Eric7100 Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 This thread refuses to end... 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slab0meat Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 This thread refuses to end... I know..... I cannot explain exactly why, but this thread has really left me with a bad taste in my mouth, to the point where I've considered stopping with INTV homebrews altogether and sticking with ColecoVision. Yes, I know that's ridiculous etc etc but it's a thought that remains every time I visit this forum, despite its lack of logic. That would involve selling off all my current ones I've acquired, too. Strange, even nuts, but the thought persists. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
108 Stars Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 You're very welcome. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rev Posted July 17, 2015 Author Share Posted July 17, 2015 Really? A discussion about DRM would make people "leave the scene"? Wow 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crazy Climber Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 Really? A discussion about DRM would make people "leave the scene"? Wow Some people are always looking for a reason to sell. They like the feel of collecting and buying stuff but then one day they realize they have $10,000+ in games and somethings gotta go. Homebrews are tough for people to sell because I think people that sell them feel they are "insulting" the programmer/etc.. Also when people cash out their homebrews people usually ask why and are sad they are leaving the scene (that is why you always see big un needed explanations as to why people are selling them when they do, car repairs, wife, blah blah) When a reason is presented, some people will pounce...this could be slabomeats "reason" to get his $$$ back and put it in to something he likes more If this is true, sell me your King of the Mountain!!!! I will not judge you 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rev Posted July 17, 2015 Author Share Posted July 17, 2015 My favorite excuse is blaming the wife! If the poor ole wives only knew they were the excuse. .....or maybe they do know? 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr SQL Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 A vid of this lost game would be cool? Is it not possible to block copy the disk including scrambled or invalid sectors? I'm assuming the bits are still intact, but designed to produce read errors when read. It is possible to copy the disk with this DRM, but the copies are unplayble unless you copy them back onto the DRM disk again. Would have to take the DRM code apart to get a copy to boot or replicate the pattern it's looking for; the game program fills the entire disk (160K) but the DRM has 5 hidden tracks worth of sectors to play around with (CoCo disks have 5 extra unformatted tracks). I think that today, just not releasing the ROM is sufficient DRM if the developer wants to do another production run. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+nanochess Posted July 17, 2015 Share Posted July 17, 2015 A discussion here leaves my heart untouched, no community is represented by the behavior of one person But somehow I feel there have been tries to make it bigger than it should be. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rev Posted July 17, 2015 Author Share Posted July 17, 2015 It is possible to copy the disk with this DRM, but the copies are unplayble unless you copy them back onto the DRM disk again. Would have to take the DRM code apart to get a copy to boot or replicate the pattern it's looking for; the game program fills the entire disk (160K) but the DRM has 5 hidden tracks worth of sectors to play around with (CoCo disks have 5 extra unformatted tracks). I think that today, just not releasing the ROM is sufficient DRM if the developer wants to do another production run. What system is this game for again? Or just a Pc game? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
townparkradio Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 It was announced via Facebook that the BD rom will be cancelled. Too bad as I planned to get to put on my CC3..... William Moeller I know that Boulder Dash has only been on sale for three months but due to lack of support I've decided to cancel the rom release. Sales were initially strong but have been generally disappointing. The customers have spoken. You're damned right we spoke. we said "Hey most of us don't have working hardware, so can we maybe buy a ROM instead"? Also... Hi, I'm back! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr SQL Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 What system is this game for again? Or just a Pc game? The TRS-80 CoCo. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pimpmaul69 Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 Also... Hi, I'm back!good. Welcome back my friend. Good to see you here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rev Posted July 18, 2015 Author Share Posted July 18, 2015 Welcome back townpark! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andromeda Stardust Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 It is possible to copy the disk with this DRM, but the copies are unplayble unless you copy them back onto the DRM disk again. Would have to take the DRM code apart to get a copy to boot or replicate the pattern it's looking for; the game program fills the entire disk (160K) but the DRM has 5 hidden tracks worth of sectors to play around with (CoCo disks have 5 extra unformatted tracks). I think that today, just not releasing the ROM is sufficient DRM if the developer wants to do another production run. So it's kind of like DVD where the decryption key is in a special code area around the center of the DVD disc. This is impossible to burn onto CDRs because they already have their own code in this area identifying the book type as CDR media and allowable burn speeds, laser power, etc. Only factory pressed disc can control data contained in this area. Also many disc contain bar codes around the center which require special lasers to etch them. It also makes a nice copy protection / region encoding scheme for CD and DVD based game consoles. Even Sony PS1 games are copyable (the disc can be read in any modern multiread compatible drive despite