how long before they will introduce special bad sectors on floppy disks, - sorry, wrong epoch, - special half-faulty components required for proper execution in chips to disable chip simulation/reverse engineering.
As an aside, I hate all of this. If someone made an open console, I'd buy it in a second. I realise that's probably my computer running linux next to me, but still...
Steam Deck?
The general field is called PUF (physically uncloneable functions)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_unclonable_function
https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/06/weak-bits-fl...
http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/210
http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/1429
https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/07/turning-400-...
This one describes very similar floppy protection - encoding physical disk parameters in the executable per every individual disk. https://scarybeastsecurity.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-cleveres...
Or perhaps the ECC simply works well enough that there's no perceptible data loss for audio?
that said, one of the first copy protection schemes involved writing specific sectors to a magnetic disk with an invalid checksum. when the program would start, it would verify that reading those sectors would return an error, but if you used a regular disk copy program it would not copy the invalid sectors- either resulting in an aborted copy or a copy that would zero out the bad sectors on the target which would not produce the expected read errors on startup telling the program it had been copied.