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An Anonymous Coward writes:

In a video [youtube.com], Dr. Abrasive recounts his seven-year-long reverse engineering project, ultimately leading to the creation of a plug-in expansion board which can load software from a USB flash device.

The Sega Saturn contains a 32-bit CPU (Hitachi SuperH) solely for operating the system's CD-ROM drive. The chip has an internal ROM which is normally inaccessible, and this is where the copy protection code exists. It checks for a special track on Saturn game CDs which can't be duplicated onto CD-Rs, preventing any data access to unauthorized discs. While previous attempts to read the internal ROM by decapping the chip had failed, mounting it on a custom PCB finally enabled a hack to dump the contents. However, this did not immediately lead to a workaround for the copy protection.

The Saturn also included an expansion slot for an MPEG video decoder to play Video CDs. Examining the inner workings of this device opened up the possibility of bypassing the CD block altogether.

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