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Copy Protection: Difference between revisions
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Modern games simply fail to run if not authenticated. Earlier games tended to let you play a small part of the game, or play at a massive disadvantage, even if copy protection failed. In ''[[SimCity]]'', failing the copy protection would cause a non-stop stream of disasters to strike your city, making the game all but unplayable. (This sort of thing may have been intended, though, as another protection against people breaking the copy protection, since there was a chance someone idly examining the game before distributing it illegally might not have realized it had copy protection at all.)
In theory, the only way to have fine-grained control over what end-users can or cannot do with software is to physically separate it from them via a client/server arrangement. In this setup, the client only serves as a front-end—sending player input to the server and outputting streaming audio and video from the server. With a competent IT staff, infringement all but ceases to exist, yet each player is at the mercy of the server's uptime and bandwidth requirements for streaming audio and video. OnLive and Google Stadia, both now-defunct retail PC game streaming platforms, inherently
The only thing that cannot be defeated is charging a monthly fee, and that really only works for massively multiplayer online games and other stuff that runs off of a central server. And sometimes even that isn't immune, especially when a popular game has private player-run servers start popping up, often implemented through reverse engineering of packets transmitted and received by the game client. This has the side effect of preserving multiplayer-only games which were otherwise made unplayable whenever the central servers for them go defunct.
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* 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.
** Depending on which sources you believe, the primary intent of the lock-out chip wasn't copy protection. Instead, the system was designed to allow Nintendo to keep tight control over who could release games for the platform and extract heavy licensing fees from third party developers. This was also the mechanism Nintendo used to enforce their infamous [[Censorship Bureau|censorship and quality control regime]], keeping out the [[Custer's Revenge|porn games]] and low quality software that [[The Great Video Game Crash of 1983|caused recurring PR nightmares for Atari.]] The copy protection was just a nice side effect...
** 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.
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