DS Anti-Piracy Software measures due by Christmas

Mr E

Interesting read on Gamasutra.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23529

Some selected snippets (check link for full article):

Andrew Mclennan, CEO of U.K.-based Metaforic has been looking to snuff out this purported R4 scourge.

Legal fuzzy areas aside, it's a fact that Nintendo wants to stop the circulation of R4 and the piracy that comes with it. According to Mclennan, Nintendo has hopes that Metaforic's tech, MetaFortress, will help combat the DS piracy that will assuredly continue on a global basis, even in the wake of legislation.

"[Nintendo has] approved our technology at the highest level for Nintendo games," he said. "The engineering team has approved the technique."

Aside from Nintendo, Around six leading third-party DS game publishers will be implementing Metaforic’s solution, with games using the technology hitting shelves by the holidays this year, he added.

Metaforic's technology at its most basic level detects the form of patching that the R4 cards use to play ROMS, and then proceeds to "kill" the ROM. Understandably, Mclennan didn't want to get too specific about the methods behind Metaforic's technology. But he outlined a more general explanation: "We take any DS game and inject a security scheme into the game itself. It turns each game into its own security system. Every time we apply it to a different game, it's a different security system."

Mclennan didn't claim that Metaforic's anti-piracy tech is 100 percent hack-proof, and acknowledged that eventually, hackers with enough brains, time and motivation eventually hack many forms of software security. But he hopes to make the hacking process as long and annoying as possible.

“What we’re really trying to do is make hackers take on a long, slow, manual job,” he said. By denying the hacker a way to automate the hacking process, this extends the amount of time that software products can sell legitimately, free of piracy.

"We add so much security to it that it will take a very long time to hack," he claimed.

But it also took quite a long time for Mclennan and Metaforic to come up with tech that would combat DS piracy. The R4 has been available for the past few years, and now enormous libraries of illegal ROMs are already circulating and readily available for the four-and-a-half year old DS, which has sold over 100 million hardware units worldwide. A late 2007 report in U.K.'s The Times said around 35 million R4 units are circulating, a number that has assuredly grown sharply since then.

"Really, the only reason that this [tech] is only just now coming out is that the problem is quite difficult," he said. "R4 cards are quite poorly understood -- how they work and how they cause piracy. They're also able to be updated. So if you're an [R4] manufacturer, you would do firmware patches to combat technological security schemes."

He claimed that Metaforic's solution is firmware patch resistant. "There is no firmware patch that they can apply that will stop our protection -- I can't tell you why that is, though."

Interesting times. Looks like the whole idea is to seriously delay the amount of time it takes for leaked ROMs to actually work. So if there is a game you really want to play (lets say the new Zelda, for example), do you wait weeks (months?) for it to be cracked, or do you just go out and buy it?

Its a very good idea in theory.....

IsThatSo?

R4 is the only one mentioned in the article but I would have to assume that it would work on all flash carts................

But it also took quite a long time for Mclennan and Metaforic to come up with tech that would combat DS piracy. The R4 has been available for the past few years, and now enormous libraries of illegal ROMs are already circulating and readily available for the four-and-a-half year old DS, which has sold over 100 million hardware units worldwide. A late 2007 report in U.K.'s The Times said around 35 million R4 units are circulating, a number that has assuredly grown sharply since then.

R4s are kinda redundant now anyway since the originals are not being made and the "clones" are a bit hit and miss. Thats a laugh though, by the time they figured out how to stop the R4s they were no longer being made

Good idea and interesting to see how long it will take to hack the security (it will be done by a 10 year old!! teens and above are too old and set in their hacking/programming ways)

**Caroline**

A late 2007 report in U.K.'s The Times said around 35 million R4 units are circulating, a number that has assuredly grown sharply since then.

Sounds like the damage is already done :rolleyes:;)

Most likely, people who already have R4's will hold off a couple of weeks or months if there's a game they want. They can be updated any time so they have a huge selection of other games available to play in the mean time while they're waiting on the one they want..

nedd

i wouldnt have too much faith in this. No matter how hard companies work on anti-piracy measures the hackers always crack it. just take the iphone as an example. everytime a new firmware version comes out its only a couple of days before its hacked.

mobius42

nedd wrote: »

i wouldnt have too much faith in this. No matter how hard companies work on anti-piracy measures the hackers always crack it. just take the iphone as an example. everytime a new firmware version comes out its only a couple of days before its hacked.

And this guy acknowledges that. The point is to make it difficult to crack the games so that if you want to pirate them, you have to wait a long time. They hope this will encourage people to buy the game rather than wait on a crack that may never come. Look at the iPhone 2.2.1 firmware; they still haven't unlocked that and it's been out for months.

Gamesnash.ie: Pat

Reading between the lines of this I think what they're aiming for is that each individual game will have its own security system to crack. So cracking Fifa 10 won't mean you will have cracked Pro Evolution 2010. Each game will need to be cracked seperately. What they're aiming for is to maximise the amount of time between the game being released and when pirated copies are available. Currently in most cases pirated versions are available before release day so anything is a bonus from the publishers point of view.