Breaking the console: a brief history of video game security
88 points by sprado
by wise0wl
3 subcomments
So, I don't know if this is AI generated or whether the author is actually unaware, but Atari cartridges and floppies commonly had copy protections. My uncle was active in the scene at the time, and as an electrical engineer came up with a solution. When I inherited his Atari 800 in the 90s there was a physical button wired into the floppy drive which would force a bad sector onto the disk as it was being written. He had notebooks about the timing for these bad sectors per game.
So, yeah. The "article" is incorrect from nearly the get-go about the "wild west" Atari age.
by sprado
1 subcomments
After some time without posting on my blog, I decided to get back to it — and my first post after the break is about the history of video game security! There are also some great stories along the way, like Atari reverse-engineering Nintendo’s lockout system, or how simply changing the name of Link's horse became an attack vector on the Nintendo Wii. I had a lot of fun researching and writing this article, and I learned a lot in the process. I hope you enjoy it too!
by favorited
0 subcomment
The best part of the 10NES design, as a consumer, was that it was fail-safe, rather than fail-secure. The console defaulted to booting. So, if your NES started having the infamous boot-reset flashing light, all you had to do was unscrew the NES enclosure and clip the power pin on the 10NES chip. And these were huge pins, it didn't require any subtlety. You could do it with a nail clipper.
by bob1029
1 subcomments
The modern consoles are pretty close to perfect with how they use PKI and certificates. Even if you clone the cryptographic identity of a valid console, the vendor can quickly detect this impossible access scenario.
by riverforest
1 subcomments
The cat and mouse between console makers and hackers is one of the more honest stories in tech. Both sides kept making each other better.
by cheeseomlit
1 subcomments
Back in the day I remember my brother got his hands on a PS1 modchip, but it didn't require any soldering- you just plugged it into the "parallel I/O" port in back of the console and it let us run games on burned CDs. We really got our moneys worth at blockbuster after that
Thanks for such an interesting read. Would be awesome to get sort of a "follow up" about modern sophisticated digital solutions we have now (denuvo and so on)
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