[mindslight]

This doesn't sound like it itself "exploits" anything, just deflates Nintendo's attempted scheme to exploit their customers by booby trapping their hardware.

If you rigged your car to destruct 30 minutes after it went out of cell service, sold it to an unsuspecting buyer, and then laughed when they got stuck in the desert, you'd be rightfully thrown in jail. But yet these companies keep attempting to pull the same shit with impunity.

[white-flame]

I actually kind of liked the Gameboy approach. You needed to include a byte-for-byte image of the trademarked Nintendo logo in order for the boot ROM to run your cartridge. So there were no technical hurdles to running your code in it, but it just made it legally dangerous to distribute.

[TheSoftwareGuy]

Holy shit. Is that why when you plugged in a cartridge a little weirdly, the nintendo logo would look all weird and the game wouldn't boot? it was a simultaneous legal protection and a harware protection? that was fucking genius!

[khedoros1]

The reason for the logo looking weird is that it did load the logo from the cartridge, and if the pins aren't reading perfectly, the data comes out wrong.

One of the first pieces of code in the startup code embedded in the GB's CPU reads the logo data, doubles it vertically and horizontally, and writes it out to the graphics tile memory. It scrolls down the screen, even if it's corrupted. Then it compares the logo with one built into the CPU and puts itself into an infinite loop if they mismatch.

So, yep. It's a combined data consistency check, and an attempt to use trademark to prevent unauthorized software.

[fragmede]

Sega tried this with the Dreamcast, and further, tried to enforce it in court.

They lost.

[Someone1234]

Indeed but since then the DMCA[0] has radically shifted to the law. Sega would win today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

[Pharaoh2]

IANAL, but the two things seem related, why is GP being down voted? From just a reading of the wiki pages without much law knowledge it does seem like sega would win today? What I am getting wrong?

[monocasa]

I don't think they would assuming that they wrote their own game and were only using of Sony's what was necessary to run their own code.

See Chamberlain v. Skylink for a post DMCA case on the matter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlain_Group,_Inc._v._S....

[tzs]

HN's algorithm to turn a URL into a clickable link can have trouble with links that end in punctuation, and your link fell victim. Here's an attempt to make it work:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlain_Group,_Inc._v._S...?

That's a mobile link since yours was mobile. Here's the non-mobile version:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamberlain_Group,_Inc._v._Sky...?

[Pharaoh2]

That seems to deal with anti-circumvention provisions and not copyright provision and not with infringing on trademark/copyright as the GGGGP (white-flame) seems to be pointing to.

[qbrass]

Genesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade

[samlittlewood]

Interestingly, this could be circumvented - the boot rom does the logo scroll using data from cart, THEN, in a separate loop checks it vs local copy. If you can make the cart read different data at each stage, you are golden!

IIRC Argonaut/Jez San had a POC of this using a very simple hardware bodge, intended as a potential way of publishing Eclipse (What became X) without a Nintendo licence.

Fortunately - Nintendo were interested in the 3D rendering, and that started the SuperFX/Starfox/ARC journey.

[userbinator]

More interesting reading on that subject: http://fuji.drillspirits.net/?post=87

[dwild]

> it just made it legally dangerous to distribute.

Internet and countries that don't enforce copyright exist you know? You can even get HDCP strippers on Ebay, pretty easily too. Never had any issue finding ISO and roms online, even for the Switch before this hack.

If only the legal side was a good enough security...

If you want a portable device that you can use to run your own software, then go get a tablet that run the Tegra X1, you will get the exact same thing.

[freerobby]

Do you by any chance have a source on this? I believe you, this is just such a clever system that I want to read more about it.

[khedoros1]

In the sense of "that's how the Game Boy behaves", it's not hard to find a dump of the startup firmware (and it's just 256 bytes).

At offset 0x21 (33), it loads the offset for the bitmap data in the cartridge into one register, and the address for tile data RAM into another. Offsets 0x27-0x32 are a loop that calls out to functions at offsets 0x95-0xa7 and 0x96-0xa7 to double up the bits and scale the image to 2x its original size. After the code to scroll the logo, it plays the iconic double-ping sound.

At offset 0xE0, it loads offsets for the firmware copy of the logo and the cartridge copy of the logo. 0xe6-0xef iterate through the logo. If at any point the 2 copies don't match, there's a jump at offset 0xe9. Here's the relevant part of the loop:

LD A, (DE) ;Load a byte from the cartridge copy

INC DE ;Increment the pointer to the next byte

CP (HL) ;Compare A with the byte at (HL)

JR NZ, -2 ;If not equal, lock up by jumping back to this location

The patent actually covers this on page 7: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/77/c0/90/d2c7514...

And claims 14+15 seem pertinent:

> 14. A hand-held electronic game machine in accordance with claim 9, wherein said processing means includes detecting means responsive to a connected external memory for detecting whether said connected external memory is an authorized or unauthorized memory.

> 15. A hand-held electronic game machine in accordance with claim 14 wherein the processing means includes further means responsive to said detecting means for preventing an unauthorized external memory from being used for executing a game program.

There's some good commentary on the legal situation, and its relation to Sega's similar legal theories (as regarded the Genesis/MegaDrive) on TVTropes (although it's a bit short):

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/CopyProtection/Nintend...

