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Jaguar interactive II
Jaguar & Lynx Encryption found! 
This was posted as a news story on this site on January 27, 2001.

 

Jaguar & Lynx Encryption found!

Posted by Classic Gaming Expo (user-2ivebrm.dialup.mindspring.com) on January 27, 2001 at 02:25:34:

Yes, you read that correctly!

Classic Gaming Expo is thrilled to be able to remove these important hurdles from Jaguar and Lynx game development and production.

Stop by the cgexpo web-site and help yourself:

http://www.cgexpo.com

Don't forget to register for the show while you're there!

Best Wishes,
John, Sean, Joe, & Tom

 

Encryption discovery story

Posted by Glenn Bruner (ginger221.u1.cos.pcisys.net) on January 27, 2001 at 17:21:59:

Well, not much of a story to tell.

Before I joined the Air Force in 1984...oh wait a minute, not my life story!

I'm from Silicon Valley and still have a friend from High School who I have= keep an eye out for stuff in surplus shops.

He found a obscure 88meg Syquest cartridge for me recently. It took me a little= while to find a Syquest drive to read it on. I only had a 44meg drive. I managed
to find one on Ebay for $14 (200Meg drive).

Well, I used an old Centris 660AV Macintosh running MagicMac to read the disk. Talk= about a round about way to read a ST disk. But my 1040STFM doesn't do SCSI and this was= a method I used to read some Syquest disks that were pulled out of Atari's dumpsters when= they closed down in '96.

After careful picking through of the files on the disk I found a file called TYPEAB.XXX.= Didn't think much of it. Open it up with a hex editor. I noticed something very familar= about the file. I've looked at enough Jaguar cart images with a hex editor trying to hack the ROM encryption code several years ago. Since I have an Alpine board now, I fired it up and did the test that I described in the README file. I was amazed at the results I got.

I didn't mention this in the README because I didn't expect people to really care how it was found. Boy have I been wrong!!

The interesting thing about the file name mentioned above is TYPE AB. Universal blood donor type! Pretty sneaky cover name for a file.

Told John Hardie about it and that's when he mentioned that Lynx Encryption was also found. He asked me if we could announce this on the CG Expo page. I agreed since it would get more exposure that way.

That's it. Just glad I was able to give a fine contribution to the Jaguar community.

Glenn Bruner
[email protected]

NOT THE ENCRYPTION KEY!!! EVERYONE READ AND UNDERSTAND!

Posted by Thunderbird (pool-63.53.78.210.nwrk.grid.net) on January 28, 2001 at 06:56:44:
In Reply to: Re: Encryption discovery story posted by smokey on January 28, 2001 at 05:08:26:

>So this is the real deal,the original encryption key!!!!!

No, this is NOT the "key".

We don't know for sure WHAT it is, but Glenn and I agree that it's most likely something like this:

What it is would be more like a file that someone encrypted using the real key which passed the validation test on bootup. This file is very small, and just so happens that if you tack an unencrypted ROM image onto the end of it that the validation code never looks at that code because it thinks the file is much smaller. So, the validation passes, and the validation code tells the system that the cart is good, and the Jag starts running the cart at the normal address (the place where you put the ROM image).

Once again, this is NOT the "key". Think of it more like a "back door".

Thunderbird
ScatoLOGIC