SpritesMind.Net

tails92 wrote:Is it the "anti-piracy" bit you mentioned earlier? Sorry to be harsh, but "anti-piracy" stuff doesn't belong where people research stuff about hardware (like here). That totally defeats the purpose.

Which is why I asked Aamir to check what his emulator-detection program did in order to prevent that. I know all programmers will use it to prevent it being run on emulators rather than for things like QJimbo said such as disabling/enabling certain features that work in one place but not in the other.

tails92 wrote:And if you don't want to disclose information about your cartridge, if you sell them, people will reverse-engineer them the same and will emulate it, and you'll get a bad reputation.

I was going to say that but you beaten me

TmEE co.(TM) wrote:my method is undocumented (well, it was documented a bit, but I removed all for one reason...) and I'll not help emulate it... and its for security too...

You develop the game/software for MD, trying to protect it from piracy, but whether you have a license to manufacture games/software for MD? If not - then you pirate himself. This is ridiculous.

The license is for using the tools that Sega gives you. If you use your own devkit you're free to do anything without the need of a license. Luckily, otherwise none of our games would be legal.

piracy is a different thing, someone does illegal copies of other's work, what I'm doing is "unlicensed production" since what I do is 100% original and I have no license to do my stuff... I just try to protect myself (well, my code)... pirates don't like to put extra HW in the carts.... I've always had to add the SRAM mappers into my pirate carts for saving ( http://www.hot.ee/tmeeco/S3PLUSSK.JPG )

TmEE co.(TM) wrote:my method is undocumented (well, it was documented a bit, but I removed all for one reason...) and I'll not help emulate it... and its for security too...

Securing what? Yes, I know that since you are doing a commercial game, emulation "might" hurt your revenue. Sorry but, I just can't wait to break it .

EDIT: If i find a way to break the protection, I promise I won't include it in Regen until you've made enough money .

Sik wrote:The license is for using the tools that Sega gives you. If you use your own devkit you're free to do anything without the need of a license. Luckily, otherwise none of our games would be legal.

I don't know exact situation with Sega, but usually that's not true. LYou must get developer license to have rights to release/sold anything for this system, devkit does not matter. You also need to go through system's owner QA to get permission to release your project.

The QA check is part of the license really. And still, Sega can't ask you for a license if you did everything by yourself, it's as simple as that.

AamirM wrote:Securing what? Yes, I know that since you are doing a commercial game, emulation "might" hurt your revenue. Sorry but, I just can't wait to break it .

EDIT: If i find a way to break the protection, I promise I won't include it in Regen until you've made enough money .

And the EEPROM mapper is not the only thing that prevents it form running in emulator... you will need to have PERFECT emulator to get it running without hacks (which I've made difficult to perform too)... if you've managed to get past "EEPROM chip error" message, you'll see "Ahem, why do you want to use <put emu name here> to run this game ?"... HW is a funny thing

Sik wrote:The QA check is part of the license really. And still, Sega can't ask you for a license if you did everything by yourself, it's as simple as that.

They can, your thing is running on their HW... just make a game for PS3 and start selling it... Sony will eat you alive, and your family too

TmEE co.(TM) wrote:

AamirM wrote:Securing what? Yes, I know that since you are doing a commercial game, emulation "might" hurt your revenue. Sorry but, I just can't wait to break it .

EDIT: If i find a way to break the protection, I promise I won't include it in Regen until you've made enough money .

And the EEPROM mapper is not the only thing that prevents it form running in emulator... you will need to have PERFECT emulator to get it running without hacks (which I've made difficult to perform too)... if you've managed to get past "EEPROM chip error" message, you'll see "Ahem, why do you want to use <put emu name here> to run this game ?"... HW is a funny thing

What, can you also detect exactly which emulator is being run? (oh, yeah, easy, Regen can by-pass the exception-based emulator detection; Fusion is accurate for most things, through not that one; Gens... well, you know how Gens is ).

TmEE co.(TM) wrote:

Sik wrote:The QA check is part of the license really. And still, Sega can't ask you for a license if you did everything by yourself, it's as simple as that.

They can, your thing is running on their HW... just make a game for PS3 and start selling it... Sony will eat you alive, and your family too

Then I can wait until you start selling the game to tell Sega about you, right? Bah, I won't do it, but c'mon, even if it's true, it's obvious Sega doesn't care anymore (they make money with old games in collections and the virtual console, not with new ones). In the worst case, consoles would start being sold again... and that's money for Sega, right?

Sik wrote:What, can you also detect exactly which emulator is being run? (oh, yeah, easy, Regen can by-pass the exception-based emulator detection; Fusion is accurate for most things, through not that one; Gens... well, you know how Gens is ).

There's some other ways than unemulated exceptions...

Sik wrote:Then I can wait until you start selling the game to tell Sega about you, right? Bah, I won't do it, but c'mon, even if it's true, it's obvious Sega doesn't care anymore (they make money with old games in collections and the virtual console, not with new ones). In the worst case, consoles would start being sold again... and that's money for Sega, right?

Luckily for us, Sega indeed does not care.

Hey, if it makes you feel any better, I'd be doing the same thing if I was in your place .

Heh, Tiido, even thought about someone getting the ROM off the cart and then patching it to make it run? It's like the anti-mod games for the PS1, they got cracked after a while, and the newest modchips even made themselves "stealth" to bypass the protection.
The time spent to protect the game isn't really worth it considering you can at most gain $100 or something like that from something homebrew and for old unsupported systems.

You just made me remind about certain trick that prevents any binary data from being modified and not being detected, and it isn't easy to remove it (like skipping a simple checksum subroutine).

Also Tiido you better go and use a different checksum algorithm because with your library I also got the algorithm you were using too

EDIT: also, piracy has been improved now, and unless you have a strong protection mechanism, you may get a cracked version of your game just a day after it has been released. Watch out

I can understand about protection, though I'd not go that way.

I think, it's better to make ROM image version completely free, but with slightly limited features, and also make deluxe version on real cartridge. Deluxe version must have collection value - good manual, package, etc, and maybe some features which will be available only for this version and only for real hardware (and will be useful only for hardware - like saves, maybe additional sound hardware, etc). Collectors can buy deluxe version (and will have reason to do it, even if price will be high enough). Emulator users can just donate money at will - they don't need real cartridge anyway, so they don't buy it. This way game get bigger audience and do self-promotion: if collector buy bad game, he just don't support you for next time; but if you game is good and collector see it (with emulator version), it will be additional reason for him to buy it.

Any plans to do that with your game if you manage to finish it?