That Tobias f--k went after Xak III and SO II as pressed CD-ROM releases!

[SamIAm]

My comment was not misinformed, it's right on the money. You guys are saying "Put your name or a disclaimer on the title screen so people won't rip off your translation." I'm saying that if someone DOES rip off your translation and removes your name from the title screen, the translation on said rip-off could still be proven as yours. It would be uploaded to Rom-hacking.net under your name, for example, and the translations would be the same. You guys read into my comment with things that I wasn't even remotely saying. Not surprised with the people in this thread, though.

I thought I was pretty clear but I guess not.

I don't care about him pressing copies with or without my name attached. I care about him selling copies of our translations. I don't want him to do that, period. That's the point. I don't care about my name. I might not even add it to the credit scroll at the end.

While I'm not a coder, a hacker, a translator, a bootlegger, or a customer, I think SamIAm's strategy is far too scorched earth.

I like your idea of not nuking a save, but rather disabling it somehow and re-enabling it with a proper version. I don't know how easy that is to do, however.

I also like adding another message to the forced crash screen.

As for the initial warning message, the one that we would make to cause a crash if it's ever erased by Tobias, I don't think there's any harm to adding a 5 second message to the startup-loading sequence when most games need a few seconds to load anyway. This could be displayed while it is loading.

Making them fight jacked up bosses or deleting their save isn't going to do anything but piss them off. They aren't going to plow half way through the game, get completely f*cked by malicious code, then suddenly be converted by the experience of having wasted 20 hours and $60 and then start all over again by locating the patch, appying it, and then playing through the first half of the game again.

No need to waste 20 hours; how about having the crash happen after one or two?

Anyway, pissing them off so they don't buy from Tobias is the point. It's just a matter of striking the best balance. We want to piss off as many people who buy his bootlegs of fan-translations as possible, while minimizing the number of them who would completely give up on playing the game via other means.

Remember, the whole crash idea only happens on the off chance that Tobias goes in and actually tries to remove our message saying not to buy from him. The idea of him doing that really pisses me off.

[Dicer]

And I still love you, Emerald Rocker.

Also: Folks, the point of this thread is to EDUCATE.

If you bought stuff from Tobias, don't get your moist panties in a bunch.

We simply hope that you THINK TWICE before buying from him...we honestly feel that you should not support him and we have explained why. 

The rest is up to you.

Knowing is half the battle.

You gotta know when to hold 'em...

Who put the bop in the bop-shoo-wop-dee-bop?

I got the free CD's, so I did my part to bring the machine down...

[Joe Redifer]

So if the goal is to get him to NOT use your translations period, why have a time bomb? Why not just have it not work right away? Or rename the save file to "HOPE_U_DIDNT_PAY_4_DIS_1 or XAK3_ENG_IS_FREE_01 or something.

[SignOfZeta]

My comment was not misinformed, it's right on the money. You guys are saying "Put your name or a disclaimer on the title screen so people won't rip off your translation." I'm saying that if someone DOES rip off your translation and removes your name from the title screen, the translation on said rip-off could still be proven as yours. It would be uploaded to Rom-hacking.net under your name, for example, and the translations would be the same. You guys read into my comment with things that I wasn't even remotely saying. Not surprised with the people in this thread, though.

I thought I was pretty clear but I guess not.

What are you talking about? Nobody is trying to hide their identity here. Yes, it can be easily learned, nobody cares.

[SignOfZeta]

Btw, in reference to the Sapphire bootlegs; by the time I caught on to them it seemed, at least to me, that as accurate as they were there was no way they were real. I bought one because they were only $35 at the time. As I said before, I have zero problem with bootlegs. I would go so far as to say they are essential. Organized piracy that disguises itself as legit just to screw noobs is a problem though. $35 ...that's not the greatest price, but it's a lot better than what he eventually started selling them for.  More importantly, several eBay auctions passed for legit but we're really these bootlegs. We're talking about $300 or more, because noobs didn't know. Back then seeing any copy of Sapphire was not a common site so when something really accurate looking showed up they had no reason to be suspicious.

It's amazing how much more greedy and brave he has become. He sends out "press review" copies of f*cking PIRATE shit? That's some guts right there. Amazing.

[esteban]

So if the goal is to get him to NOT use your translations period, why have a time bomb? Why not just have it not work right away? Or rename the save file to "HOPE_U_DIDNT_PAY_4_DIS_1 or XAK3_ENG_IS_FREE_01 or something.

Think about a logical series of events.

NOTE: This may never happen.

(1) Let us assume that Tobias hired someone to hack out the DIY/fan disclaimer on the title screen.

(2) Let us assume that Tobias would check the game (by briefly playing it) to ensure that altering the title screen did not break the game.

(3) A few of us think that it would be MARVELOUS if Tobias then proceeded to spend his hard-earned Euros to press the disc.

