Pirates Get Fool's Gold: Illegal Copies Of FFCC: Ring Of Fates Die After 10 Minutes
It was really only a matter of time before someone cracked down on the piracy on the DS, but I never imagined they would get as creative as this. Today, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring Of Fates was released. I personally have been eager to snag a copy of this, and I am not alone. Many software thieves quickly procured illegitimate copies of the game and went to town.
... But all was not well in the world of illegal downloads. Square either released a time limited dump or a copy that senses illegal carts, regardless the system knows that it is not legal and after 10 minutes of game play presents the image shown above.
I've always been a fan of creative piracy warnings. Rather than simply not working or hassling the paying users, create fun and unusual ways to entice pirates into buying the game rather than stealing it, like a time lock like this. Kudos Square-Enix for your creative use of copy protection.
Square Enix se joue des pirates [Nintendo-France]
[via GoNintendo]
Asterick
Posted to Video Games on 11 March 2008
· Comments (13)
Other stuff like this: crystal chronicles, final fantasy, nintendo ds, piracy, ring of fates, square-enix
Name: Dave
hahaha, well, the R4's popularity is really big. So it's about time something like this happen.
While this will be cracked in a matter of seconds, it still deserves props for the reasons Asterick listed.
I agree, game-boi. It won't take long until a working copy of FFCC:RoF is released by Eximius or some other group.
I do enjoy watching the ebb and flow between developers and scenesters, though. Props to Squeenix.
I went to Target to get my copy, but it was already sold out by 12:30pm. Now that's a hot title!
Crippling pirates isn't worth hitting the false positives. I make it a point not to buy games that might revoke my permission to play them, so thanks for the heads-up.
My good friend redistributed a fully cracked version accross about 15 newsgroups [instead of the one he posts in] just because of them stopping play.
Same with Hostel 2, when Roth spoke out about piracy, I downloaded the film and banged it all over the place.
Also, I never watched the film.
so what would happen if you bought this game and some how it still showed this message LOL
@ Dennis: With no false positives reported (read: retail copies doing this) are you still upset?
[boring, drawn out text begins here]
There are key differences between R4 loaded ROMs (and similar products) and the real deal that the DS can detect, but due to the fact that not a lot of developers and publishers have the resources available to combat this, this simply ignore it. SquareEnix is one of those developers with the time/money to bust this out without questioning it. Especially with separate US/Euro releases to entice the pirates.
As users of R4s can most likely tell, what they are playing is not exactly the same as a real cart (real enough for general play, sure! perfect duplication, no). The difference in read speeds alone can do wonders to trip things up. This can span from odd loading times to show stopping bugs. This results in bugs that can only be found when the ROM is loaded from an R4. I so wish I could share some stories about this without getting a friend in trouble.
[boring, drawn out text end here]
In a nutshell, since cart-based ROMs all read at the same (or extremely close same) speed without variations like disc based media, I'm guessing that FFCC uses a combination of ROM read and data write speeds to detect R4s with inhuman accuracy. All without interfering with a real user in any way.
Even as a card carrying member of the FF Hater Squad, I still have to say that this is pretty slick, even if destroyed within minutes (Hi there, Neo!).
Bravo, SquareEnix.
Yes, game-boi, still upset. They can't know in advance that the crippling won't affect legit copies (and, indeed, it's too early to say whether it has or not), and a willingness to fuck over whatever paying customers is might affect is simply reprehensible. I will not knowingly purchase the product of any company that would take such a risk, but instead I would pirate it joyfully and without ill conscience.
tl;dr, doctrine of double-effect type justifications for collateral damage in the fight against piracy makes me feel morally obliged to pirate and not buy your product.
srsly tl;dr, i'ma pirate their shit and laugh about it, if I feel like playing it at all.
There are a million fool proof ways to detect an R4 that will not produce false positives on a retail cartridge, so complaining that it's going to affect legitimate copies is completely out of the question.
