I've just recently become aware that several devs make it so that their protos will only work with acompanying usb security dongles on PS2 (yea, I'm lttp on that info). At the very least I know that copies of 'God of War' and 'Sly: Band of Theifs' in collectors hands require them. What I'd like to know is what other games, or game companies, use dongles to protect from leaks?
I've got about 10-15 games that came with dongles. On ps1 there was a mem card dongle for Mike Tyson boxing and colony wars thats all I can think of right now. On ps2 jak and daxter ,sly and god of war all came with mem sticks for dongles. Just sony products so far but I'd imagine other systems required dongles as well but I've yet to see them.
I believe EA used them on certain titles, but that is a memory and might be incorrect. I am pretty sure though.
So, in theory, could you say, copy the contents of that thumb drive, to another thumb drive and have a copy of the dongle? Because if that's the case, wouldn't someone be able to just include the dongle's content in the .rar with some instructions on using it in the .nfo? Sure it'd be an easy way to impliment fingerprinting but still...
I've got a ton of ea games. I'm pretty sure they are fingerprinted but I've never seen a dongle on any one of them.
In theory yes that would work but a bit stream copy would work better, even more so if you could match it sector by sector with the exact same flash chip from the same manufacturing week. That might sound a bit overkill but believe me, if they wanted to do that they very well could. Some of the ps1 dongles are uncopyable by the ps1, but those of us cool enough to have dexdrives might be able to do it. Nintendo tends not to make use of dongles instead prefering to padlock some of their 1st party games to the cube it comes in. Either disk or that fancy hdd in a cart type. I'd imagine ALL of these can be hacked but unless you release an image to the public there is no way it'll get done unless you contract someone with the necessary skills, good luck keeping it off the radar either way.
Thanks for the picture. I have never heard of this, but it is a wise idea. :thumbsup: Not so good for some collectors, however. :lol:
I have a copy of Sly 2 that requires a USB dongle. Its a tiny blue thing that i'm too afraid to put in my pc for fear of somehow corrupting it. It actually looks exactly like picture posted a few posts up but my disc is different so I suppose maybe the dongles have different data? I'd love to see what kind of data it holds or attempt to copy it.
http://cgi.ebay.com/PlayStation-don...oryZ1489QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem here is an example of some playstation one security dongle's that used memory cards
If you wish, I could write a little program to make an exact 1:1 copy of the dongle, if it's set to act like a Mass Storage Device or something similiar. Then again, you'd have to put the dongle in your PC's usb, so there would be a slight possibility of corrupting the dongle. Another possibility would be to look at how the game code interacts with the dongle, but that's a different story.
I can confirm that the dongles are supplied by an external company specifically for use as a security dongle. They are not just USB flash drives with code on them.
I figured, it'd be a lot more effective to put some crypt chip inside (and not that terribly expensive) than putting some easy-to-copy files on them... and if they did, I sure hope they wouldn't use bog-standard FAT16 ;-)
I've never heard of this before! maybe some genius will be able to make a copy or build a dongle to make those betas work
I'd guess that it would be much easier to hack the check code out of the game than to try to reproduce the dongle. Am I the only one that smirks every time I type/read the word dongle, BTW? :lol:
maybe OT ,but the Namco 246 and 256 arcade boards use security dongles aswell , they come in form of a PS2 mem card. for the Taito Type-X , the security dongles are usb memory sticks.
