Copy Protection: Difference between revisions

* Eight-bit to 32-bit consoles including the Game Boy, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, (Super) Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo 64 used proprietary cartridges that were relatively expensive. But by the time of the Game Boy Advance, third parties introduced compatible cartridges for playing homemade GBA games (which could also be used for pirated games, wink wink nudge nudge).

** That's not all. The North American NES made use of a "lockout chip" system called the CIC, composed of a chip on the console that would reset the CPU if it did not detect a corresponding key chip on the game card. Nintendo patented the design of the key chip so that no one else could legally manufacture them.

** Some unlicensed games work around the lockout system either by using special cartridges that piggyback on another game ''a la'' [[Game Genie]], or through a charge pump designed to send a voltage spike which should knock the CIC offline; later revisions of the NES were no longer susceptible to said voltage spikes. This led to companies such as American Video Entertainment to bundle their unlicensed games such as ''[[Wally Bear and the NO! Gang]]'' with instructions on how to modify their NES in case their console is of the newer revision.<ref>[http://www.thegameisafootarcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Wally-Bear-and-the-NO-Gang-Game-Manual.pdf Wally Bear and the NO! Gang - Nintendo NES - Manual]</ref> Also, Atari's Tengen division got themselves into a lawsuit by using social engineering and reverse engineering to create a key chip workaround called the "Rabbit Chip". Years later, the Rabbit would serve as a key to successfully reverse-engineering the CIC for homebrew and reproductions of popular games due to the presence of debug/test headers in the chip.

** While the top-loading NES omitted the chips, a similar, albeit more sophisticated system was used on the Super NES and Nintendo 64. Bootleg games still thrived on the Super NES, though not as much as it was in the NES days (it also helps that the use of complex enhancement chips such as the Super FX meant that bootlegging the likes of ''[[Star Fox]]'' would be nigh impossible), and there were reportedly only a few bootleg cartridges for the N64 until recently when the CIC for it was reverse-engineered. There were however backup devices such as the Doctor V64 which used a legitimate N64 cartridge for authentication and loaded games off commodity CDs. While it was ostensibly marketed as an inexpensive development tool to test games on actual hardware, with a number of developers, notably [[Iguana Entertainment]], using Doctor V64s for developing their N64 games due to a shortage of official development kits from Nintendo, the V64 could easily be modified to run backups, and many resellers sold their V64s pre-modded. Unsurprisingly, Nintendo took umbrage and filed legal action to halt the sale of the V64.