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Topic: Copy protection in unlicensed Game Boy games (Read 1 times)
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taizou
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« on: July 19, 2010, 09:41:25 pm » |
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I have a few unlicensed/pirate original GBC carts that I'm trying to dump, but so far I've only managed to successfully dump the first game off a multicart - Shi Kong Xing Shou, a pokemon clone - not sure if I'm allowed to link it, but it's on my site.
Apart from that I've got one obviously incomplete/repeating dump, two seemingly complete dumps that won't run in emulators, one more that seems complete (but some of the bits are inverted), one that crashes the linker software, and the rest of the games on the multi (since I could only dump the first).
Obviously the incomplete dump, the software-crashing thing and the rest of the multicart are problems I'm going to have to sort out on my end (unless I can find someone else to dump them) but would anyone here be able to help out getting the three apparently-complete dumps working? I'm not sure if they're good dumps with protection, or if the dump actually just failed in other less obvious ways, but I don't know a thing about GB ASM so I can't tell either way.
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Next gen Cowboy
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« Reply #1 on: July 20, 2010, 04:21:36 pm » |
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First and most obvious question is; if the games themselves actually work as they are supposed to? It would not be the first time a pirate game did not even run on the system is was designed for, if that's the case then I assume a problems could occur when trying to dump them.
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taizou
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« Reply #2 on: July 20, 2010, 05:13:10 pm » |
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Yeah, the games all work fine.
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Tauwasser
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« Reply #3 on: July 21, 2010, 07:19:21 am » |
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It might be that they use custom carts that are unlike any other carts that other commercial games use. So it might execute some (logically) invalid code that is perfectly ok for its custom cart. Did you look at the ASM and determine if it performs sane operations?
cYa,
Tauwasser
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taizou
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« Reply #4 on: July 21, 2010, 11:40:58 am » |
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That could well be the case - most emulators give an "undefined opcode" error, but I have pretty much zero knowledge of ASM at the moment so I have no idea why that's happening.
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Tauwasser
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« Reply #5 on: July 21, 2010, 01:50:35 pm » |
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Does the header at least check out? Go use No$GMB and look at the header info starting at 0x100. Alternatively, post it here  cYa, Tauwasser |
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taizou
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« Reply #6 on: July 21, 2010, 02:34:36 pm » |
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Yeah, the headers all seem fine. They actually have duplicate headers at 0x180 which are used to display a custom boot logo (posted a bit about that here) so I guess they must use some kind of custom cart hardware to swap the fake headers with the real ones, at least. |
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aa336699
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« Reply #7 on: July 21, 2010, 03:36:59 pm » |
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Did you try loading those in KiGB? I think it's the most compatible emulator out there. And I think it would be a better idea to leave the whole multicart untouched instead of extracting the game, just a suggestion  |
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taizou
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« Reply #8 on: July 21, 2010, 04:41:19 pm » |
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Yeah, I tried KiGB, get the same invalid opcode error.
as for the multicart, I would have left it intact if I could, but my flash linker only recognises the first game so thats all I can get at for now. :(
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