New solution runs games from USB drive on unmodified hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E

Given enough time, and enough focused ingenuity, any copy protection method can probably be circumvented. For the latest evidence of this truism, look no further than the Sega Saturn. A hacker has developed an external, plug-in solution that lets the two-decade-old system play games off a generic USB drive, without the need for heavy internal hardware modifications like a soldered, hard-to-find mod chip or a full disc drive replacement.

The news comes via this fascinating 27-minute video that outlines how a hacker going by the handle Dr. Abrasive spent years looking for a way past the system's particularly robust disc-checking scheme. To prevent regular old CD-Rs from working on the system, Sega had the Saturn disc drive check for a microscopic "wobble" pattern etched into the outer edge of the game disc itself (a CD-R's pre-set spiral pattern makes replicating the pattern with a regular CD burner pretty impossible).

In addition, the Saturn has an extra CPU dedicated exclusively to handling the CD sub-system. Before now, that CPU has been a frustrating black box for hardware hackers; they could send commands and get data, but they couldn't decipher its inner workings to try to develop a workaround. Even opening the chip up to examine the ROM via microscope failed, thanks to an implant ROM process Sega used in creating the chip.

Dr. Abrasive went to the trouble of unsoldering a disc drive CPU from a Saturn, resoldering it to a custom-made circuit board, and reading out the ROM contents directly to his own computer. From there, he spent months deciphering the messy, overdeveloped spaghetti code to figure out how it works. He even looked into an odd, encrypted piece of ROM code on an obscure Saturn MPEG decoder card, which seemed to somehow run code on that black box disc drive CPU.

All those avenues ended up being dead ends. In researching those dead ends, though, Dr. Abrasive found that the Saturn's Video CD slot (the one used for that MPEG decoder card) lets you "insert tentacles... directly into the CDB brain of the system" without the need to modify the original hardware. Dr. Abrasive's custom-made interface uses this slot to load Saturn CD images directly from a USB drive to the system processor, circumventing the CD drive and its copy protection entirely. He hopes to produce more of the chips and market them for interested retro gamers in the future.

Having an easy way to play backed up Saturn games is important, because many of the original systems are seeing their flimsy disc drives die of old age these days, even while the rest of the system's solid state parts remain relatively robust. Since the Saturn discs themselves aren't encrypted, game discs can be easily archived to an external hard drive via a regular PC, and run on the now fully solid-state Saturn indefinitely.

Dr. Abrasive also hopes his solution will supercharge the Saturn homebrewing community, which was previously limited to the few hackers willing to open up their systems to install mods. More coders will now have the opportunity to play around with the Saturn's complex and over-engineered innards, creating new demos and chiptunes with the hardware.

This is brilliant!