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Sony's Clever but Flawed PlayStation Copy Protection--And How They Might Have Fixed It

Technology Connections · Youtube · 9 HN points · 1 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Technology Connections's video "Sony's Clever but Flawed PlayStation Copy Protection--And How They Might Have Fixed It".
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The original PlayStation is a pretty neat thing. Using the CD as a storage medium was a smart move. But, Sony needed to add anti-piracy features to the disc to prevent miscreants from making bootleg copies of Crash Bandicoot. This video tells the story of how that works, why it wasn’t infallible, and also proposes a potentially impervious solution (24 years late, though).

Here’s that paper on reading optical discs. It’s a good read:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/f772/6d20c43b22fb13f8788c8c64df2dbe9fa44f.pdf

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Hacker News Stories and Comments

All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
Protection is at the physical level. I mean, it was for the CDs, but you can easily imagine stuff that you can press onto the disc that your burner can't do.

https://youtu.be/XUwSOfQ1D3c?t=481

May 04, 2022 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by Tomte
Apr 21, 2022 · 1 points, 1 comments · submitted by thunderbong
nh23423fefe
pirating psx games and doing disc swaps made me feel like a super hero. the xbox memory save hack was also amazing.
Aug 27, 2021 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by Tomte
Jan 26, 2021 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by Tomte
May 19, 2020 · 3 points, 1 comments · submitted by kibwen
kibwen
To summarize the copy protection itself, which is quite an interesting example of (subverting) opaque abstraction boundaries: because CDs contain physical imperfections, ordinary CD drives will automatically perform micro-adjustments on the laser lens in order to account for warped or imperfectly-centered discs. These adjustments take place in the hardware of the drive; by the time any user-provided software comes into the equation, the contents of the disc are irreversibly reduced to the data it contains, with no notion of how the lens had to "wiggle" in order to properly read it.

But as part of the manufacturing process for PS1 discs, Sony deliberately introduced pre-determined amounts of "wiggle" into the first sector that would be read by the laser, and constructed their hardware such that it would refuse to play any game whose disc did not match the intended pattern. Thus any ordinary computer could both read and copy PS1 games just fine, but any burned copies would fail to play.

Mar 27, 2018 · 2 points, 0 comments · submitted by sarreph
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