Comment by dyingkneepad
4 years ago
There is one thing about video-game piracy that I never understood. Back when I was a kid, there was a lot of piracy for Playstation 1 games. In my home country you could buy any game for the price of a Big Mac. It didn't matter that the game CDs contained copy-protection, the CDs you could buy also had them and were indistinguishable from the original CDs.
Then PS2 came (or was it PS3?) and all the pirate CDs/DVDs simply disappeared. I never understood what made game media piracy nonviable with newer consoles. Why can't the pirates simply copy every single bit of the newer game media as they did before?. I think the WII had some piracy CDs easily available but you also had to mod your console somehow. I'd be happy to have an answer from any of the hackers here :).
Edit: I'm not talking about "home piracy" where you copy your CD in your PC using cloning software, I'm talking about industrial one, you could buy these games in real stores that also sold other stuff brought from China.
Are you sure that the PlayStations you had weren't modchipped? The PSX had physical copy protection (the "wobble groove") that was relatively easy to circumvent (you could manually switch a genuine game for a pirated game once it had passed the check). Modchips made it even easier by just dummying out the wobble groove check. Later games started using Sony's LibCrypt and various checksumming maneuvers to detect pirated copies, but that was all defeatable.
The PS2 used a lot of the same tricks, it was just better at it. But once consoles started having internet connections, they could start doing checks that way as well, and ban people using modded consoles.
You absolutely can mod modern systems to play pirated games. The tradeoff is that you can never use online services. That's why people don't do it as much anymore.
First generation copy-protection efforts were lackluster.
Case in point: I ordered three DVD box sets from eBay, new and sealed, a few weeks ago. All three were counterfeit, and all three were from different sellers. Very convincing counterfeits all of them - but the single-layer discs (because pirates struggle with the more common dual-layer) and lack of copy protection on studio releases (because pirates can't recreate it) were the giveaways - along with some sloppy data layer cutting edges.
Compare this to, say, Blu-ray. It has also been cracked - but counterfeit Blu-rays are far, far more rare and easily detected. Why? The DRM is stronger, sure - but Blu-rays are also entire Java programs and much harder to replicate or rip than a DVD menu. Many Blu-ray Discs have Cinavia, which embeds invisible data inside the video and audio streams informing the player that the disc should have copy protection. Cinavia can't be removed without massive distortions to the video and audio, and pirates can't create their own copy-protected discs - thus, any attempt to make (even press) an unprotected disc with a protected video stream will fail. And finally, rather than DVD which has the recordable and pressed discs with a similar color, Blu-ray uses almost transparent discs for pressed ones, but dark black for burnables, making spotting fakes visually easy.
Where am I going with this? My point is that DVD used only one real form of protection, and it was weak and broken less than a year after release. Blu-ray uses up to, I believe, five different methods all assuming the others have fallen. And that's for a system that doesn't get software updates and came out 15 years ago, unlike a video game console.
DRM in breadth and in depth.
DVD CSS could be cracked for every movie in just 20 minutes of MPlayer+libdvdcss. Then, the key was cached.
> Why can't the pirates simply copy every single bit of the newer game media as they did before?
Ah! So actually, they implemented a really (technically) cool DRM that is totally sideband to the bits of data on the media. It relied on tracking servo feedback that most (all?) cd burners ignored.
Though, this pertains to ps1, I'm sure they did something similar and perhaps harder to spoof for ps2.
https://hackaday.com/2018/11/05/how-the-sony-playstation-was...
You would love the history of cat and mouse with the Xbox 360! When Microsoft lost another round they came out with the brilliant idea of making the games larger then commercially available dvds had space for. The next round hackers truncated the games so they could burn to standard disc as most games had a lot of padded data it didn’t need and this worked well for a while. Then the ban hammer dropped and a bunch of people playing truncated games got banned. So the next thing the hackers did was so cool. They found a way to burn more data to a standard DVD. DVDs were 7.5gb too small for xbox games which were now made to almost 8gb if I remember correctly. Hackers developed a custom software for certain DVD burners, the one I used was a lite-on drive but they supported a few different ones, and you would flash the firmware of the DVD burner and it allowed you to write to the very edge of the DVD. Typically DVD burners don’t allow you to write to this area because it can sometimes be prone to errors. Hackers didn’t care though they even came out with a program that would scan your disc after and verify it was clean with no errors so it was essentially a clone. Of course you still needed a flasher DVD drive in your Xbox but Microsoft wasn’t able to detect that they were detecting discs. It was such a cool cat and mouse game in the end I stopped with the burnt discs and went for the reset glitch hack which allowed me to play all the games from an external HDD but of course not online with microsoft. Though you still could connect to other servers and do things like album cover downloads and play with other hackers xboxs. Good memories.
