I know there's a Dreamcast vcd player that requires a dongle in order to play anything on it. No idea if it's for security reasons or it holds some sort of memory though. Anybody know what I'm talking about? I used to want one some years ago but now I see that it's just crappy quality video that plays at a slow framerate. :crying:
Let me tell you hacking out a reliance on a security dongle is a pain in the... Took me and a few close friends around a year and a half to remove the reliance of one arcade game on a dongle. Granted the dongle did hold an encrypted decryption key for all game data.
I can imagine that the requirement for executables to be signed, in many current generation systems, makes it hard to remove a dongle presence check, or do a LC-crack style key insertion, too... CF
I've actually attempted to look at the assembly driving it but the SCUS file is not terribly helpful. One positive thing is that I can get it to emulate right up to the "INSERT USB DONGLE" error screen in pcsx2 so I will probably try fooling around with it a bit in the memory editor. Regardless, I have no idea how intricately the dongle is coded in. If it actually contains boot data i'll never be able to figure it out, but hopefully it is just a branch or two that I can re-write.
Id there isn´t some obscure chip on the PS1 security dongles, then I don´t see any thing impossible about being able to copy its content, to a memory card. Since I do remember some dude long ago said, that they had copied the Net Yarozes keycards content on to a normal memory card. It just plainly sucks, that I can´t find the thread where I read it on here.
There is no obscure chip in the PS1 security dongles You can copy a Net Yaroze keycard to a normal memory card. You just can't to it with the PS1's Memory Card manager, but need to write a small program to do a raw read and write of all the blocks. Paradox had a tutorial on this at paradogs.com, but their site is down now....
This isn't PS1 format so I assume it has to be a PS2 boot disk? Then again I didn't try it for the Dreamcast or the Saturn yet. BUT it might be just for 1 specific game.
90% certain the ps1 dexdrive can do that, it sure as hell doesn't mind copying any save I throw at it.
AFAIK a standard PS1 memory card is 16 blocks, but only 15 of them can be used for savegames. The 1st block is a directory. Not all information in the directory can be copied with the PS1's memory card manager. That is the copy protection. If the DexDrive software can do a raw copy of the 1st block, you should be all set
