Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: flarn2006 - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

I'm sure a lot of people here know how TMSS worked, or at least was intended to work. You can read about it on Wikipedia, but as a tl;dr: Basically it was a mechanism on the Genesis that refused to load games unless it contained the word "SEGA" at a specific location in the ROM, in which case it would also display a message that it was licensed by Sega. Their goal was that if this mechanism was reverse engineered (which they expected would happen) and a company made unlicensed cartridges, they could take them to court for allegedly violating their trademark. This did end up happening with a company called Accolade, but (thankfully) the court ruled that they were abusing the trademark system and Accolade was not in violation.

In the section of the article about the lawsuit though, it says:

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My question is how was that possible? Sega may not have revealed it, but they haven't revealed much if anything about the internal workings of the system's games, and look where we are now. Does anyone here know? My guess is that they had anticipated someone using this defense, so they also programmed in a secret string that could be inserted in the ROM in place of SEGA (AGES is what initially came to mind as a possibility) to load the game without the warning. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Accolade reverse engineered it themselves and figured it out, considering they were offered the cartridges and they obviously had the means to dump them.

Another question: if they had previously made systems without TMSS, how did games made before TMSS load on the Genesis III? I'm assuming it didn't use a whitelist of approved hashes, because I imagine that would take too long on the Genesis' hardware.

This tutorial is hosted on Steam Guides. Here's the description I posted for the guide there.

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View the guide here.

I was recently banned from the Steam forums for "advocating / admitting to software piracy", despite not having done so. This is the post that got removed by a moderator, but had been quoted in other posts:

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I contacted support, as I figured they thought I was referring to cracking the game, I.e. removing DRM so I can use it without purchasing the game. I explained what I meant and mentioned that I legally own SA2, on their own distribution service no less. This is the response I got from them:

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Since the post was in a thread related to VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat), I figured they thought I was referring to (if not piracy) hacking in multiplayer games, despite this not being the reason given for the ban. I understand that I have to follow their rules since they own the forum, but I doubt Valve of all companies would have a rule prohibiting the discussion of hacking singleplayer games (well it does have multiplayer, but it's not online, at least not officially.) Here's my reply:

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As I have just sent it, and they take a while to respond to support requests (and to release Episode 3), I haven't received a response yet.

Let's say you lose a life in Green Hill Zone Act 1. Now that would seldom happen to anyone who isn't a noob (no offense if this happens to you), but let's say it does happen. You might say, "Oh well, I'll just keep going." Maybe you're playing on a real Genesis and you're too lazy to get up and hit Reset. But anyway, now you only have two lives instead of three. Now that could come back to haunt you later on, once you get to the harder levels. But I don't think it should actually take a life away in the first level unless you've hit a checkpoint.

This issue tends to come up more often in the later games, however. With checkpoints that persist even after a game over (whenever you complete a level and save the game, not the mid-level checkpoints) this type of issue comes up more often, and in levels that are actually challenging. If I lose a life before I hit the first checkpoint in a level, I'm almost tempted to exit back to the main menu and start again. I'm pretty sure at least some of the games reset your lives then if you have less than the starting amount, but I don't know if they all do, and either way it's still a hassle to have to wait for the level to load again.

(Hmm...long loading times, frustratingly difficult levels...no autosave..... Well I wouldn't want to play that game anyway.)

But yeah, I think if you have not yet reached a point where you wouldn't be able to instantly restart from there after losing all your lives, dying shouldn't actually take a life unless you have more lives than you would normally start with. If you lose a life and keep playing, that could mean the difference between completing the level and having to start over from the beginning once you get some checkpoints. Even in bosses that don't have checkpoints I think this would be good. Back when I wasn't as good at Sonic Adventure 2, I HATED always having to go back to the main menu, and load the game again once I lost all my lives during a boss.

I get them wanting to be challenging, but if the "challenge" is more just frustrating and can be avoided by performing an also-frustrating task that isn't cheating, and may or may not even be necessary in every case, I think it's something that should be changed. Why don't most games do this?

In addition to the major stuff, many minor things from older Sonic games are featured in Sonic Generations in one way or another. For instance, the elemental shields can be bought in the skill shop, and there are some challenge missions where you have to keep the end-of-level signpost in the air (like everyone tries to do in Sonic 3.) But there's one awesome thing about the Genesis games that Sega hasn't even acknowledged: debug mode. It would have been awesome if this made a cameo in Generations. Perhaps if you pressed Up,Y,Down,Y,Left,Y,Right,Y at the menu that appears when you select a level, and then start it with Act 1 selected, it would do it. Obviously achievements and statistics would be disabled, but it would still be fun.

Does anyone else think they missed an opportunity for something awesome?