GameCube ISOs Released? 546
Mister.de writes "An online piracy group called "StarCube" has made ISO's of games like The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker available for download on the net. They are not publicly available to everyone, but are said to be hosted on private warez FTP sites. As of yet (6/14/2003) there is no way to actually play the games after burning to a mini-disc, but reliable sources say that there will be a hack for the GameCube released soon so that these illegal copies can be played. Also rumors do have it that the copied games can be played on the Panasonic GameCube, but that is unconfirmed. " The story came from Console-Gods originally.
Hard to do (Score:4, Informative)
Remember (Score:5, Informative)
Seems real (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hard to do (Score:5, Informative)
Not quite. Rather than writing data to the discs normally from the inside to the outside of the disc, Nintendo does it vice-versa and write the data to the disks from the outside in. Therefore the data is written to (and read from) the disk backwards. But the disk itself spins the normal way around.
To play a burned disc, you'd have to either heavily modify your computer or your 'Cube, and in the end it would be cheaper to just buy the game rather than pirate it.
I'm no expert on chipping, but I would assume that you'd just need to chip your GC and then write the games ISO out differently than you would normally (specialised software?). But even if this thing cost £200, you'd still be saving money after your 5th game.
Blanks? (Score:5, Informative)
3" Mini DVD-R, 1.5GB/25min
Write-once format DVD, For Data / Audio / Video use, Full compatibility with all writers and players w/ 650nm laser, High capacity and data transfer rate, portable and easy to transport, Long-term data archiving, compatible with Nintendo Game Cube, Playstation 2, Xbox. Price start from $8.00/pc.
Re:Hard to do (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever protection they have on there is damn good since (barring this story) I haven't heard of anyone successfully reading a disc.
Re:Where are the links??? (Score:5, Informative)
However you can see what has been ripped so far at:
http://www.nforce.nl/nfos/index.php?do=1&s=20
Sales show GC games sell more than on any system. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Remember (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hard to do (Score:3, Informative)
Dreamcast drives are CAV (Constant Angular Velocity) and have a hard time reading the inner tracks. That's why when you backup a game, you should use specialized software like DiscJuggler that can calculate where to start writing so that the data ends at the outer edge of the CD. I believe it then fills the inner tracks with dummy bytes.
Re:Blanks? (Score:1, Informative)
To play pirated games you'd have to find some way get the GameCube read an alien format, and spin the disc the otherway. The Gamecube normally spins its disc backwards.
I think it would just be easier to buy the game...
Misconceptions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hard to do (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hard to do (Score:5, Informative)
What they _probably_ did was take some 'special' 8cm DVD disks (look here [dvd-and-media.com] for more info and a picture of one in a case--how hard would it be to get it out of there if your the "Big N"?) and encode it in such a way that only a specially modified firmware would read the discs.
Just like the dreamcast (which did use some special hardware... and the price of the Devkit was high... No games (in USA)... pattern?) did. Its all a matter of TRICKING the GC into thinking whatever disc you put in there was supposed to be there, and then either making it read the discs as normal, or formatting your discs to use the same layout as the real discs.
And anyone with a oscilloscope (and a fair bit of skill with it) can see what lines are being pulled high/low to see what the disc is reading at a given time. How do you think these 'mod chips' actually work? All they do is feed the processor/DSP a code of 'This disc is ok--just play the game' and then the processor does what itâ(TM)s been designed to do.
Its like cracking a videogame on the computer--all we do is make the 'Disc bad/not present--no play' instruction jump to the 'Disc present--play' instead. Its so elegantly simple, and its mind-boggling how stupid game developers think that anything they make will never be cracked, just because they have some 'proprietary' disc/code/hardware.
Let me make this as clear as possible to game hardware developers out there:
So long as your processor supports the jump assembly command, or your hardware uses standard CMOS/TTL voltages/IC's, your program/game can be hacked. I said 'can', because its all a matter of who wants to put the effort into it and not just the plain and simple fact that they can do it. Ok... maybe thereâ(TM)s a little of that in there too.
Yes, I am a Pedant. (Score:3, Informative)
Secondly: An apostrophe is not required when referring to the plural of an object.
Have a nice day.
Tim
Re:Hard to do (Score:5, Informative)
Because it's not. It's copyright infingement. It's still a crime, but it's not stealing. Theft deprives the original owner of the property use of said property.
Re:Blanks? (Score:3, Informative)
-The drives don't spin backwards. They may read from the outside in, however.
