Banjo Tooie for N64 finally cracked | Hacker News Reader

Banjo Tooie for N64 finally cracked

eurasia.nu

109 pointsramiwi25 comments

The encryption algo:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?pid=explorer&srcid=0Bz16_...

One cool thing: looking thru the README it looks like they ended up fixing a part of Banjo Tooie that had always broken before due to the challenge/response being encoded wrong in one case.

I guess the DRM was strong enough for this product, it's past its shelf life now. Or is this a case of no one really wanting to pirate the game badly enough to put in the effort to crack it?

The real "DRM" of that game were the cartridges - even if you cracked the same, you couldn't burn it to a CD like the Playstation games, and N64 emulation on PCs was mostly a pipe dream at the time.

Dumped games doesnt need cracking in order to run on emulators, it was only required for use with n64 backup units. @rpledge: This game was a gem.

Uhm. It was? I remember running an N64 emulator on a 300mhz PII back in the 90's. A bunch of us were standing around and our jaws dropped when zelda ran for the first time.

I was one of those people picking up my jaw and elated about it.

UltraHLE (N64 emulator on PCs) came out in 1999 [1] Banjo-Tooie - came out in 2000 [2] And yes, there had already been Internet at that time too.

N64 game cracks were desirable even without emulation though. There had been "universal" carts (e.g. Doctor V64) that would enable running a game image on a retail console.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraHLE [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo_Tooie

It was a much smaller scene though, nothing like game carts for the GBA or DS.

It was. Yet not that much smaller to dismiss this is as a good counter example to the claims that every DRM will be cracked immediately and if something is not cracked then it just means there is zero interest in crack.

This has me interested, what did this protection actually preclude? What's possible now that it's cracked?

I know 1964 and Project64 could already play BanjoTooie (Although I think with some crashes) so if wasn't detecting flashing or emulation what was it doing? Or if it was, how did these emulators get around it without the specific game being "cracked"?

Or is it just the sort of thing an emulator...emulates?

I believe it's useful for the flashcard scene. All current Nintendo 64 flash cards (64Drive, everdrive64 etc) require a hardware CIC chip. I believe there's a different lockout chip between NTSC, PAL and certain games like Jet Force Gemini.

All flashcards have either the CIC required to be soldered on (destroying some genuine N64 game) or has a port for a cartridge to be plugged in (so the CIC maybe accessed non-destructively).

Once the lockout algorithm is discovered, they possibly no longer need the dedicated chip. (not sure about this part)

Cool. It's funny to think there's still an active N64 flashcard user base, since emulation for the N64 has always been pretty decent. My first foray into console hacks was with thick first gen PS2's, and all the ones I've bought over the years have basically died of old age, even with manual maintenance and cleaning, so I sort of stopped caring about the hardware. Makes sense that the older consoles with a longer shelf life would still have a lot of people who care about the real hardware.

When I read the size allocation for the static arrays, and they set the size in hex 0x10 rather than just 16, my mind always blows up because it is amazing how people in the emulator / virtualization world work so much with hex they probably can think it like decimal.

does this mean we can finally do something with those eggs, the key, and the door in the desert?

I think they implemented the stop'n'swop functionality on the xbox live arcade versions, did they not?

They did. Kinda ruined the fun of it though. Who remembers when those people extracted the debug codes from the ROM that let you actually get the eggs, on the n64 version? It was years after the game came out iirc.

I must admit I also clicked the link expecting something to do with eggs and crystal keys.

> Who remembers when those people extracted the debug codes from the ROM that let you actually get the eggs, on the n64 version?

I'm so glad somebody else remembers that.

It was years after the game came out, and was perhaps just a side-note in the videogames magazines, meaning that nobody believed my childhood self when I claimed to finally obtain the eggs.

FYI a spiritual successor to B-K appears to be in very early stages of development. https://twitter.com/MingyJongo

I do hope there is another Banjo Kazooie - not the nuts and bolts kind but a classic platformer even if it is not published by Rare I would still love to see it!

I spent probably hundreds of hours on rarenet, and playing tooie running around that damn water level pleading with that pirate guy to give up the ghost.

I still checked for years. In fact if anyone is interested in the full breakdown:

http://www.therwp.com/article/dk64-stop-n-swop-connection

I've never played this game? What's the deal with those eggs?

If you completed the first game (Banjo-Kazooie) 100%, the player was shown a video of the key and eggs, with a promise that they would be used in the sequel. (Banjo-Tooie)

The technology that would have made this possible through what was known as Stop N' Swap. Turn off one of the games, then while the data was still in the RAM of the N64, place the other game in the console. However, Nintendo had made a change to the console that made the time the console clears the RAM post-shutdown to 1 second, making this method impossible. (Tooie had an alternate method to get the items in that game alone, where they did grant bonuses)

In Kazooie, however, in-game cheat codes were discovered that let the player get the items anyways, although they had no function.

EDIT: irishcoffee's link below explains it better: http://www.therwp.com/article/dk64-stop-n-swop-connection

Now if they just get the ability to emulate SW: Rogue Squadron and Donkey Kong 64, I could die a happy man...

FINALLY!

Interesting article.

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