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After twenty long years of suffering caused by the Sega Saturn's infamous hardware-based DRM, James Laird-Wah, a computer engineer known as "Dr Abrasive", has finally cracked the twenty year-old console. This DRM was so unique due to its mechanic that required a special groove to be present in all its CDs, requiring a rare modchip for any kind of homebrew. This solution involves a USB emulation of the disc drive.

This is not a public release as of yet, but this represents major progress for the Saturn homebrew community as hardware testing will now be much more accessible. Post your thoughts below!

Interview with Dr Abrasive:
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Am I the only one who has never heard of this console?

 

Quite possibly, and while it's too early to say since there is no release, having better control over the hardware is likely to bring more progress on that front as well as homebrew.

 

Gret news for Saturn's lovers like me

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Not by cartridge slot, but by VCD card slot !

 

What makes Dreamcast interesting is that only applies to copies. You must modify the console to automatically run a legit imported GD-ROM in the same manner. (no boot disc, swap trick, or anything)

 

This wasn't a console that was well produced/known about/did well with sales afaik. I probably would be asking the same thing if I didn't have one just laying around...

 

Philistine. The Saturn's great, it could easily run laps around its competition in many aspects and its design was far ahead of its time. It's fascinating to this day and the way consoles are designed today, with multi-cpu, multi-gpu setups, is not unlike the Saturn's design. My issue with this breakthrough isn't so much that it's useless, it's the fact that it wasn't made earlier because nobody cared due to having plenty of alternatives. Making an ODDE would've required decapping the SH2 processor where the disc controller was to see what's cooking in the interface, and with cheap modchips and even cheaper swap tricks nobody wanted to go the extra mile.

 

Back when I was dicking around with my Model 1 they did not and it's been at least 2-3 years since I looked into them, but you're right - they're called Rhea and Phoebe (depending on the pin count) and yes, they have been around since 2015, so nothing new is being created here.

 

do you know what suffering is? lol... some people... exaggerating is not the same as reporting.

 

It was bypassed by using a different kind of medium (mil-CD rather than GD-ROM), cracking it would have no benefit as 1GB CD-R's don't exist, so a GD-ROM can't be "copied". We know what we know about the DC because of the Katana SDK and machines that float around.