Gamecube Technical Questions

[aDoL_iVxX]

Hey there, does anybody have or know where to find any technical information on the Gamecube, or its methods of copy-protection? I'm thinking that it probably wouldn't be very hard to get something going... I have electronics experience as well as programming, etc... so far, this is what I've gathered:

The barcode on the gamecube disc is a form of copy protection.. presumably the GC reads the barcode and compares it to a "master barcode" hardwired into the GC's bios or something...

The empty ring around the whole of the GC disc... don't know what this is, but I've heard that it's similar to some type of existing protection used for PC discs... (I don't come across original PC CDs much, y'know? ;) ) Looking at it closely, one can see that it is comprised of little sections, with fainter lines in each section... the lines are not evenly spaced apart, so maybe this is like a "barcode" too?

Oh, another thing about the actual barcode; how does the GC go about reading it? Is it done with the laser, and if so, is it outside the normal reading range of a CD/DVD reader?

Also, if anyone else is interested in this, a good place to go is the US patent online search... EVERY thing has to be written out and explained to the patent office... that's where I found the complete breakdown, FROM SONY, of how the PS2's copy protection works... and though no one will listen to me (they just say "it's impossible"... yeah, those are the ones who'll never do anything but be somebody else's bitch their whole lives), I'm fairly certain that it would almost easy to modify a CDR/RW to be able to burn a PS2 game that would boot w/o the use of a modchip, etc... but that's for another day :)

One last thing; has anybody tried networking the GC through the broadband adapter? Hell, that's what we did on the dreamcast, worked great... I just don't have the BB adapter for GC yet, cause I really don't wanna pay to play Phantasy Star Online, when I used to play it for free on DC...

Later
aDoL_iVxX

[Quall999]

Hmm. Did you try putting electritions tape on the bar code, to block it? If the GC reads it and it is covered, then the barcode might not do much.

As for the Broadband thing... I have a dreamcast and a coders cable, so I am familiar with copying DC games (i'm assuming that the BBA method is similar). The DC doesn't really have any good copy protections in the DC itself. Which is why you don't need a modchip to boot games. So, it was pretty easy to boot anything in the DC.

Lets get to my point, the Dreamcast had software you had to load up first to accept the connections, before you copy the games. The problem in the GC, is that you can't load up any software. But if a modchip ever comes out that allows you to boot unsigned code, I believe that your right on the BBA part, and thats probably the way things will flow (kinda like the xbox, but without the easy to use interface).

The first thing that has to be done is to crack the hardware, which most people on these boards still don't understand. Everyone seems to think there's a way to read the GC's discs inside a normal PC dvd-rom, and thats all that has to be done to play copied games. Thats not the case (I could be wrong though. Only time will tell). I think that Nintendo encrypted their dvd's like M$ did. They made it so the games can, in no way, be read on a normal dvd-rom.

I can't program and don't really have any hardware experiance, but I'm pretty sure that this is the case.

[eviled]

I painted the "barcode" over and the disc started normaly!

It's not even possible for the head to reach this area! (I measured it.)

The following is just speculation on my part without any real knowledge to back up.

Normal CD & DVD have their TOC located near the centre auf the disc (their read inside out) and CD-/DVD Roms are hardwired to read the TOC at this specific location only. When you enter a GC disc into your reader it tries to read the toc at that position but can't find anything because there is nothing! Worse the remaining part on the GC disc fools the reader to re-read the TOC over and over!

As i mentioned above I measured the reach of the GC laser head and it can't reach this part, it starts to read just after the empty space so I think that the TOC is located there!

I think in order to read a GC disc on a PC DVD Rom you would either have to hack the bios so that it reads the TOC an another position on the disc or modify the hardware of your Rom so that the head won't move all the way.

Clumsy but I think you'll get my point.

So what do you think?

[aDoL_iVxX]

Hehee... so what you're saying is that the empty ring on the GC games is where the TOC would normally be located on a "normal" mini-DVD, but since there's a BLANK SPACE, your drive basically thinks that you've put in the equivilent of one of those clear plastic CD spacers that come on the bottom of CD spindles?

That makes perfect sense- plus it just seems like something Nintendo would come up with- elegent in it's utter simplicity. There's gotta be a way to get around this; I might try a CD forensnic program or something...

I just got 5 blank mini-DVD's in the mail; I'm itching to try them!

Also, does anyone have access to anything that will just straight duplicate a disc, no matter what is there? Aaak...

aDoL_iVxX