the black dye layer designed to block early CDROM drives from reading them) but the copies cannot be played in the PS1 because the console scans the inner ring before playing. I guess the hidden sectors in the disk are the same way, but if the floppy drive can read them, they should also be writable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andromeda Stardust Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 It is never easy to tell wether DRM makes sense or not. For Pier Solar we had copy protection, and it was pretty effective; for a while I think sites with cracking guides etc were even taken down. But everything will eventually be cracked. As Long as there is People interested in it, that is. With the DRM for ROMs, I am against it because I am generally no a friend of the limitations of digital goods. Digital goods are more than anything else a way for companies to take away some rights that customers had had since the dawn of time. Specifically, lending your games to someone else and selling them. It totally goes against what I feel are my legitimate rights as a paying customer. The planned DRM for BD as a ROM would have been so much worse than a copy protection for the cart for this reason. For me, it is customer-unfriendly to not let them choose whether they want to Keep the game they purchased or sell it. Selling the entire flashcart is not really a viable option. I know the fine print on games, that the Software is still property of the Publisher, and all you buy is the medium and the license to use it... this was originally meant to clarify that because you bought a copy of some creative work, you are not entitled to any rights making a Business with it. Because you own a copy of Detective Comics #27, you are not allowed to Reprint and sell it. It was not meant as a way to forbid People to sell their copy of the book. But that's exactly how it is used These days. The dangers are very low for the Intellivision Scene imo. All there is is a very small, dedicated fanbase. The actual sales numbers are already inflated artificially by fans buying mutliple copies of every release to support the system. Should be more than enough to make up for a Hand full of people who would purchase a cart only if a free ROM was not available. Even if the ROM are encrypted and can only be decrypted by the firmware within the flash cart, it could still be "dumped" with the right tools. A modified console could load the flash cart and allow the user to boot into the game. Then a switch is flipped after the decrypted ROM is loaded into the flash cart. The modified console could then be interfaced with a computer to dump the preloaded decrypted ROM from the flash cart. A stand alone dumper would not work in this scenario. The dumper would have to be built into the modded console. CopyNES works in this fashion. Ironically, the Everdrive N8 won't boot with a CopyNES installed. Should someone mod their Intellivision to dump carts, it may be possible to break encrypted ROMs by using authentic modified playback hardware to dump them. As another AA member has stated, if it can be read, it can be copied. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
soporj Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 This thread refuses to end... Bumping it probably doesn't help. Er.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rev Posted July 18, 2015 Author Share Posted July 18, 2015 Bumping it probably doesn't help. Er.... LoL Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Utopia Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 This thread refuses to end... Why end it? There is lots to digest here. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 Watermarked mp3s... There exist tools that strip the id3 tags. Easy to use. Scan an entire directory of 1000s of mp3s or m4a music files, and it will strip the tags off every file found, but still leave useful stuff like artist, album, track info. Back up your data. Somebody steals your ipod/hacks your pc and torrents your entire media library? No sweat; they can't trace you. They can trace you if they want to. They alter one section of the music in a phasic or timing manner. Perhaps change a duration of a background note, time between a drum beat at the beginning and end of a track. Maybe introduce phase change at a certain time by a certain amount. Or any combination of those. Changing one or two bits here or there in a 5MB track can give them 100's of millions of uniquely different files. One of which is registered to you. They do the same thing with e-books. Putting in an extra space after a "." Or a series of spaces on a "this page intentionally left blank" statement. Maybe they mis-spell a word. Maybe add in an invisible control character. Or change something to make it look like an editorial error. And an e-book, like mp3, can have millions upon millions of combinations. So don't ever think removing metadata is enough, it isn't. And the above is very simplistic and very real. If you weren't aware of such techniques - now you are. The watermarks are embedded into the content (= music data), else they could be removed way too easy. Don't expect to hide your traces by only removing the id-tags! Maybe reencoding the mp3 helps, but I probably not even this is fully sufficient. People have invested a lot of thought into these. That's right. Sometimes re-encoding can "gloss over" or obfuscate the nuances introduced when DRM'ing. But you can't really know for sure unless you know exactly what you're looking for. A forensics expert can compare the files side by side, not only byte by byte but by waveform in the time/frequency and amplitude domains and look for differences. That's all I'm prepared to say. My favorite excuse is blaming the wife! If the poor ole wives only knew they were the excuse. .....or maybe they do know? Maybe they're the cause? This thread refuses to end... Is it supposed to? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 You're damned right we spoke. we said "Hey most of us don't have working hardware, so can we maybe buy a ROM instead"? That's right. Eventually I'd get around to buying a rom. If they ever make it available. But I certainly will not go out of my way and chase down a console just for this one game. I've only acquired a specific platform to run the software I wanted 2 times. The Apple II and the PC. 3 if you count the TRS-80 Pocket Computer. But I just wanted it and only had a nebulous idea what I would do with it. Anyways, this isn't the first time a publisher shot themselves in the foot because they don't understand how marketing and digital formats work in this day and age. Intellivision is niche enough, and finding an audience with a working console AND an interest in the game is just all that much harder. