[svenpeter]

To be fair, we deliberately used very obscure hardware "features" which we knew were not implemented by any emulators and probably not used by any games to build these protections :-)

I'd have to dig up the old code but I'm fairly sure some of them rely on an operating system (Nintendo IOS, unrelated to both Cisco's IOS and Apple's iOS) running on the co-processor (nicknamed "Starlet"). Dolphin doesn't emulate that part at all because IOS exposes a high-level interface that can just be emulated instead. Works amazingly well for games, but will probably trip our protections.

[sumtechguy]

What I find interesting in addition to that is how much slack most software allows. I remember lurking on the alt groups when emus were being discussed for things like an amiga or pc. They were talking sub cycle accuracy would be totally necessary for anything to work at all. Yet most software seems pretty chill with 'sort of close' results. It is oddly counter intuitive. Intuitively they were right but ended up being wrong (mostly). Some bits though you need that accuracy. Mostly you dont.

I think a lot of software companies would do like what you did. Where they would check for some sort of thing that should be there, or not, or too much of something. But the emulator would or would not have it. I think in many cases it would be things like checking to see if 512k of memory was available, when the real box would have 128k. That was usually for things like copiers I think?

[svenpeter]

Yup, I'm pretty sure many software companies have done similar things. It's a bit easier on video game consoles where your software runs on the very same hardware everywhere and you can pull off more subtle tricks. There were a few commercial games that also used a similar approach [1].

[1] https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/02/01/dolphin-progress-rep...

[93po]

Is it weird that you sound proud about this? Is there something noble about doing work that makes lives harder for hobbyists trying to preserve video games for the future, and has nearly zero impact on the actual sales of the game at release?

[svenpeter]

> Is it weird that you sound proud about this? Is there something noble about doing work that makes lives harder for hobbyists trying to preserve video games for the future, and has nearly zero impact on the actual sales of the game at release?

What makes you think we did it for any of those reasons? And how does us abusing hardware bugs make video game preservation any harder?

This was not for a commercial game, this was for an entry point to load your own software on a locked down video game console.

And back then people were selling our (free!) software and we added those protections to make sure we could show a "you have been scammed if you paid for this" screen that couldn't be removed. Unfortunately that also meant breaking our loader from running in emulators, but that didn't matter at all: Those could just directly launch actual .elf files anyway and didn't need the detour through the homebrew channel.

The code (minus those protections) for the Homebrew Channel is also available as open source these days.

[93po]

I'm clearly not grasping the full context here. Sorry for the snide remark

[svenpeter]

no worries, this stuff happened over a decade ago. I can sometimes barely remember the details :)