

Arcade Games: Hacking, Emulation, Preservation - silsha
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiRIc0LDlu4

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

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busterarm
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.

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nuhonda
This was hugely interesting. And Ange was fantastic.