There are a few ways to test this:
1: Access Speeds, this has caused compatibility issues with numerous other applications attempting to run on an R4, especially noted with cheap MicroSD cards. This is however not always a fool-proof method of determining that the copy is ILLEGAL, but it will never kill a legit copy as access speeds are fixed by the platform and are loaded via special purpose DMA
2: DLDI exploit. Simply placing a DLDI fingerprint in a .NDS will force an R4 to modify the rom itself before boot, which a program can use to determine if the rom has been modified. DLDI is a homebrew method of accessing FAT tables on microsd cards, which also would not affect retail cartridges. Again, this is not 100% positive
3: Custom CARDBUS command. The Nintendo DS uses a LSFR-XOR overlaid serial interface to communicate with the cartridge and load binary data. The protocol is strictly mapped and allowed for a number of application specific commands, most potentially reserved for things like large scale flash (normally accessed over an SPI bus). Creating a new command would cause the R4 to simply stop working. This would be fool proof, as no developers can anticipate new commands and how they are handled. This copy protection would be similar to a PSX "bad sector" protection. A reader can read it, but a writer cannot write it.
4: Finally, there is sending FAT commands to the R4 itself. If the pirate cart is communicating, than it exists.
All of these methods are 100% false-positive proof. The reasons for this is because a system would have to have a serious failure for any of them to not be consistent. Read times are not delegated by any mechanical means, so even that potential hiccup is right out.
Technically speaking, this is not intended to stop piracy, it's not make an illegitimate copy inconvenient. Lots of pirates cannot be bothered to find a patch for the game if it does not run, and will either move on or buy a copy. If someone is making a point to troll pirate circles for a copy, they are more likely than not going to buy a legitimate copy no matter how much they try to prevent it.
Square is concerned with sales, not thievery.
^ Absolute truth. They knew it would be bypassed, but had this extremely safe/minimal amount of protection to make it that much more of a chore. I just wonder if the game uses multiple "checks" through out the game. So that even if bypassed once, there may be checks an hour, three hours, X hours into the game using a different method. That would be hilarious!
Asterick, your wealth of knowledge puts my "Artist" experience with DS development to shame, but if my post was "tl;dr"-worthy (*sigh*, don't get me started on that), what makes you think Dennis will read your post? :P
game-boi,
You need to re-read what I wrote. I was tl;dring myself. I clearly read what you had to say, as well as what asterick had to say. Unfortunately, what he's said still doesn't completely rule out the possibility of a false positive for piracy. The only way to guarantee a 0% false positive rate is to declare everything negative, and the only way to guarantee a 0% false negative rate is to declare everything positive.
Asterick's (and Square-Enix's) position is based on limited knowledge (though extensive) of current and future hardware. There might be some 10,000-unit run of DS-heavies out there that reads a little slow, and thus could run afoul of test 1 in a wider range of cases than supposed.
Tests 2-4 could each be fouled up by future hardware. Nintendo has lately become a big fan of backward compatibility, so it's reasonable to expect that some future product will support DS carts. However, said support could be fouled up by such non-standard specification copy-protected carts.
Tinfoil hat territory? Yeah, sure. It's a longshot in all the cases you described. But, like I said, for a developer to accept even the possibility of a false positive on some copy protection scheme because they don't trust... that doesn't really make me feel like behaving in such a way as to be worthy of the trust I'm no being given.
Asterick, don't call the R4 a "pirate cart". Pirate carts are what they sell on ebay, made to look like the real thing but it really isn't. The R4 is a flash cartridge, and while I can't speak for anyone else, my flash cartridge has no pirated anything on it.
Seriously, it's like calling a DVD-R a "pirate DVD" because the movie studios would like us to believe most people buy them to copy movies.
@raindog: I was referring to it in the context of what it is being used for. If you put a bootleg on a DVD-R, the DVD-R becomes a pirate disk (IMHO)
By default, yes the R4 is simply a tool. Same as a pirate ship is a just a boat until you put a bunch of hook-handed scallywags on board.