, that's already a good sum, but if this continues out throughout a year at three games a month, that's 720,000 individual keys and the console must compare them to a list of valid keys.

Now, take the current memory space on the DSi. I'm not sure how big it is but storing 720k keys after a year would take up quite a bit of space. If Nintendo tries to force a "Internet Connection Required" gig on all games with this code, how would the sales of their games go with people who lack a wifi connection? Would a person without Wifi be able to play that brand new game that they just bought?

Note: The numbers I'm using for the games per month/year is hypothetical, but the first run release numbers are always around 20k.

 

[luneth22]

Apparently they're doing everything they can to blast piracy down. But it doesn't seem that hackers will simply stop there.....you know how clever they are. They'll find a way to break the security.

 

[DSGamer64]

Maybe they should stop letting the DS (and the Wii for that matter) be dumping grounds for absolute dog turd titles like Petz 2 and Horses, movie spin offs or games based off of any books or TV shows. Once they consistantly provide good worthwhile games that people will pay for and imo if they didn't cost 40 bucks a pop, I would easily pay for every game that I deem is worth paying for and so would a lot of other gamers. I have the same issue with console games though, there is no way in hell I am paying 80 dollars for a game that won't even last me 30 hours of gameplay which is why I think the current generation of consoles is a joke, even PC games are still under 50 bucks.

 

[nl255]

...
This got me thinking, "Does this affect AR users?" By AR users I mean, people that use retail carts and and original AR. The AR must patch it it somehow and if the security system mistakes it for a flashcard patch the game will destroyed all because you wanted some rare candies in your new SoulSilver game.

But most likely, the patch is different than retail AR units than it is to flashcards. So hopefully, Nintendo won't make that mistake.

~ Jon

That's absurd, a retail card can't be "destroyed" because of this as those aren't writable.

It could destroy the retail card, but it would require special hardware (or programming) on the card. The easiest way to make retail cards self destruct would be for the "self destruct" code to write certain data to the save area (which is writable) and have the game refuse to run if that data is found, similar to what Comex did with his DVDX installer. You could also do the same by deliberately burning out a fuse on the card (mabye an efuse) or even using a capacitor to store enough power to fry the card (and even the DS or AR, depending on how nasty they want it to be). In fact, if the self destruct system is hardware based (and not based on save data), the cart might be able to detect dumping software being used on it and then destroy itself, but that would require considerable extra circuitry to detect the data reading done by the dumper. Not to mention that the more protection you put on it, the more likely the card will destroy itself due to low batteries on the DS or other false positives.

 

[thebert]

If all it takes is extra patching time for each rom before we see a release, then I don't care. In fact, I'm all for that, because the hackers will only have time to focus on releasing good games, and we wont see a never ending avalanche of shoveware all the time. Like is anyone really going to take the time to hack Horsez 14, or a crappy brain training game? Of course then there is always the issue of determining what a "good" game is. Everyone can agree on Kingdom Hearts or Zelda, but I bet there will always be someone that makes requests for obscure games or bad ones like,

"zOMg can saHm onez plz hax0r Babiez fur NDS plz!!!!!111 I wunts to tatch da Babiezzzz on mai DS plz!!11okthanksbye"

 

[rklamer]

This is a meaningless effort on the seller's end -- all it does is add a tiny step extra to the people who extract the ROMs from the cartridges, which they'll probably set up to batch-script anyway. :/

 

[Chris_Skylock]

I sometimes dont play badass games like zelda so it's now a problem for me to play casual games like Happy My Sweets, for example. Though there are really borings and should have not been released like all US movie games like Monsters VS Alien or Harry Potter.

I just hope the new set of hackers will not be picky on the games they will hack. It's a 50-50 as they say

 

[TheDarkSeed]

I'd feel bad about pirating DS games if they were good, but they're not, with the exeption of a few titles(VERY FEW).

 

[chillyp]

I'd feel bad about pirating DS games if they were good, but they're not, with the exeption of a few titles(VERY FEW).

Why would you pirate bad games then, personally, I'd rather not play bad games. Furthermore, do you happen to buy the good games that come out? If you're like most people I'd say no. Look at GTA: Chinatown Wars, that game got pirated to HELL and bombed in retail markets. This is exactly why developers are pushing for anti-piracy options on the DS, because its too convenient to download, drag it on to a micro SD card and play for free. Its pretty ironic that the people complaining about how they'll have to wait for patches are the reason why games are getting protected in the first place.

I noticed someone in this thread going on about how games are going to be signed with keys or something equally ridiculous. Nintendo doesn't allow individual signing of carts because they MASS produce them and it would be a waste of time and you are completely wrong. Instead - as the original post mentioned - it will be looking for patched segments of code.

DS games running on a flash cart need to be modified. Take for example saving. On a legitimate retail cart, there is a dedicated chip located on the cart which saves usually around 256kb of data. The Nitro SDK, which is used to develop DS games, comes with a chunk of code that allows a developer to read and write data to this chip. The majority of flash cards for DS lack this chip, for a good reason. In the GBA days, most games used around 64kb of Save memory, so many flash cards used a similar sized chip, until one day Nintendo started releasing games that used 256k, making games incompatible with a number of existing cards. To work around this lack of a save chip, the loader software searches a ROM for any function calls to Save or Load data, and redirects it to custom built function which reads and writes to a FAT filesystem. There are numerous other patches that need to be done to allow a game to work as a file loaded from a disk instead of a ROM chip.

