Hacker News Comments on
Sony's Clever but Flawed PlayStation Copy Protection--And How They Might Have Fixed It
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Jun 16, 2022
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comboy on
Sega Saturn CD – Cracked after 20 years (2016) [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.
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⬐ nh23423fefepirating psx games and doing disc swaps made me feel like a super hero. the xbox memory save hack was also amazing.
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⬐ kibwenTo 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.