#175170 - brave_orakio - Tue Sep 21, 2010 3:21 am
Please don't ban me, this is a legit question!
Recently, Pokemon black and white was released in Japan. Now Nintendo has somehow made it so that pirated versions of the game cannot have the characters level up. Also, some other DS games have this kind of protection(Love Plus I think).
Is this protection hard coded into the game? Meaning the pirated version and the original version is the same and it just somehow detects that an illegal cart is used? I'm kinda curious as to how they achieved this.
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#175171 - Dwedit - Tue Sep 21, 2010 3:50 am
When you run a game off a flash cartridge, the game is heavily patched and modified a whole lot to make it read from the flash device's storage card instead of an actual DS cartridge. It's really easy to detect such modifications.
If a hypothetical flash cartridge actually included extra hardware to simulate how an NDS card operates, and run the game without patching, then the game could not detect that it was a pirate version that way.
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#175172 - brave_orakio - Tue Sep 21, 2010 6:14 am
Ah yes. Like the way we patch the header of our homebrew to run on a ROMCART on GBA. Thanks! I didn't think DS games required patching when run from a non-official device
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#175177 - Miked0801 - Tue Sep 21, 2010 5:59 pm
Until very recently, developers were not really allowed to add this sort of checking and such due to the possibility of false negatives when moving to new systems or even using different ROM timings between card types. I guess they got tired of losing something more than 1/2 their potential revenue in Europe...
#175178 - Exophase - Tue Sep 21, 2010 6:19 pm
It's possible the patching method is just breaking the game unintentionally.
#175179 - Dwedit - Tue Sep 21, 2010 6:35 pm
No, other games have copy protection as well, it's not accidental.
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#175180 - Exophase - Tue Sep 21, 2010 9:13 pm
Many times now have I seen things called "copy protection" that appeared pretty unlikely to me to be engineered. I'm sure some games do include it deliberately but that doesn't mean that all games that don't work on flash cards are copy protected.
#175181 - wintermute - Tue Sep 21, 2010 10:40 pm
#175182 - wintermute - Tue Sep 21, 2010 10:46 pm
| Miked0801 wrote: |
| Until very recently, developers were not really allowed to add this sort of checking and such due to the possibility of false negatives when moving to new systems or even using different ROM timings between card types. I guess they got tired of losing something more than 1/2 their potential revenue in Europe... |
That surprises me rather a lot actually. Pretty much all of the flashcards employ patching to run commercial games so some targeted checksumming should, in theory, catch pirates in the act.
Are there statistics somewhere that suggest Europeans pirate more than Americans btw?
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#175184 - brave_orakio - Wed Sep 22, 2010 2:51 am
Well from what I read at least the copy protection doesn't seem to affect our home made stuff since it's software specific and not built in the hardware.
Is it the same for PC games? Like batman arkham asylum? One part is unplayable if you have a pirated version. Although I don't think those are patched
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#175185 - elwing - Wed Sep 22, 2010 6:19 am
| wintermute wrote: |
| http://www.joystiq.com/2009/05/13/metaforic-unveils-new-anti-copying-measures-for-ds-games/ |
it seems to be a good news for us homebrewer...
through I doubt nintendo will encorage homebrew...
#175187 - cyril_sy - Wed Sep 22, 2010 4:51 pm
| wintermute wrote: |
| Pretty much all of the flashcards employ patching to run commercial games so some targeted checksumming should, in theory, catch pirates in the act. |
But I think the code that checksums can also be patched...
#175188 - Dwedit - Wed Sep 22, 2010 5:53 pm
Sure anything can be patched, but it takes time, so that's a few weeks that pirates can't play a pirated copy.
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#175200 - Miked0801 - Wed Sep 29, 2010 9:53 pm
From what I've heard from our European publishers is that Piracy is so rampant in Europe that they are not even bothering to port some games. I was told a story about brick and mortar stores in spain that sell flashcards that come with hundreds of ROMs already on them. I know that things aren't that bad here.
And any copy protection scheme can be broken with time and knowledge. Developers only have a limited amount of time and resources to work on copy protection whilst the public has unlimited time and resources in comparison. All copy protection is supposed to do is discourage the average person.
#175387 - keldon - Wed Nov 10, 2010 11:46 am
#175388 - wintermute - Thu Nov 11, 2010 9:24 pm
The original source of that is http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/library/events/100929qa/index.html which goes into quite a bit more detail. I really wish they'd link sources instead of either copying verbatim or oversummarising (is it just me or is there no happy medium?)
Interestingly Iwata says that Art Academy topped the charts in Spain despite the rampant piracy there. Perhaps poor sales are due to something else ...
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