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Re: Playing with gcm files

Posted by Vimm on .
That's interesting, I haven't heard that angle before. I should probably fire up each game again just to make sure it loads. When I wipe certain games Dolphin can't even find the header so that's a dead giveaway something's wrong. Maybe the Table of Contents is bad somehow, causing too much data to be wiped? That might explain why I sometimes hit out of range exceptions too. I dunno, it's still a mystery at this point.

I've found true weirdness in some games though. For example, right now I'm looking at the header of Digimon Rumble Arena 2 and the whole thing has whitespace where there should be null. For example the title reads "Digimon Rumble Arena 2          ". Surely it wasn't made that way.

Nine out of ten games are normal, but weird stuff like that makes me question the copy.


In reply to: Re: Playing with gcm files posted by Tricob on .
Quote:

>> I've found some games break when I wipe them though,
>> so perhaps they weren't copied properly?

It could be a copy-protection scheme.

To give you an idea of how funky the copy-protect schemes can get, a Tandy Color Computer game "Sands Of Egypt" has an area of the game disk purposely marked as "bad" when it's actually not, and the game checks this area for the "fake badness". If the "badness" isn't there, the game assumes the disk is pirated, and won't run.

What exactly does this "badness" do? Well, it gives off an "Input/Output Error" if you try to make a copy of the disk through the command prompt.

This scheme was written for an 8-bit home computer system. Nowadays we have 64-bit systems. There's no telling how weird the schemes have gotten now. 8-O

- Tricob.


Replies:
Re: Playing with gcm files
Tricob -- 12/31/2013 8:19 pm UTC
Re: Playing with gcm files
Vimm -- 1/2/2014 6:40 pm UTC