This is not a question about HOW to do it. I have no interest or capability to make this happen. I’ve wondered though why it’s so easy to copy PC games but you can’t really copy PS2/360/Wii games and get them to play on your console without buying one of those chips or whatever.
I guess what I’m asking is why don’t movie and PC game companies use the same anti piracy techniques as 360/Wii/PS2 etc… because I know that there are people who modify their consoles etc to play pirated games but it’s not as prolific as PC game pirating (I think) so why dno’t they use that anti piracy scheme for movies and computer games? (That’s a hell of a sentence).
Are there special drives in consoles that prohibit them from playing copies or something?
Mods don’t close this thread. I don’t want to know HOW to pirate/copy games because I already know people can do it. I just want to know what makes it harder for JQ public to throw a PS2 game in their dvd burner and play it like they can do with movies/pc games nowadays.
There is a header in the track leadin of a CD/DVD disk that identifies the media type. On a writable disk, this disk identification section is not writable. So even if all the other data is duplicated exactly, the disk type header identifies the disk as a writeable disk. Games consoles check this header and reject writeable disks.
DVD/CD player manufacturers don’t want to restrict their customers from playing their own media files - personal videos cut off a PC, self performed music etc.
I don’t know exactly - but some mods involve flashing the dvd reader firmware to always return the isn’t a writable disc code to the console. Of course, a simple console firmware update that checks the dvd reader firmware checksum can kill this particular hack.
Other mod chips intercept far more of the consoles behaviour by modifying memory, io and control lines.
There are some PC games you can’t copy, or can’t copy easily. The discs are created with intentionally bad areas on the disc that can’t be read, stuff like that. That’s been the case since at least C64 days. Of course the copying programs keep adapting too.
However, my WAG as to why PC games aren’t as commonly protected is they have to be compatible with every obscure brand of CD-ROM/DVD drive out there, and games often have a CD Key that needs to be entered to play the game, which provides some measure of protection, and a HUGE amount of protection if you play the game online. When you go online the game company can tell if 2 people are playing with the same key. So if you give your friend a copy of the game you can’t both play online, which is a hassle.
Some of the worse PC copy protection schemes need activation over phone or Internet (Flight Simulator X and Bioshock too IIRC.)
I hope this doesn’t get mod attention - nothing that would aid in cracking consoles.
Back in the day, the Playstation had region encoding to stop you using imports and a bad sector to stop you copying. The region encoding was a stream of text which was read from the disk. For Europe it said “SCEE” constantly (SCEE being Sony Computer Entertainment Europe). For US it said “SCEA”. The mod-chip detected this and changed the stream to a universal code which stopped region blocking.
The second aspect was the bad sector. Each original disk was pressed such that it had a specific bad sector in a fixed location. When you copied this on a CD writer the writer firmware wouldn’t allow this bad sector to be written - it just appeared like an error. So the writer would correct the checksum and write to the disk. The PS was able to detect this no-longer bad sector and refuse to load. All the mod chip did was to intercept this check.
The newer chips work in similar ways. The XBox360 chip sits between the DVD and the Xbox. It just rewrites certain parts of the data stream to mark the disk as being a legitimately authored disk, instead of showing a media type of DVD-R (for example).
The Ninendo disk based systems (gamecube and wii) and Sega Dreamcast use a weird disk format so you can’t master the copies yourself.
I think the short answer is that consoles are well defined hardware. You can build this stuff in, and you also know the exact spec and performance of each component. That alone gives you lots of opportunity for coding in protection. PC’s on the other hand are almost entirely random combinations of equipment. This makes it a lot harder (if not impossible) to rely on hardware based protection. Given that a game running on the PC generally has to coexist with other programs it’s quite* easy to start up a debugger, take the code to bits and remove the protection. To do this on a console you need to get access which is often tricky.
tim
quite easy should read “possible if you know what you are doing”
I’ve been spending the last 30 minutes trying to verify that some consoles actually spin “backwards” but I can’t find any hard info. If this is true, it would certainly hinder pirating.
Also, the Wii and Gamecube consoles don’t use a standard CD/DVD, but instead uses proprietary optical media to prevent piracy.
Another factor is that there’s a lot bigger market for PCs, and so much more effort is expended on ways to (legitimately or illegitimately) copy PC things. For instance, some of the game consoles use a different size of disk, and while one could presumably build a burner and blank disks for that size, it’s not worth it.
There is a deeper explanation for why you can’t copy console games as easily as PC games. With console games, the console maker makes little to no money by selling you the console. Instead, they make money off of licensing fees from the people who sell games for those consoles. So they work very hard to make sure that any game that will run on their console will have put cash into their pocket.
PC manufacturers, on the other hand, make very little or no money from the people who produce games for their product. They will put a certain amount of effort into providing copy-protection tools for folks who make software for their machines, but will not go to such great lengths as console makers.