Arcade Games: Hacking, Emulation, Preservation

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26 points·silsha··3 comments

Heavy on retro nostalgia, but there are good hardcore hacking bits in the talk.

I found it interesting both Capcom and later Sega used custom security scheme that encrypted specific address ranges used for code, and how it was defeated. Very same method is used to this day* in Bluray drives, and is as "easy" to defeat.

* Micah Scott is working on reverse engineering USB bluray recorder firmware. She found encrypted procedures in firmware running on one of the processors inside the drive, and was able to decrypt it using similar trick(pushing own code after decryption, but before execution over jtag)

http://vimeo.com/channels/coastermelt/111417458 talk about decrypting AACS DRM function starts at ~10:00 minutes.

I don't know if any of the web sites are still up, but King of Fighters 2000 was the first arcade game that I remember with both fairly difficult ROM encryption and a public, documented effort to crack it. The cart was being dumped by two groups, one based in Italy and one in Taiwan, that posted loads of pictures and a detailed technical explanation of what they had to do. The project deserved a book like Hacking The Xbox.

Worth a read if you can still find any of it. It also kind of marks the end of an era in arcade hardware -- that was the last major effort of a manufacturer to really lock down a game through this means; afterwards everyone switched to the more advanced disc-based systems that were hard/impossible to emulate instead of being hard to decrypt.

This was hugely interesting. And Ange was fantastic.

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