PSP piracy taking off with multiple games

[Muscelli]

Yup, weve heard of the Lumines Loader, now they have Puzzle bobble, puyo puyo fever, Coded Arms, and Mercury all running, and with sound!! Crazy stuff....

[NE146]

Crazy stuff....

What's so crazy about it.. Not like 99% of us didn't fully expect it from the get go. :)

[Muscelli]

THe crazy stuff is all the people talking about it, like the 12 year olds that tell u to email them the ISO....

Coded arms, ouch...

[Chuplayer]

I said it before, and I'll say it again.

Excellent... [/Mr. Burns.]

[poopnes]

It amazes me just how fast these guys are developing these hacks. I bet Sony is really shiting bricks.

[Mangar]

It amazes me just how fast these guys are developing these hacks. I bet Sony is really shiting bricks.

Don't amaze or surprise me one bit. As someone who's been involved in various scenes since the C-64 era (And even had those little Atari 2600 chips as a kid) - I'll say what i always say: There is nothing that Sony, or **ANY** company can do to protect their systems from dedicated hackers or crackers.

Excess protection only manages to annoy and turn off the actual paying customers really.

[Poofta!]

i was away last couple days.. someone fill me in.. wtf happened?? hehe

[Arcade Antics]

i was away last couple days.. someone fill me in.. wtf happened?? hehe
Since I don't have the foggiest idea of what in the hell you're referring to, how about if instead, we suplex you into next week for making a pointless post like this one? :D

[Poofta!]

i was away last couple days.. someone fill me in.. wtf happened?? hehe
Since I don't have the foggiest idea of what in the hell you're referring to, how about if instead, we suplex you into next week for making a pointless post like this one? :D


and i havent got the 'foggiest' idea of what YOU said.

i was referring (obviously) to:

"weve heard of the Lumines Loader, now they have Puzzle bobble, puyo puyo fever, Coded Arms, and Mercury all running, and with sound!! Crazy stuff...."

because i havent heard of Lumines Loader. and i have no idea what he meant that the other games play with sound... im assuming people found a way to throw the game on a mem card? but again i dont know, which is why i was asking...

now that i spoon fed all the details, anyone have more in-depth info?

[Gamereviewgod]

You can play PSP games off the memory stick now. That's the short of it.

[nate1749]

There is nothing that Sony, or **ANY** company can do to protect their systems from dedicated hackers or crackers.

Nothing they can do? I guess it depends on how long their protection will last, but there is certainly quite a bit they can do. To me if you can hold them off for awhile and make it inconveinent then you're pretty much successful.

Sony did well with the bad sector idea. By the time a mod that didn't require a swap was available sony was already very successful with the system.

Sega has probably done the best job. Saturns today are still a pain to mod and the dreamcast would have never had pirated games had Yamaha not screwed them over and starting selling GD-Rom readers.

Nintendo has also done a great job. Using carts w/64, emulation still is not 100% for all the games. Mini-dvd's were very smart with the gamecube and until recently you had to do that terrible broadband hack.

The more inconveinent the piracy is to use (e.g. swapping, case mod, long loading times, hardware mods (especially ones that have many tiny solder points)), the smaller the niche will be.

Obviously the PSP isn't holding it's ground to well, but I would hardly say there is nothing a company can do.

Nate

[unbroken]

have they made a umd movie loader yet?

[Kamisama]

[quote=Mangar]
Saturns today are still a pain to mod and the dreamcast would have never had pirated games had Yamaha not screwed them over and starting selling GD-Rom readers.


You can read GD-Roms when the data on them does not exceed a certain size. I dont know, maybe 700 MB or something.
And believe me, there are enough guys in the piracy scene who got Dev. Systems and everything, and there should be a GD-Rom reader somewhere ^^

[Mangar]

Nothing they can do? I guess it depends on how long their protection will last, but there is certainly quite a bit they can do. To me if you can hold them off for awhile and make it inconveinent then you're pretty much successful.

Sony did well with the bad sector idea. By the time a mod that didn't require a swap was available sony was already very successful with the system.

