Would this be possible using a modified gameshark? People can already boot from the cart port and the system disc is only 10Mb or so. :flamethrower:
So you can boot games from a CD-R without issue? I'd assume if it could be done it would have been done by now seeing as region protection has been defeated through carts for some time.
The Magic Card does just that. Basically it's a mod chip on a cartridge. It woudl boot the saturn then stop the drive from spinning. It would also overlay a message over the actual Saturn CD dashboard screen. Actually, that's pretty clever I though. A boot disc on a cratridge probably would be possible I think but I'm not tech' expert so... Yakumo
Didnt you have to swap with a real disc with the magic card though? if you put the system disc on a cart all you would do is put in your cdr no swapping with a real disc. And im sure it can be done, all youd need is a flash chip big enough to hold the img or hack a gameshark to boot from an sd slot which would be nice
Yeah the Magic Card does the swap. You need both discs. If one can put the System Disc image on a cart the prices will drop a lot, lol...
Atleast a howto on hacking a gameshark or even one of those memory cards (they boot a menu dont they?) to accept an sd card or to replace the flash with something that will hold more would kick ass.
I doubt Sega would take too kindly to someone selling a cart with their proprietary boot disc image on it... dead system or not. You'd have to be stupid to sell something with someone else's code without their permission.
the issue with a mod chip is you have modle1 and 2 versions of the Saturn each requiring a different mod chip and then you have the hi-Saturn and V Saturn Samsung Saturn to deal with a cart would truly be universal and cheaper to produce
thats true also i haven't every herd of sega getting there undies in a knot over dreamcast in fact at the end i think sega welcomed it because it helped them moves the huge backlog of stock
The idea of the system disc on a cart really is great BUT would it work? The disc images on the net will boot and even provide a menu but they won't boot the game. Wouldn't the cartridge version have the same problem?
im sure a work around could be found even if we have to write our own launcher possably even make games on a sd card possible but that would be complex as hell let alone expensive probably $150 or more
I'm not so sure such a thing would ever work. When the CD-ROM is checked the CDROM subsystem/cpu checks the disc before the SH2 host can look at it. The CDROM controller likely checks the system disc for whatever unlocks security. I don't think that the SH2 would be able to do it. Afterall, why would Sega let that happen when they knew that unauthorized software could boot from the Cartridge Port? It would just be silly if you could put some software on a cartridge to poke some register to turn off security checks. The Magic Card or whatever it is just makes doing the swap trick easier which makes sense. It's also all pretty pointless since modchips have existed for Saturn for a long time and are easy to install atleast in some models. Maybe more interest in other methods will become popular when it really gets extremely hard to find modded Saturn consoles or the chips themselves. I haven't done this, but I've heard it works. What you do is you use the Swap Trick to boot the system disc. Then after that you can boot CD-Rs without the swap trick until you power off. The catch is few people would do this or have ever done it since most Swap Trick users don't have an electronic switch for Lid Status. Instead they physically tape the sensor down. But if you had a switch it's supposed to actually work. If you just kept your Saturn on during long play sessions you could just reset the console and avoid needing to swap trick. Or you could just get a modchip... Or better yet, buy the games.
Like it's been said before, the Magic Card v2.0 simply slows down the CD-ROM drive to make doing the swap trick easier. That's it. For the system disks, they need to first authenticate legitimately with the Saturn before they can do anything. Even if you somehow got the software on a card, it still would need to bootstrap itself with a legit authentication first, which it couldn't.
There's a homebrew Saturn game currently in development that uses a custom boot cartridge to bypass the console's disc protection system, though I've heard the makers of Police Officer Smith don't intend for their hardware to be reverse engineered as a way of loading any other software. Of course, it's likely someone out there won't be as considerate and that it won't be too long after until a universal modified working prototype is seen in the wild. In fact, I'd guess most people will be getting this one (if it's ever released, that is!) purely for the purpose of trying to finally crack Sega's most effective anti-piracy measure... providing we can forget about the swap method?
