Engineer Cracks Sega Saturn DRM

After countless hours of tinkering, one industrious engineer has cracked the DRM on the Sega Saturn.

Why would you want to do that? The console was released in 1994, so if you have one, it stands to reason that its CD drive will not last forever. When it dies, the copy protection on the system means the entire console is basically useless. So an engineer known as Dr. Abrasive figured out how to load games via USB.

This was no weekend project, though. Dr. Abrasive—aka James Laird-Wah—first picked up a Sega Saturn during a 2013 trip to Japan, so it's taken him three years to get this thing up and running.

In a 27-minute video outlining the process (below), Dr. Abrasive says he discovered an analysis feature in the Saturn that detects a "wobble" pattern etched into a game disc. As long as the wobble appears while the disc is spinning, gamers can play. No wobble, no gaming.

As PCMag sister site ExtremeTech points out, "This makes it extremely difficult to mod an existing console to work with a third-party CD-ROM."

Homebrewers and hackers have long criticized Sega for the feature. While it was designed so only authorized games would run on the console, it creates an issue for old-time gamers who are now dealing with outdated hardware and the possibility of messed-up discs. Ultimately, they want to be able to convert the discs to a digital file and play them on the Saturn indefinitely.

Up for the challenge, Dr. Abrasive kicked things off by unsoldering the disc drive CPU and installing a custom-made circuit board. He then claims to have spent months analyzing the code and digital rights management features to figure out how to circumvent the wobble. Nothing worked.

Ultimately, though, he came across an important finding: the Saturn's Video CD slot has a feature that lets users access "the brain of the system" without making any changes whatsoever to the hardware. Using the slot, he loaded up Saturn game images onto a USB drive and ran them directly to the console's processor. The result? Fully playable Saturn games from digital files.

The entire hack was announced on the Assembler Games forum and a video was published to YouTube by cTrix's debuglive, which visited Dr. Abrasive's lab. According to cTrix, the doctor would eventually like to sell his Saturn hack to old-time gamers in hopes they, too, can enjoy Saturn games running digitally from a USB drive to their console.

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