[crankylinuxuser]

Sounds kind of like a Tesla, now that you mention a car like that. They already will call and threaten you if you own a Tesla and mess around with it under the hood.

https://www.slashgear.com/expect-an-irate-call-if-you-try-to...

How much further will they go? Will they remotely disable it? Or perhaps, they'll send it into "Service Needed" mode and cripple it?

[hvidgaard]

It ought to be the law that anything I can do, is fair game. If I fuckup something it shouldn't be under warranty, but only for the issues the tinkering causes. If I can connect to a port in the car I've paid for, and read something, it's not industrial espionage. That is just Tesla being lazy and trying to get security-by-obscurity, instead of a proper secure implementation.

[freerobby]

That article is clickbait. Tesla contacted the owner out of fear that his car had been hacked (i.e. by someone else). That the owner stop was merely a "recommendation," warranty invalidation was the only threat they made, and "industrial espionage" was the owner's characterization of Tesla's concern, not an allegation it made against the owner. Lots of people have gone on to hack their Teslas without consequence in the years that followed.

There was another episode where Jason Hughes was denied firmware updates after rooting his car. Elon responded that no punitive action was intended and that he views white hat hacking as a gift, and they seemed to resolve it pretty quickly.

It will be interesting to see how Tesla responds to these cases when FSD is available.

edit: Here's the original post: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/successful-connectio...

> This evening I got a call from service center :crying: They told me Tesla USA engineers seen a tentative of hacking on my car... I explained it was me because I tried to connect the diagnosis port to get some useful data (speed, power, etc...). They told me it can be related to industrial espionage and advised me to stop investigation, to not void the warranty.... Don't know if they really seen something in the log, because I just sniffed the network. Or maybe they seen the port scanning with nmap ? Or maybe they just read this topic ? :eek:

[mikeash]

It’s half and half. This scheme defeats Nintendo’s attempt to control what console owners do with their own hardware, it’s true. But it also allows console owners to be exploited by malicious hardware (say, a cheap charger).

[tinus_hn]

Homebrew is cool but 99% of the real world usage is pirated games.

[BoorishBears]

Well it’s your choice, open hardware or billions of dollars invested in an industry employing millions of people...

[loup-vaillant]

How about an open hardware industry that would employ millions of people? Not to mention the questionable premise that we should have enough work to employ almost everyone. I mean, we're mostly programmers in here. Our primary task is to destroy jobs. Shouldn't free time be a good thing?

[BoorishBears]

People seem to not understand this was a tongue in cheek reference to the NES and the recovery from the 1983 crash...

That being said, I don’t have major qualms about closed hardware. It creates the incentives that have allowed for massive investment in what is now cutting edge technology, and over time it is trickling down to more open hardware.

The number of proprietary technologies in a modern high-end GPU is staggering. Maybe one could say in an alternate timeline open hardware could have beaten companies creating GPUs with proprietary IPs, but it didn’t really happen. So I’ll take 1080tis with binary blobs over the open alternative.

[yarrel]

False dichotomy.

[BoorishBears]

Not everything has to be a fallacy, I remember when people understood the concept of tongue-in-cheek.

DRM (10NES) was a core part of the strategy for the console that brought a recovery from the 1983 video game crash.

And even today publishers value a platform that is able to combat privacy (see: Denuovo and the lengths AAA productions go to delay piracy in PC.

[reality_czech]

Yes, publishers do certainly value a platform that is able to combat privacy. Although lately the combat has been a little one-sided.

[boomboomsubban]

>DRM (10NES) was a core part of the strategy for the console that brought a recovery from the 1983 video game crash.

About 1/3rd of the consoles sold didn't contain the DRM, yet the Japanese market still saw similar growth.

Publishers value Denuovo, is there any proof that it helps sales?

[BoorishBears]

1/3rd of the units sold? Or 1/3rd of the types of consoles? I know several consoles of the era also had DRM, so I’d be curious which ones youre referring to and the time period if referring to 1/3rd sold.

And if Denuovo actually helps sales is not an easy question to answer since no publisher has come out and said it (that I’ve seen).

The premise seems sound enough, sales follow an “inverse hockey stick”, so design DRM meant to delay cracking instead of stop it and you can get more time with maximum interest and sales, with no easy piracy options.

A few times it’s fallen in hours, and pirates started to write it off, but just recently Far Cry 5's implementation lasted weeks, which seems to be what they’re going for (some versions even lasted months on end).

One could argue no pirates would buy instead of wait, and one could argue all pirates would buy instead of wait, but both would be wrong and the truth is somewhere in the middle, publishers have evaluated that question and apparently the answer is something they like enough to keep shaving margins for

[baud147258]

If I remember right, DOOM and the latest Tomb Raider used Denuvo and they weren't cracked until a few weeks after release, but they did not report sales above the norm.

[boomboomsubban]

Sorry for the late reply

>1/3rd of the units sold? Or 1/3rd of the types of consoles? I know several consoles of the era also had DRM, so I’d be curious which ones youre referring to and the time period if referring to 1/3rd sold.

The Famicom did not have the DRM, and accounts for about a third of the total Nintendo sales. That market did not suffer because of the presence of piracy.

As for Denuovo, why would publishers hide data showing it works? And the base capitalism answer doesn't work,continuing to use aggressive DRM gives them information and a power over users that may not directly show a profit.

The rest of your arguments ignore the sales piracy brings because more people talking about it, an effective advertising, and the people who use piracy as a true demo.