I suspect this is where this particular protection is going to strike. I'll show some pseudo code:

checksum = CalculateChecksum(SaveDataA)

if (checksum != correctChecksum)
ÂÂ enter_infinite_loop

A solution like this is easily crackable, and once it is you could find the hex location for its code, create a signature and after a flash cart firmware update it could be automatically patched away. The developer of this protection is likely going to customize the code to do different things in each game. Say the above code was included in Pokemon Gold, the following could be included in Pokemon Silver:

CODEchecksum = CalculateChecksum(LoadDataA)

if (checksum != correctChecksum)
ÂÂ jump_to_random_address

It's just as crackable, but its significantly different enough that you couldn't get a signature for it and remove it. The beauty of this system is you could include multiple variants throughout the game, say the first one when you start the game, and the second one when you reach the first boss. Many scene crackers don't actually play the games very long as they are trying to release as fast as possible, and this sort of attack has been used successfully in a Playstation Spyro game which resulted in a fully working patch coming out 3 MONTHS after its initial release. Keep in mind that the majority of game sales are made in the first weeks - first month of being on shelves. Even a few days will frustrate casual pirates to go and buy the game if they want it badly enough.

Of course this protection will be crackable, the developer is absolutely correct, its just designed to piss off casual people enough that they will buy the game instead because its easier.

 

[triassic911]

Corporate heads are stupid, just lower your prices and piracy will drop drastically. It's like they WANT to start a war with hackers. Piracy increased over the years because of pricing on video games.

 

[Domination]

Sighs....

Good thing that Starfy is released in June

But you know.... some games are more fun with more players on wifi....

 

[funem]

I thought of a method like this ages ago, more based around the testing of what media the game was running from , but I have also ( in my head ) worked out a way to produce a new type of card that in theory would not need to be patched and would work 100%, I will keep quiet about it for now as I may be wrong. They could have killed piracy completely by just adding a chip to NDS cards that decrypts on the fly at the hardware level, different games with different decryption codes, if the overhead was to much for a whole game they could just encrypt portions of it making it unplayable at those points. Using a method like this the flash card manufacturers would have to add the same type of chip to their cards and have to add the decryption algorithm for each game, firstly they would need to be able to read the key, which would cause a problem in itself. In so doing this they would be saying "hey look our cards are for pirates, not just for homebrew" any legal argument they have about the legitimacy of the cards would then collapse, not that I think they are worried about that anyway.

 

 

[BlueStar]

If a game can be read, a game can be copied. This company's just blowing its own trumpet, if Nintendo discovers there's any danger of the protection causing errors on genuine carts or anything it may never see the light of day anyway, quit worrying.

 

[deathking]

This is overhyped , look at chrono trigger and the massive day it took to hack , im sorry Metaforic but this seems a pr job to get nintendo to use your service.
i bought ds games as gifts for people and the reason i chose the games was by testing them on my piracy cart. For games like soul bubbles and other minor titles if implement this will equal less sales as people arnt playing their games and spreading the word while bigger games will be hacked in little time and piracy will be rampant for those titles.


Make games a worthy purchase , add maps , add sound tracks , for music games chuck in some decent custom headphones or screen protectors for games like pokemon ranger dont waste your money on adding minor annoyances to games .

I wonder what the cost per game is and what else can be done to lower piracy as this method has been tried before and failed .

 

[funem]

If a game can be read, a game can be copied. This company's just blowing its own trumpet, if Nintendo discovers there's any danger of the protection causing errors on genuine carts or anything it may never see the light of day anyway, quit worrying.

While true that if it can be read it can be copied its not true that it can be run from another medium, which essentially a flash card is.

 

[Sarvesh50]

if there is a flashcard where dldi event is needed cause it reads the rom onpatched abnd can started than there is no problem

 

[shakirmoledina]

there must be a big loophole in this thus they are waiting till 2009 to fix this completely but remember that not always can these news be scary but infact most of the time nintendo screws up

 

[fermio100]

LOL i dont think this will be much trouble.. If you just take a look at history, anti-piracy measures have always been one big FAIL.. Guess people will have to wait a few days or maybe weeks for a solution to this one..

And yeah, i think its another big FAIL to announce this, instead of just doing it without telling.. Not that it would make that big of a difference xD

Fail? PS3, PSP slim, DSI in DSI mode. What about them? There are some anti-piracy measures that really work!

 

[elixirdream]

i am not worried about the game can/can't be hacked!!! if we like the game so much, i think it is fair to buy the original!

the only thing i anticipate that will happen before the game is being hacked is all the whinners and kids will spam gbatemp to paralyze! just look at the naruto thread......

 

[wchill]

i am not worried about the game can/can't be hacked!!! if we like the game so much, i think it is fair to buy the original!

the only thing i anticipate that will happen before the game is being hacked is all the whinners and kids will spam gbatemp to paralyze! just look at the naruto thread......

I agree with this 100%, though I would like to have a copy of the original on my flashcards.
We need to enforce an anti-whine policy or something that will prevent GBAtemp from being slow and crappy again.