What did the Utopia bootdisc actually do?

Datel did it first. And Utopia came from a hacker reverse engineering Datel's work. :thumbsup:

SEGA sued mostly because Utopia boot disc used SDK code and libraries than because what it did. I mean, they wanted to sue because of what it did, but they had to use the argument of it being built on code that did belong to them in order to fight it.

 

Weird is that Datel didn't use SEGA libraries (Bleem neither), but Utopia did. Differente methods to achive the same thing.

 

I dunno if this was the problem, but utopia clearly stole the spinning deer animation from the teapot demo on the sdk. They simply swapped the teapot model for a reindeer one.

Does anyone knows the outcome of the trial?

FG

 

Which came first for the DC? Homebrew software, or piracy of commercial games?

Back in the day, I remember DC ripping guides saying to search on homebrew websites to learn how to selfboot software on CDRs, and to buy a "coders cable" from a homebrew site in order to rip GDroms. Does this mean that the coders cable was a homebrew invention? Or were piracy groups already using the cable to rip GDRoms, and homebrew spun off of that?

 

The coder's cable is nothing more than a serial chip that converts 3v serial signal into 5v AFAIK. And the original way of using it is to use a disc with a weird ip.bin to hang in the binary loading process and thus allowing to upload code it the dc and executing it. This cable was clearly made for homebrew in the beggining. A lot of group presumably used it after. Note that it takes almost 24 hour to rip a disc this way ... It seems some groups had faster way of ripping discs, maybe using a gd-x duplicator or custom circuitry.

If u remember well, the action replay was the first disc to be selfboot, and bleem was really close too. So I think it was homebrew first.

 

yah but wasn't Action Replay licensed?
SEGA has a storied history with supporting cheat devices
and turning a blind eye from time to time and actually letting the community do great things with its hardware

 

Was the attach rate really that low for the DC at the time of its death?

I was just under the impression that the PS2's launch killed its momentum temporarily, but that it could have been regained with some additional cash Sega simply didn't have.

Unless behind closed doors devels and publishers were bailing on Sega because Mil-CD meant that there were millions of essentially pre-modded consoles floating around that once CD-RWs and broadband internet became the norm, would make buying games a thing of the past?

 

I'M pretty sure the action replay came on plain CD-R and wasn't licensed. Datel usually doesn't license its stuff, and everybody was surprised at first when this "normal" cd booted up in the console.

 

IIRC Sony went further than that beforehand with a sneak move, by publicly unveiling PS2 in the span between DC's Japan and international launches.

 

Datel never license their products, every product you see says they're not partnered with SONY, SEGA, Nintendo, etc in any way.

I still find it hard to believe Datel get away with exploiting the consoles, and when homebrewers that create simple apps to maybe play music get hit with bats.

Datel reverse engineer boot code from original game discs (and carts from the Nintendo DS) and get away with it. The headers are exactly the same you'll see, bushing made a complete article on it.

Didn't most consoles like the XBOX and PS2 got softmodded from Datel's products? :shrug:

 

I don't know when action replay was released, but I used to be on dcemulation.com back in 2000 and 2001, and there were tons of selfbooting homebrew programs and emulators available before Bleemcast was released. Selfbooting commercial games existed already too. BUT, I just remembered that dcemulation used to host an image of the utopia boot disc... because some of the early homebrew efforts were not self bootable. That implies to me that maybe piracy came first.

I keep seeing this chicken and the egg thing with DC homebrew and piracy. If homebrew predated the utopia disc, was it selfbootable? Presumably not because early homebrew required the utopia disc to boot. At the same time, what about the disc used with the coders cable? If that was a selfbootable disc, and it predated the utopia disc, then why would there be any need for the utopia boot disc when pirated games could already be made to be selfbootable? In fact, if the utopia disc was selfbootable by itself (which it was, of course), why was there any need for it's existence when it is clearly possible to selfboot DC games/code already!

 

All I can say for sure is that bleemcast BETAs were selfboot before any piracy (shown in E3 or another conference I beleive, in 1999). However it was released after the rise of piracy, as everybody knows.

Also, I believe Datel puts a lot of efforts in reverse engineering stuff in a legal manner, and have lawyers working for them in order to "cover their ass" in the case of a lawsuit. While individuals are easier target to get rid of. However, SEGA is know not to make a witch hunt on piracy and homebrew, which in the end lead to the "post-mortem" life of the console!

 

The same holds true for the PS1. Everyone and their mom got one back then because you could use CD-R media.

You're also right about the DC. I remember buying a Saturn at some point and telling a friend about it, considering how the games were cheaper since it was dead - he replied that he'd instead get a DC, since it can play all "then" current games on CD-R.

 

How many people had CD-R drives and broadband internet in 2000?

 

I knew a few actually, too bad they didn't know how to download backups. :lol:

 

Err.. Correct me if I am wrong, but no code actually runs from ip.bin at all, ip.bin just points to a valid executable (usually 1st_Read.bin) which in the other end does have to be scrambled in order to run from a mil-cd.
As to the scrambling algorithm. You can get it from reversing the bios.

 

It did use them, but the action replay didn't allow to run backups, so sega turned a blind eye to it.

 

Some code gets executed int he ip.bin. The part that rescramble back the executable (for non homebrew binaries) and the aprt that unlocks the gd-rom drive.

 

Since the MEGA-CD, the purpose of IP.BIN is display the SEGA logo (the data and text is part of the IP.BIN file) and is object of lawsuits as the sole purpose of such architecture is prevent the launch of unlicensed applications on the protected platform.

The boot process for MIL-CD is different enough to require a different IP.BIN be used to boot the games.

And Gameshark/Action Replay DC dates back to 1999 and the release of the Dreamcast in Europe. It comprised of a disc and a MU dongle. So because it was just a standard CD with badblocks to prevent copying they added a hardware dongle to it.

I remember reading an article posted by the author of the Utopia boot disc where he described his analysis of the Datel PAR disc. He pointed out that the Dreamcast only cares about the big endian side of the ISO9660 standard and Datel made the little endian portion of the ISO look like a Windows 98 install disc. :lol:

 

It's called the Broadband Adapter which I recall hearing it takes approx 1 hour to dump 1 Gigabyte.

Piracy might make a system more "popular" but that doesn't help if no one buys licensed products (i.e. games) as you make no money then. While the DreamCast was very neat with emulators like NesterDC, and quite odd with full blown piracy of CD-Rs booting on any system, it would have certainly been better if that piracy hadn't happened or had happened much later.

You can make whatever arguments you want about piracy but at the end of the day the companies make money when you buy retail games. Unless you pirating all kinds of games somehow leads to you influencing others to then purchase these games, you're not helping.