BattleSphere Update: 9/13/1999

Originally posted at http://home.sprynet.com/~thunderbird/

The clock is ticking!

4Play is proud to announce that it will only be a matter of weeks until we will have utterly defeated the encryption code for BattleSphere. We are using a proprietary method which will allow us to encrypt the binary without using any hardware bypassing techniques.

After carefully considering the options, a software scheme seemed like the right thing to do. While hardware bypassing is currently an alternative, it adds significant cost to the manufacturing. Hardware bypass would require an entirely new circuit board be designed and fabricated. All existing circuit board stockpiles are relegated worthless by hardware bypass techniques. Since the market is small for Jaguar games and we don't have the economy of scale to offset production costs, designing new boards adds a large cost to the price of a cartridge. However, we are working very carefully to reduce these unnecessary costs while delivering the polished, professional product the Jaguar Community deserves. Price has been a primary concern to many of you, so we determined that a little more work to insure a reasonable price is worth the effort. Hence, we invented this ingenious method for software encryption.

Our clever software scheme employs a "brute force" method of cracking encryption by utilizing a bank of 8 specially modified Jaguar consoles with a custom patched version of the standard Boot ROM and a few modifications to the BattleSphere executable itself, which runs in a hardware hacked EPROM cartridge. The exact details of our technology will be revealed in the future, as we do not wish to give an advantage to our competition in the cartridge manufacturing market. Suffice it to say that this bank of Jaguars is constantly booting a self-modifying binary and checking if the Jaguar Boot ROM has failed or passed the software encryption. Once the binary boots, the encryption is successful! Our calculations indicate that it should take a maximum of 125 days for this process to try ALL the possible encryption combinations, but the odds are evenly distributed around 1/2 that amount of time.

Keep your fingers crossed!