subject: British Game Developer Talks About Nintendo Company Anti-Piracy Road [print this page]
To Nintendo`s handheld game console DS, the emergence of writer card is a disaster. It enables game players to download game freely from internet and thus don`t need to buy genuine ones.The Most Superior supercard dsone i Yield, Go to Have a Look!
Andrew Mclennan of Metaforic Technology Company is an ex game developer in Britain, who once developed TV games, PC, NDS platform, and saw in person that his developed game could be downloaded prior to stepping into retail shop. What's Witching now?: n5 ! In the 17 years when he was engaged in game development, nearly all of his games have been copied illegally. Burning disks can be seen all over the world. Players only need to spend 10 dollars to get almost all NDS games for free.
Andrew Mclennan isn`t the only one drove to crazy, and Nintendo must get more pain. Nintendo itself made crack-downs in 2008 to prohibit writable card R4 by use of law, stating that the users of R4 writable cards brought extremly serious harm not only to Nintendo but also to other third-party firms that develop games for NDS. In March of this year, Tokyo Court permitted Nintendo's demand of prohibiting R4 writable cards. In doing so, R4 writable card is really defined as illegal existence in Japan. It is said that Nintendo will look into the developing firm of R4 writable card in order to thoroughly cut if off.
Although living space of writable card in Japan becomes small, it still exists between law grey area (between legal and illegal) in other districts of the world. Burn card itself is technically legal, but downloading the game ROM is clearly not legitimate, so a combination of both is difficult to define. Of course, Nintendo definitely wants to solve the problem from the source of the vicious circle, i.e. burning disks. According to Andrew Mclennan, presently Nintendo hopes to cooperate with Metaforic, letting the latter help resolving the problem of burning disks on a global scale or even eventually follow suit of the legal method used in Japan.
Metaforic Technology Inc has detected R4 kernel and patch used to run ROM of the NDS games. It can be understood that Andrew Mclennan can't say too much about the developing skill against game pirate for now. The explaination on the concept of the skill is "We will put a set of safety program into NDS game ROM so that each game would have the individual safe system. Different games would have different safe systems."
Andrew Mclennan hasn't over exaggerated on the skill can prevent from the decipher of hackers for 100%. He admitted that if hacker had enough talent, time and motivation, most safe systems would be able to be deciphered eventually. But he hoped that it would cost as much time as possible on the decipher time. It would be better to make hackers headache in decipher process.
Andrew Mclennan still need a long time to release this technic to fight with burn card. But R4 has already existed for many years, all the illegal NDS games of the past four and half years can be downloaded from many websites all over the world. In 2007, British [Times" once reported on R4 cards, saying that there were 35 million sold and so far this figure must be even more substantial.
What`s more, Andrew McLennan said that their knowledge for all kinds of R4 is still very limited, and corresponding to security system of the official anti-theft technology, R4 can continue to crack by upgrading its firmware. But he claimed that the skill solve plan of Metaforic technology company had the prvention ability to updating firmware. "The updating of firmware can't break through our protection system though for now we can't say too much about the details."
Andrew Mclennan make all effects to against piracy by technology, but he don`t think it`s necessary to prohibit flash card by legal due to respect to those home made software and games developers relying on flash card, even those home brewers are in a tiny minority. He also said that the law for corresponding ares is also vacant now, so it is difficult to prove that circulation of writable card violates the law. If we prohibit one kind of writable card today, a new kind may appear the other day. Thus, Andrew Mclennan agrees on finally using technical method to solve this problem instead of law method.
DSi, a new type of NDS had been released in Japan last year, and then appeared in Euramerican this year. All of the flash card became useless at first, but hackers surely didn`t surrender to Nintendo`s efforts, launched again another kind of flash card specific to DSi. As the saying goes [Villains can always outsmart", it's a long and hard way to go to protect against piracy.
British Game Developer Talks About Nintendo Company Anti-Piracy Road