>Xbox 360! When Microsoft lost another round they came out with the brilliant idea of making the games larger then commercially available dvds had space for.
When Windows & DOS were still normally installed from 3.5 inch floppies, each Microsoft factory install floppy also had more data on it than a PC would be able to write to a regularly formatted blank floppy.
Oh so interesting!
> Along with the region specific license key data, Sony pressed a special pit into the TOC of every disc. This pit, or “the wobble groove” as it would become known, was virtually impossible for consumer grade CD writers to replicate. A CD writer laser would need to be programmed to physically move in three dimensions in order to burn the wobble groove into a CD-R. So the patented pressing process achieved both copy protection and region encoding simultaneously.
A nice game of and mouse with the modchippers described as well.
Cdrdao dumped most PSX games in order to be played under an emulator, tho.
On bootleg chinese games, you could get 20 in 1 cartridges for the Game Boy on your local video renting store.
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I remember all sorts of bootleg media prior to the PS2 release, and what I suspect happened is that there were large crackdowns with FBI investigations and raids on bootleggers. They went after homeless people selling bootleg VHS and DVDs on the street, too. I haven't seen much counterfeit media since then.
Modern DRM uses cryptography and remote attestation, but that wasn't around in the PS2 era.
How does that work? Is every legitimate CD different, with some unique key? Otherwise why can't pirate versions use the same key?
I can't speak for all systems, but some games on CDs were burned with unique keys, yes.
They didn't disappear, they moved online. You modify your own console, download the cracked games and burn your own physical media. Selling actual discs became less profitable (fewer buyers) and riskier (stronger enforcement).
Also selling physical (or digital) copies was rarely done by the crackers themselves (that's actually looked down upon in the community), mostly by third parties who usually had better Internet access/knowledge. When everyone started having unlimited ADSL/etc, their small business dwindled quickly.
Not sure where you grew up, but PS2 piracy was rampant and easily accessible. It probably had more to do with local copyright laws than anything technical.
As far as anti-piracy measures go, the PS3 is where Sony upped their game AFAIK.
There's a really good presentation, by a Microsoft Platform Security Engineer, detailing the lengths they went through to ensure only properly signed executables run on the Xbox One and really answers your question. One of the tools they developed, HVCI, was later incorporated into Windows Hyper-V.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7VwtOrwceo
VMware actually filed and was granted a patent for the same technique, years earlier, though to my knowledge they never used it for anything (not even for counter offensive purposes against MSFT :).
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7984304B1/en
Microsoft would have had proof of using the technique earlier. It was designed into the Xbox 360, so it would have been already taped out by that priority date.
Today's 1st party game media has a number of unique properties that are difficult to replicate with your average at-home CD burner. I remember a lot of xbox 360 games had check codes etched into the platic inner ring of the disc, for example.
A number of patches and mods came out to attempt to disable these checks, including mods for the Wii as you mentioned.
PS1 (or PSX) had a technique for copy protection that depended on physical characteristics of the cd, something that was not copied when you made a backup. Still the mechanism was simple enough that you could bypass this check with a modchip, or even with a technique called disk swapping, in which you could swap an original disk at the right time with a pirated one and bypass the check. PS2 also required a modchip, AFAIK, there was not any technique to get around it.
On the next generations of consoles, ps3 and ps4 were software modded, so you could run copies, but they were loaded from the machine’s hard drive, so no cd copies were necessary.
There’s a modern way to play burnt dvds with no swap on a ps2. It pretends to be a video DVD (so no wobble groove check) and uses a buffer overflow in the DVD menu code handling to boot the game.
On PS2, there were certain games that could be exploited to allow a software mod to load.
Is it possible that people in your country simply got enough DVD burners that selling DVDs on the street was no longer profitable? Or street enforcement stepped up? I think that's what happened to Taiwan, at least.
Edit: People pointed out that PS2 discs had burned sectors that most consumer burners can't replicate. But I don't think that's really a complete answer as to why street vendors went away, considering Swap Magic[0] made disc-based piracy viable again in a few years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swap_Magic
I can remember people brazenly advertising console "chipping" in my local newspaper in the UK. I don't know why it stopped when we went from PS1 to PS2 (or Xbox).
