Re: [stella] Perfect BIN copy protection

Subject: Re: [stella] Perfect BIN copy protection
From: Thomas Jentzsch <tjentzsch@xxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 10:17:21 +0100
At 02.02.2002, 23:04, Chad Schell wrote:
> There is no flaw in the Cuttle Cart's emulation of various ROM and RAM
> modes once switched to that mode.

I really hope, nothing that I posted here could be misinterpreted that
way. 


> I provided
> this known state to Thomas and Manuel at their request as they wished to be 
> able to detect Superchargers and Cuttle Carts and disable them.

Yes, Chad has been more than fair when providing the informations for us.


> This preset condition will not affect most games, as they're not actively 
> seeking out these values.  The effect I figured most likely to occur in a 
> game was that if they relied on a RAM value being random to initialize a 
> random number seed, that the seed would always be the same after loading a 
> cart.  So far I haven't received any complaints of any obvious effects as a 
> result of this, so it's apparently not much of an issue.

Those effects might be hard to recognize. It depends on what the random
number generator is used for.

But I don't think, that any game out there is relying on that. And so CC
is working 100% perfect.


> I have however, received numerous emails asking how to make Gunfight work 
> on the Cuttle Cart.  I reply to these requests that the author of Gunfight 
> has specifically designed the game not to run on the Cuttle Cart, and they 
> should go bug him if that bothers them.

Perhaps the CC incompatibility information got lost or wasn't made clear
enough. May be Manuel should try that once more.

But that's not an easy task, still people are asking why Thrust isn't
working in Stella and I made that more than clear (I thought):
It's written in the manual (RTFM!), and also on several of the download
pages. 


> Also, as I think
> far too much energy is being spent to lock it out, I'll close with this 
> hopefully sobering fact.  It would be trivial to load a locked out game 
> into the Cuttle Cart, unaltered, in such a way that it would not see the 
> Cuttle Cart pattern.  (And this is without altering the Cuttle Cart.)

Ok, so you should publish this to the public and nobody will every try
again to stop the CC.

So, knowing that, only leaves the hack protection, but due to the
limited abilities of most of those hackers, that's to simple to continue
even talking about. :-)


> ...can we stop proudly harping about killer ways to disable the Cuttle
> Cart and move on?

The "killer ways" I was "proudly harping about", where not how to
disable CC (because we both know that's trivial), but to prevent people
from removing this disabling code or the hack protection. 

And now, I'm moving on... :-)

Have fun!
Thomas                            
_______________________________________________________
Thomas Jentzsch         | *** Every bit is sacred ! ***
tjentzsch at web dot de |

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