Copy Protection: Difference between revisions
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** Some unlicensed games work around the lockout system by using special cartridges that piggyback on another game (like a Game Genie.) 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".
** While the top-loading NES ommitted 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, and there were reportedly no 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 inexepensive 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.
** The Game Boy is an interesting example, as it was designed more as a passive ''trademark protection'' scheme that relied more on their merry band of lawyers than actively shutting out any bootlegs, the theory being that bootleggers and developers of unlicensed games wouldn't dare display the '''Nintendo®''' logo lest be sued for trademark infringement, which was more easily enforcable in certain jurisdictions. If a copy of the logo was found on the cartridge ROM, the game loads, but using it as it is would make them an easy target for litigation. There is however a workaround taking advantage of a peculiarity on how the logo is checked and displayed: the Game Boy reads the boot logo twice--once to display it, and another to check if it matches the one on the boot ROM.
** In a similar vein to Nintendo, Sega used a similar trademark enforcement system on the [[Sega Genesis|Genesis]], aptly named "TradeMark Security System." The TMSS checks for the "SEGA" wordmark in various memory locations for a cartridge to boot, and if an unlicensed game has the necessary strings in the ROM, Sega can sue them for trademark infringement. This was however challenged in 1992 by Accolade when they were involved in a lawsuit concerning the use of Sega's trademarks on some of their games. The courts ruled in Accolade's favour, as the judges concluded that the required TMSS code took up 35 bytes while the rest of the game was wholly original content, and that Accolade's reverse-engineering to achieve compatibility with Sega hardware was a reasonable invocation of fair use.
** The [[Famicom Disk System]] also relied more on trademark enforcement than actual hardware or software-level protection. The disks, which were little more than a semi-custom variant of Mitsumi's Quick Disk, had '''NINTENDO''' molded at the bottom part of the disk, with the '''I''' and second '''N''' activating a switch which authenticated the game. [[Paper-Thin Disguise]]s ensued as with most pirated games, with the trademark being minced to "NINFENDO", "NINTEN", "NINJENDO", "INTEND" or even just "I N". Eventually, bootleggers simply just left indentations on the disk without the need to mold the Nintendo name or intentionally misspell it at all, making this scheme useless.
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