Depends on you're definition of "awhile" i guess. I can go in-depth into the PSX scene and it's piracy beginnings, but very simply - I think i purchased my PSX a month or so after launch. Not sure on the exact date, but wasn't much longer then that. Within a week i had a mod-chip installed on my unit, and well... You can do the math from there :)

The thing to keep in mind, is that the Sony Playstation was the most widely pirated console in what is essentially the history of consoles. The top end scene groups were doing stuff within a month of the consoles release, and the only thing which really held off the masses had nothing to do with Sony's protection or anti-piracy schemes. It centered around the fact that this was sort of the beginning of "CD-Burning" and CD Burners in general. Nowadays, they are plug and play devices. 80$, hook them up to an IDE port, and you're in. At the advent of the PSX, a cheap CD-Burner was still 500$+, and required a certain amount of technical know-how in order to get working properly. Especialy good burns. The software itself was clunky, you were required to have a SCSI adapter, and it was just a far-cry from the ease that people burn CD's today. It's what kept "The Masses" out for a good period of time, at least until prices dropped and burners became MUCH easier to use. But the top-end people? Sony didn't even have a chance.


Sega has probably done the best job. Saturns today are still a pain to mod and the dreamcast would have never had pirated games had Yamaha not screwed them over and starting selling GD-Rom readers.

Again - Both systems were having games released and ways to play them by scene groups within a month of release. Sega did do the best job, because by releasing systems that few people cared about, few people also cared about pirating on them. :)


Nintendo has also done a great job. Using carts w/64, emulation still is not 100% for all the games. Mini-dvd's were very smart with the gamecube and until recently you had to do that terrible broadband hack.

N64 Copiers existed during the life of the N64, which allowed people to play every N64 game for free. They were also readily available, affordable, and easy to use. Games for the N64 were released onto the internet sometimes a week prior to them hitting the stores, and never more then an hour afterwards. Same devices existed for the Super Nintendo as well. (And Genesis, etc.. etc..) So again: Not so great a job :)

My only point is - That if people wan't to pirate, they will. There will always be a small group of dedicated pirates, hackers, and crackers which will have these systems figured out within the first month. It's been going on forever, and won't stop regardless of what any company does. None of these companies have done "good jobs" in their efforts. They have tried and failed miserably, and the only people that they ended up pissing off(With the PSP especially) are the paying customers who wish to use them for legit or legal purposes.

[ddockery]

Yes, but nobody said anyone did a good job of outright stopping piracy, but rather a good job of making it difficult. In the cases of the cart systems with copiers, you had to buy a whole new piece of rather expensive hardware to pirate anything. I'd say that's a pretty good job.

[Anthony1]

I think Nintendo did a great job with the GameCube, as far as piracy is concerned.



Up until just recently, it wasn't even worth it to attempt to pirate any Cube software. So everybody that had Cube games during the first few years of the Cube's life were paying money for the real ones.

[Mangar]

Yes, but nobody said anyone did a good job of outright stopping piracy, but rather a good job of making it difficult. In the cases of the cart systems with copiers, you had to buy a whole new piece of rather expensive hardware to pirate anything. I'd say that's a pretty good job.

But is that really making it difficult?

Look at it logically: You spend 200$ for a Super Nintendo, and then another 250$ for a copier that pops on top and allows you to copy any game that you borrow from a friend, or rent from a videostore. All on highly affordable 3 1/2 diskettes. You can also download them if you choose. It's not exactly hard or difficult in any way, and the process itself was very easy and user-friendly. Once you pay for the unit(Which is hardly expensive when you consider that it paid for itself after 5 games) it was piracy bliss. Even for people who weren't tech-savvy in the slightest.

[hydr0x]

blah blah blah blah, blah blah

heh, you proved him wrong on every point, except the one point you ignored on purpose, Gamecube, say what you want, the GC pirate scene was crap, and i don't know a single person with a pirated gc game. Nintendo was very successfull in making sure people are not pirating their stuff. Now it's getting "better", but that's very very late in the systems life and doesn't change anything about the fact that this is a system where the devs won against the pirates

[hydr0x]

Yes, but nobody said anyone did a good job of outright stopping piracy, but rather a good job of making it difficult. In the cases of the cart systems with copiers, you had to buy a whole new piece of rather expensive hardware to pirate anything. I'd say that's a pretty good job.

But is that really making it difficult?

Look at it logically: You spend 200$ for a Super Nintendo, and then another 250$ for a copier that pops on top and allows you to copy any game that you borrow from a friend, or rent from a videostore. All on highly affordable 3 1/2 diskettes. You can also download them if you choose. It's not exactly hard or difficult in any way, and the process itself was very easy and user-friendly. Once you pay for the unit(Which is hardly expensive when you consider that it paid for itself after 5 games) it was piracy bliss. Even for people who weren't tech-savvy in the slightest.

maybe someone should mention that there was no mass-market copier for the NES 8-)

[hydr0x]

damn, double post

[nate1749]

What I was getting at it is the more inconveinent they make it, the smaller the niche of people who will use it. I don't know anyone with a cart copier for any system and I've never met anyone whose dones the recent painful gamecube hardware mod w/new case swap. It ends up being easier to just buy the games than deal with the complex hacks.