Re:emulator? (Score:3, Informative)
http://benjamin.francois.free.fr/artwork/gcubix/m
Re:Done before on Dreamcast (Score:5, Informative)
1. Get a GameBoy Player and a GBA Flash Rom cartridge
2. Load a special ROM onto the GBA cart
3. Run it on the GBA Player like a normal GBA game
4. The GBA cart will transfer data to GC's main memory
5. Press the reset button on the GC - this is a soft reset, it simply jumps to a fixed memory address, without reading off the disc at all
6. Game data can then be transferred thru the serial port on the bottom of the GC
The question is, is step #4 possible? The rest of the story is definately possible (if you don't believe step 5, put in Animal Crossing, wait til the title screen comes up, take out the disc, and press reset. You can still play, without any need to put the disc in again.)
Re:Done before on Dreamcast (Score:2, Informative)
I've had the same game booted on several GCs before with that little trick. It comes from being an N64 game originally, so it's small enough to be entirely loaded in the GC's memory.
Which also explains why the graphics look a bit like canned ass.. Great game, though.
Re:emulator? (Score:4, Informative)
Playstation and Nintendo 64 emulation is VERY easy. I managed to run Mario Kart 64 well enough to be playable on a machine with a Pentium 166, 32 MB of RAM and a Voodoo Banshee with UltraHLE in early '99...
Re:emulator? (Score:2, Informative)
There is a very good open-source emulator that can play pretty much every game out there. There are a couple of exceptions, of course, but certainly a large majority of the games out there can be played. Project 64 [pj64.net].
Clint
N64 Emulator (Score:2, Informative)
For More News.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hard to do (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Yes, I am a Pedant. (Score:3, Informative)
I think you've been out-pedanted.
Re:Hard to do (Score:3, Informative)
Because it's not strictly true. Okay, suppose I choose to pirate some game that I most definitely would have purchased otherwise. In this case it can be argued that, yes, I've chosen to withhold value that the company would otherwise have (OTOH, I am not depriving them of something they already had, but let's forget that for the moment). Now, let's say I pirate some game that I wouldn't have purchased otherwise (due to, for example, the risk of laying down dollars for a game I'm not sure I'd like). In this case, am I "stealing" (to use your definition)? Since I wouldn't have purchased the game anyway, I'm not depriving the company of anything, right? So is this theft?
You see, calling copyright infringement "stealing" is just not accurate. Theft refers to the taking of something from someone else and depriving them of that item. Copyright infringement just doesn't work this way. Comparing the two is like comparing apples and oranges. Sure, they're both fruit (illegal), but they really are fundamentally different things.
Re:Hard to do (Score:3, Informative)
it's that the laser starts reading the disc from the outside and works its way towards the center.
This is different (of course) from the normal, start reading at the center of the disc and work your way out.
If this is the case, it seems like a incredibly simple yet effective method of copy protection.
Re:Done before on Dreamcast (Score:2, Informative)
there was a solution for loading cress-compiled binaries over ethernet on the dreamcast... i see no reason why this should not be possible with the GCs "broadband adapter" [sic], in theory at least...
--strangeloop
Emulation!! (Score:2, Informative)
Experiment to verify CDs burned from inside out (Score:2, Informative)
Start your CD digital audio recording software and set it to "track at once".
Place a blank CDDA-R disc in your recorder. Record three audio tracks. Remove the CD from the recorder and look at the underside of the disc. Notice a boundary between two differently colored washer-shaped regions of the disc's data area.
Place the disc in your recorder again. Record three more audio tracks. Look again at the disc's underside. Notice that the darker color has expanded into the area that was once lighter colored.
Record three more tracks. By now you should notice a pattern: adding new tracks to a disc expands the dark area outward. Therefore, guess that the darker area is the recorded area, and that the disc is recorded from inside to outside.
Compact Disc and DVD media are mastered in a spiral track that runs from inside to outside when the disc is spun counter-clockwise (viewed from the data side) or clockwise (viewed from the label side). The second layer of a dual-layer disc runs from outside to inside. It appears that Xbox and GameCube disc formats may place their boot sectors on the second layer, which means that the discs are read from outside in. Uncareful reporters may confuse this with a disc that spins backwards; no popular open-disc optical medium does this.
Almost, but not quite right... (Score:5, Informative)
1) More profits per game
2) More difficult to Pirate
3) No loading times.
The reason that the publishers did not support the N64 is that producing a playstation game (Or saturn game for that matter) was cheaper. A cd is cheaper to manufacture then a cartridge.
Nintendo's use of the miniature disks also has less to do with piracy and more to do with manufacturing costs. First, since they dont play DVD's, they do not have to pay any fee's to use that technology. The cost per console is cheaper as a result. Nintendo figured that people who want to watch DVD's are going to buy a DVD player.
Assuming that the choice of avoiding or reducing piracy will win out over econimics for any console developer is just stupid. Its an important secondary concern, but not the primary concern. At least not right now, and certantly not 7 years ago.
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