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 They can trace you if they want to. They alter one section of the music in a phasic or timing manner. Perhaps change a duration of a background note, time between a drum beat at the beginning and end of a track. Maybe introduce phase change at a certain time by a certain amount. Or any combination of those. Changing one or two bits here or there in a 5MB track can give them 100's of millions of uniquely different files. One of which is registered to you. They do the same thing with e-books. Putting in an extra space after a "." Or a series of spaces on a "this page intentionally left blank" statement. Maybe they mis-spell a word. Maybe add in an invisible control character. Or change something to make it look like an editorial error. And an e-book, like mp3, can have millions upon millions of combinations. Another important thing: It must not be sufficient to compare e.g. two watermarked files to identify the complete watermark. That would be too easy. Therefore the watermarked files will look almost identical when you compare just two of them. The obvious difference is enough to differentiate between the two files. But that's <1% of the whole watermark. If you remove or alter it, you cannot differentiate between the two files anymore, but you can still identify the two files used. Which is sufficient for the case. The other >99% are identical if you compare just two files. This forces a pirate to compare 100s (or way more) of watermarked files to be relatively sure that he has eliminated enough of the watermark. So that none of the files he used for comparing can be identified by the remains of the watermark and there are no traces left which would lead to the pirate. So removing watermarks with a simple compare is no option. Instead the pirate has to know, how the watermarks are added to the file. So that he can actively search for those changes. Which is quite complicated (or impossible) if the change is not as obvious as an extra space after a ".", but e.g. a slight note duration change. And probably it is much easier for the pirate to fake his identity if he plans to pirate a watermarked file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 Yes I would agree. The variations on the instruments, vocals, and timing between them can be very subtle. Often only a few milliseconds. And the analog hole today is good enough to pick up on them; if you're thinking of re-encoding them. Ahh but you can vary the speed ever so slightly. Slowing down the song or speeding it up by one second over 3 minutes.. The time between musical note/instrument X and X1 is a ratio of instrument Y and Y1. So they get you on the ratio. Considering the low quality of MP3 files, there's loads of spots to insert or mask something without you ever hearing it. Remember, mp3 is a perceptual codec and thus uses algorithms to "re-generate" the music while eliminating what you don't (supposedly) hear. Another technique is to shift the whole song up or down in frequency by 1Hz or 2Hz, or fractions. Then there are harmonics.. the list rolls on! It is very easy to make 500 Mp3's that sound identical to the critical listener and yet not have one frame identical across any of those files. Each frame is different Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
intvdave Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 If this is true, sell me your King of the Mountain!!!! I will not judge you Bless you! King of the Mountain is a cool game that I think is underrated. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andromeda Stardust Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 (edited) On the topic of inaudible watermarks of the file, besides an easily strippable id3 tag, does anyone have evidence that Amazon.mp3 or itunes inserts watermark data into the actual waveform? The overhead of reencoding the file everytime someone purchases is huge. Yes mp3 is lossy, but wav recordings are not easily manipulated in the ways you suggest. You cannot easily separate instruments, vocals, or other components in the time / frequency domain, and to suggest that they are easily separated or can be done on the fly without irreparable damage is ludicrus. Also mostly inaudible things like least significant bit flips will be erased by the compression algorithm. Maybe I should compare my autorip albums to the cd masters that I have bought. The mp3 compression artifacts, when subtracted from the master wave recordings and boosted 12-20db or so, sound like "gurgling mud" and are horrid, but I should be able to detect any manipulations in the time or frequency domains as the wave forms in a processed sample will flat out not match. Low level amplitude modulation would also be detectable. OGG vorbis distortion, a codec I absolutely adore, while not actually posessing a lower signal-to-noise ratio compared to equal bitrate mp3, sounds more like white noise and less like mud pops when subtracted from the source audio and amplified. Edited July 18, 2015 by stardust4ever Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted July 18, 2015 Share Posted July 18, 2015 Also mostly inaudible things like least significant bit flips will be erased by the compression algorithm. True, therefore I am pretty sure the watermarking algorithm is integrated into the encoder and either manipulates bits which are juuust not cut of by the encoder or the watermark is added after the encoder. Also they claim that the watermarks cannot be removed by decoding and encoding again. Which would mean, the watermark cannot be 100% inaudible. BTW: UMG seems to watermark their uncompressed files. These watermarks must be pretty strong, so that they cannot be removed by encoding. Therefore people using lossless compression can hear the watermarks with their good equipment and trained ears. And are pretty pissed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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