(4) Tobias would have to deal with the ensuing drama, should any arise, if his commissioned version of the game was broken.

PLEASE NOTE: This should answer your question. If not, look at step #2 and #3...Tobias probably wouldn't press a disc if it was immediately obvious that it was broken.

(5) We can never really stop profiteers, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun!!! If you honestly did not understand the humor and sweet comeuppance of the "Anti-Tobias Checksum" ...well, try to smile  and/or laugh once in a while. I thought it was a creative, amusing way to thwart Tobias.

[SamIAm]

So if the goal is to get him to NOT use your translations period, why have a time bomb? Why not just have it not work right away? Or rename the save file to "HOPE_U_DIDNT_PAY_4_DIS_1 or XAK3_ENG_IS_FREE_01 or something.

There is no way to stop him from using the same version of the patch that we are going to distribute freely, which will actually work. It has to actually work, or there is no point in making it.

esteban summarized the rest of the idea pretty well. Tobias or whoever can alter a warning message, whether it's before the title screen or the name of the save file or whatever. The idea is to make the game check to see if he has done this, and if he has, to break at a point deep enough in the game that Tobias will not notice until he's already pressed and shipped lots of copies.

If he notices the forced crash before he presses his bootlegs, he has a shot at hacking that out, too. We don't want that.

[Joe Redifer]

Do you seriously think he doesn't keep an eye on this thread?

[SamIAm]

Do you seriously think he doesn't keep an eye on this thread?

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. It's possible to rig up the patch pretty heavily, though, and it's only really important that he doesn't know the fine details. After all, it's one thing to hack out a bit of text at the game's first loading screen; it's quite another to isolate and neutralize multiple cross checks within the game itself. If he's afraid of ruining his bootleg of our translation and doesn't touch our message that says he's a funky buttlover, we win anyway. That's actually preferable to screwing over wayward gamers. Not to mention deterring/screwing over other bootleggers in the future.

[Necromancer]

Let me get this straight: Tobias could find a hacker competent enough to remove whatever warning notes you'd add but he'd never find one good enough to disable the time bomb?  Such hubris.

As for ol' Sapphire, the only people that heard his story and believed it were fooling themselves.  None of Tobias's story ever made a lick of sense.

[SignOfZeta]

Let me get this straight: Tobias could find a hacker competent enough to remove whatever warning notes you'd add but he'd never find one good enough to disable the time bomb?  Such hubris.

I don't think this is unrealistic at all. The warning message could be easy as hell to find, especially if it was just text written with an existing font. The other stuff could be made much much harder to find. In fact, even after reading this stuff, there is no real way he could know for sure the game wasn't rigged to explode. If three or four booby traps were installed and he found them all, there is no way of knowing for sure that there isn't a fifth one.

At this point, as far as I've seen, he has yet to alter code at all. He'd have to join up with someone who is a good PCE hacker, one with loose morals, which could be tough to find. The PCE hacker scene isn't exactly enormous.

[Opethian]

don't you think he played these games to the end before getting them pressed to disc? lol

[Joe Redifer]

Keep in mind that the hack would have to check for the COLOR of the font as well. For example let's say the text is white on a black background and he just changed the text to black. So it's still there, ya just can't see it. There'd have to be a lot of redundancy checks and whatnot. Like: Check in level 1 to see if text code is still there. Then check in level 3. Because you'd only translate level-based games, obviously. But you get my drift. It'd be a lot of hacks to remove. They should all be written differently so he couldn't find 'em by searching via hex.  Also hack in an ADPCM voice that sez "Dis translation iz 4 free kna mean my nig?"

[SignOfZeta]

It would not be hard. It seriously would not be hard. You just run a hash check on whatever section of code you want to stay put. The entire intro sequence, for example.

The message itself doesn't have to actually be in the check, that only needs to be on the CD once. If you write the check in a number of significantly different ways then they won't stand out significantly when some bag is looking for the code in the ISO. Put one right before the first boss fight, one at the end, one in the save screen, etc. The only way to find them all would be to basically have a really good programmer play all the way through the game and debug the entire thing for ages until he's thwarted by every check and fixes them all one at a time. This is certainly possible, but it's way beyond the normal Tobias way of doing things (file the numbers off, make up a story, octuple the price, profit). At the very least it would require this sponge to do some work.

[_joshuaTurbo]

I know the Midwest Gaming Classic for example apparently passed a rule in recent years banning the sale of repros. But a few years back there were 3 or 4 vendors selling mostly or primarily repro carts. A lot of them had the same common popular cartridges quite a few of which were fan translations and hacks of existing games.

2014 was the first year that we banned the sales of repros.  I think it was mostly due to a fear of lawsuits since Nintendo had their Pokemon booth about 50 feet away from some bootleggers trying to sell NES fantranslations and SNES Earthbound booties for $65 a pop.  lol