SNES game with copy/anti-piracy protection!?

[Alpha]

I found out today that apparently Earthbound for SNES had built in anti-piracy protection against cartridge copiers back in the day. Apparently this game had Region Protection and many SRAM checks to see if the cartridge had only 8KB of ram.

 

 

If the SRAM checks fail during game play, the game will increase in difficulty substantially to almost impossible to beat. Quite clever might I say from the developers for almost 20 years ago.

 

Has anyone heard of other SNES games that employed similar measures? I just find all this quite fascinating.

 

http://tcrf.net/Earthbound#Copy_Protection

[ken_cinder]

Oh there's a number of them, you just don't encounter the issues on emulators like you would on real hardware, and if dumps are fixed then you certainly won't.

 

http://ucon64.sourceforge.net/ucon64/SWC-compatibility.txt for example...1+2 entries, Earthbound being a case of both, number of others in that list, and that's just for the Super Wildcard.

[Alpha]

Oh there's a number of them, you just don't encounter the issues on emulators like you would on real hardware, and if dumps are fixed then you certainly won't.

 

http://ucon64.sourceforge.net/ucon64/SWC-compatibility.txt for example...1+2 entries, Earthbound being a case of both, number of others in that list, and that's just for the Super Wildcard.

 

It's funny seeing Street Fighter Alpha 2 on that list. I can specifically remember for years that game didn't work in any SNES emulator (borked graphics, but had sound). Sounds like this may have been the reason.

[Agozer]

In the case of Street Fighter Alpha 2, the issue was with a very specific graphics compression/handling used by the game, via a custom chip in the cart. Naturally, Dump units had no support for these special chips. It's the same deal with Star Ocean and a few other titles, like Far Eden of the East.

[Alpha]

In the case of Street Fighter Alpha 2, the issue was with a very specific graphics compression/handling used by the game, via a custom chip in the cart. Naturally, Dump units had no support for these special chips. It's the same deal with Star Ocean and a few other titles, like Far Eden of the East.

 

It appears you are completely correct. It also seems the chip may have had a dual purpose to work as copy protection as well. But where were people buying copied SNES games?!?! I've never seen one in my life.

 

The chip Street Fighter Alpha 2 apparently used is the S-DD1, which caused obvious load times in the game to load all the sprites at the "FIGHT" screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-DD1_chip#S-DD1

[Bambi]

Waay back I remember there was a game genie code for showing you screens that say "We don't support piracy! Call 1-XXX to repeort anyone.".

 

If I'm thinking right the major game that had anti piracy/cheats was Super Metroid. It would also erase your saves if you tried the code.

[ken_cinder]

That's because that code causes the game to see an SRAM location that shouldn't exist(And even on a legit cart, doesn't, but is still "mapped"), one of the most common copy protection types...such as the one referenced in the OP>