User talk:Jrra

OOT Anti-Piracy

Have these anti-piracy measures listed here had documented tests to see if they can be triggered? I'm thinking it might be worth adding a todo box to the page if not. --Hiccup (talk) 12:09, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

As discussed on the discord, I'm just putting some information here to get things moving forward a bit. Some key questions which need answers include the following:

• Why isn't any of this in the decomp?
• Which versions have this?
• How can anyone else see these?
• How does the check work?

I feel that if the anti-piracy cannot be triggered without modifying the original ROM's data in a case where the game would otherwise not boot on something such as a cartridge copier, then the anti-piracy section should clarify that it is unused anti-piracy measures. The fact that the functions tie to the CIC chip leads me to believe that yes, they were indeed there to trigger when something was wrong with the CIC chip, but I also believe that this protection could have been implemented before the PIF-NUS hardware was finalized. Until these questions are answered, I believe an Investigate Template would be wise to add, as you removed Hiccup's todo citing: known to be triggered on with patched roms for copiers from back in the day. I don't feel there's any reason why we should continue to display this as concrete evidence so every gaming youtuber stops reporting this as if it were a casual thing encountered by pirates. Biggestsonicfan (talk) 21:19, 24 April 2023 (UTC)

Continuing this conversation from the information on discord, you seemingly refuse to use tcrf to communicate, so I will put concrete notes here for those curious. Yes, the console will freeze when the CIC chip check fails. However you are stating from our conversation that cartridge copiers booting a bootleg of Zelda OOT affixed with a 6102 CIC chip (the most common one) which replaced the cartridge's original 6105 CIC chip, as well as having the cartridge using an IPL3 that would use the 6102 chip. The IPL3, as I understand it, is the "Initial Program Loader 3" or boot code, which is a short piece of MIPS assembly code located in every single N64 ROM that starts at offset 0x40 and has a size of 4032 bytes. So if my understanding is correct, the ROM itself would need modification within this offset to allow the 6102 chip to run. Biggestsonicfan (talk) 23:54, 24 April 2023 (UTC)