Plus the gamecube mod is very recent, nintendo is already coming out with a system in less than a year - I'd say that was a success.

Xbox on the other hand, well I cant think of any of the dozen or so people I know who don't have a soft modded one.

FYI - The dreamcast comment just can't be true. DC was released on 9/9/99, and the first pirated game wasn't until June of 2000 (check any 0day site), because slightly before then Yamaha started selling GD-Rom readers. Even then a boot disc swap was required (pain), and was not until months later that the self-booting option came out.

PSX was definitely not cracked within a month. Every cd-rom thought the disc was screwed up, so it took a lot of firmware hacking to get by that. Even then, you had to have the exact make and model cdrom of the one that was cracked.

You're also talking about 1995, there was still a large BBS scene at that point and to imply that mod chips and games were widly available just doesn't seem accurate to me.

Granted games weren't using the full amount of space, but still, at the time of 500 meg hard drives and 28k modems, you weren't doing much psx iso or rip swapping. Perhaps I'm way off though and the piracy started much earlier.

Nate

[§ Gideon §]

I don't get it... Are you guys cheering for the corporate pirates or the pirate pirates?

[boatofcar]

What I was getting at it the more inconveinent they make it, the smaller the niche of people who use it will be.

CD burning took off because anybody with half a brain could download napster, buy an external burner for $50 or so by 1999, and give record stores and record companies the finger. Copying video games has never been that easy, which is why video game piracy continues to not be nearly as much of a problem.

Now that PSP piracy becomes as easy as dragging and dropping an image onto a memory stick, the industry may have a much bigger problem on its hands.

[Mangar]

Well i didn't address the Gamecube, because to be quite honest - I don't own one, and don't know even one single person that does. :) - So it's not something i could comment on firsthand, while the rest of it i could.

I will however offer an opinion that one of the better ways to look at the current status of Gamecube piracy, is due to lack of interest. The best parralel i can think of would be back in the SNES/Genesis/TG-16 days. While SuperNES and Genesis copiers were widely available, TG-16 ones were not. It had nothing to do with any special protection, or methods used by NEC - It's simply that scene groups, pirates, and just people in general couldn't care as much about the system as they did the big two. That's pretty much how i'd approach the current status of the Gamecube. It's always been my experience that if dedicated pirates on the top rung WANT to pirate, hack, or reverse engineer something - They will. Nothing is unbreakable or unhackable if theirs a demand or a profit to be made.

Nate - I don't need to check public 0-day sites to get information. :) - I will point out however, that if you are using public internet websites to get all your information about piracy - Then most likely many of the opinions you have formed are wrong. A lot of animosity exists between scene groups and public 0-day sites that bookmark and draw attention to their activities, so it's not as if they getting firsthand news and reports. With that said though.

I can comment rather in depth as to the BBS scene, the exact date of the ISO scene, and others. But i won't for obvious reasons - However, In regards to the PSX: Keep in mind it took a simple modchip to crack it, and that the system was available to people well before it's US release date. The PSX was cracked very early, and it's hardware was never a problem. The only thing that stopped widespread piracy of the system was technology constraints. (CD-Burners at that time period) Once technology became more user friendly and available for little Timmy down the block, that changed considerably.

[sharp]

[quote=Mangar]

Sega has probably done the best job. Saturns today are still a pain to mod and the dreamcast would have never had pirated games had Yamaha not screwed them over and starting selling GD-Rom readers.

The Saturn isn't hard to mod, I own a modded Saturn. It only cost me 25 euro (CD-R board, 50/60 Hrtz switch and region switch). Oh and I never played any game I did not own legal. I only downloaded games which I have sealed.

[zmweasel]

www.psphacker.com has a screenshot of the forthcoming "UMD Launcher 3.0," which will apparently let you rip UMDs to the Memory Stick with the press of a button.

http://www.pspupdates.com/wab346346227742.jpg

-- Z.

[rbudrick]

maybe someone should mention that there was no mass-market copier for the NES

No, none at all..probably only about 20-30 of them.

-ROb