In your opinion, would this anti-piracy measure work?

[DarkeSword]

The point of the emulator is to EMULATE THE ACTUAL HARDWARE. Emulators don't emulate extra nonexistant keys. The game only sees what's emulated. There's no way for it to see past that.

The entire idea is completely wrong from a computer science standpoint.

I can't believe it took someone this long to actually make this point. Bravo Drack. Bravo.

[CHz]

I said it on the first page.

[Dhsu]

So did I? Kinda?

DS games can't have dongles.

Actually I imagine it would be fairly easy to use a GBA pak as a dongle. I'm not sure how you would prevent someone from dumping it and burning it to another flashcart, but I assume it would be the same way companies prevent people from copying USB dongles. Maybe you could make the system rely on custom hardware that's difficult to emulate. Or you might go the route of games like WarioWare Twisted...even though it's possible to emulate the gyro functionality on a PC, it's pretty pointless.

[Drack]

Usual anti-piracy measures include some extra chip on the cartridge outside of the ROM.

The ROM code checks for that chip, and does something undesireable if it's not detected.

Since emulators usually only have the ROM to go off of, unless they have a special code exception for that particular game or they also emulate that on-cartridge chip, the anti-piracy measure works. Since both of those workarounds require recoding the emulator, the antipiracy measures are effective until a fix is made.

Disc based systems are generally trickier, because you can't put hardware on a disc. A recent anti-piracy measure was implemented on Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii. It took advantage of a difference between the size of a Wii DVD-ROM and a standard DVD-R or DVD+R. The Wii DVD-ROMs have slightly fewer bytes of capacity, so they hold a little bit less data than standard recordable DVDs. The trick was to attempt a read on one of the bytes that only the recordable discs have. If the read failed, the game booted. If the read succeeded (only possible on a modded wii and a burned disc), the game refused to boot with an ominous "Unauthorized device detected" message. Of course, most modchips came out with an update patch within a week that would intercept reads and if a read was attempted on that area, automatically return a failure to read.

It's a cat-and-mouse game. The best antipiracy measures are not the most complicated ones, usually -- they are the ones that are most inconvenient for the pirates to get around -- the ones that take the longest time to fix because of that. After all, it's nearly always just a matter of time before a new scheme is broken, or an even newer one is devised.

[The Coop]

Usual anti-piracy measures include some extra chip on the cartridge outside of the ROM.

The ROM code checks for that chip, and does something undesireable if it's not detected.

Since emulators usually only have the ROM to go off of, unless they have a special code exception for that particular game or they also emulate that on-cartridge chip, the anti-piracy measure works. Since both of those workarounds require recoding the emulator, the antipiracy measures are effective until a fix is made.

Or until the ROM is hacked, like what was done with various MegaDrive games (not to mention countless PC/Amiga games).

[Dhsu]

Well if the game actually uses the chip to do processing (e.g. FX, Cx4, etc.), hacking the ROM would probably involve just emulating the chip anyway, or at least some subset.

[Broken]

CPS3 BOARDS!!!!

and soon Naomi.

Honestly, nothing is safe from piracy once there's enough interest in it. I agree with Drack's previous statements about anti-pirating

[The Author]

DS games can't have dongles.

They can... wont be practical