From what my memory recalls, the PS2 era was when Sony started going after companies which made not just modchips, but any kind of device which let gamers use their consoles in ways they did not like. Think: Adapters which let you use PS2 controllers on an Xbox and vice versa.
Lik-Sang was (again as I recall) the primary target of all this, and was eventually forced to shut down. They were definitely the single best place to buy console modding and other weird and crazy accessories from Asia.
After the first volley, Sony and the rest started going after the smaller players, the local console modders, the ROM hosting sites, eventually even the hackers who discovered vulnerabilities themselves. 2002 was when they came for Lik-Sang and it had an immediate chilling effect, and they shut down as of 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lik_Sang
By the way - chipping services still operate, but they have a lot of ways of flying not under the radar exactly, but operating in ways which make it not worth it for Sony, Nintendo from going after them. Doing their manufacturing in China (of course), sales from various parts of eastern Europe, and the direct modding services being super-small time modders operating off local sites like OfferUp, Craigslist, or sometimes even eBay. It's overwhelmingly previous generation consoles they offer services for.
There was also a period when you could very easily (I guess you still can) buy "homebrew" cartridges for the DS, like the R4. Piracy was rampant. I have no idea what the scene is like now, but certainly GB/GBC/GBA/NDS files had no copy protection and were easily distributed online. To make things worse for Nintendo, a big SD card could hold a huge catalogue of games. Since it required zero modding, kids started to ask their parents to get them carts for Christmas and you can still buy them on Amazon. At some point there was a lot of scaremongering that the carts were illegal and that you'd get arrested for owning/buying one. There was a big crackdown and a bunch of countries banned them and fined/jailed distributors, but I don't it ever impacted serious pirates (who could just order them from somewhere like DX).
Things like this I reckon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tangled_Web
This is going off old memories so don’t take it for 100 gospel, but it’s my recollection of my youth when the consoles were in their life cycles.
PS1 chipping was/is very easy, decent sized pins/pads, depending on the chip it’s almost 8 solder points on the board (other chips had less solder points, it depended on the board revision and if you had a stealth chip or not). Any kid with a crappy soldering iron could install them. The code for the chips also got quickly “leaked” along with the methods the chips used so you could easily find chip code online and program your own chips using cheap microcontrollers. So basically there was very little cost (both in skill and cost) to get started chipping PS1s. So you had a very high success rate chipping them and a decent profit from each console (but as anyone who was so inclined could chip the console, it did lower the cost you could charge per mod. Me and my friend used to mod PS1s at school during our lunch break in the schools technology lab using the schools irons, solder and wire, me and my friend went half’s on a parallel chip programmer, so our overheads would be low, chipping PS1 was basically my first soldering adventures, that’s how low the skill bar was to solder these things in)
Once installed you just slapped a disc in the drive and played the game. (The early chips soon got “detectable” so game devs started putting copy detection in their games, but later chips started becoming “stealth” so would be much harder to detect and would play un-modifyed rips without issue, crackers would also bypass the copy detection in games so they would play on the old chips).
PS2 chipping started off slow, in the early days you would have to push button combinations to put the chip into the right mode for the game you were trying to play (PS1/PS2 CD/PS2 DVD), so the chips were not as user friendly as on the PS1. The chips would also need much better soldering skills to install as you needed to solder wires to some fine pitch ICs on the board. The chips were also more expensive as they required something a bit more “beefy” than the cheap microcontrollers used on the PS1.
So in the PS2 world (esp during the early days) the cost of installing the chips was much higher and they were not as user friendly. So imo the market wasn’t as large as it was for the PS1. (Plus I had started working and had some cash from my PS1 days tucked away, so I just got into the habit of purchasing my PS2 games.
That’s just what I remember, but its 1am, I’ve had a couple of beers, and this was all 20plus years ago so I may not be remembering everything 100% correctly.
Side note: Iirc, chipping an Xbox 1 was much easier than the PS2, and the Xbox 360 “just” involved replacing the firmware on the DVD drive for the console to enable backups so with the right tools (a PC, a ~£15 sata card and a screw driver, a bit later in the console lifecycle you also needed a serial port but a cheap USB serial converter would work, I used to use a cheap Nokia USB data cable with the end cut off and a sewing needle soldered to the RX line) you could flash all the 360s you could get your hands on (there was a decent amount of mail in work on the forums of private torrent trackers, people would open their 360, mail off their drive for £4~ first class recorded (in the UK), and get it back a few days later flashed.
There are lots of great deep dives into piracy protection for various game consoles on YouTube. I highly suggest taking a look. It’s very interesting.