Square Enix thanks pirates for playing FFCC

by Eric Caoili { Mar 11th 2008 at 3:00PM }

Mere hours after Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates hit store shelves today, pirated copies of the game appeared in the shady corners of the internet, posted for all the picaroons out there to download and transfer to their flashcarts.

Twenty minutes or so into the ARPG, however, many of those pirates found themselves greeted with this "Thank you for playing!!" screen and unable to progress. Players have the option of restarting the game from the last save point and playing on, but the screen reappears at random intervals. Clever!

Why not lock pirates out before even loading up the game, you ask? Well, this way, they can try out Ring of Fates, eventually reforming their criminal ways and buying it if they find the experience enjoyable. Also, anyone dumping the game for distribution wouldn't notice this bit of programming unless they played a significant portion of it first.

Though this method isn't 100% effective, as some brands of carts are unaffected and hackers will likely find a workaround by day's end, it's certainly cute! Pirates should feel thankful that this isn't even half as malicious as Earthbound's anti-piracy measures.

Tags: arpg, crystal-chronicles, earthbound, final-fantasy, flashcart, mother, piracy, square-enix, yarr

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

pas @ Mar 11th 2008 3:27PM

Nice turn ! Hopefully this will make devs coming back to the DS that didn't even think of developing cause of the piracy question before.

sifer2400 @ Mar 13th 2008 6:01PM

its only a matter of time b4 it gets cracked/hacked/patched MUAHHAHAHAH U cant beat pirates X )

RaiDesu @ Mar 11th 2008 3:48PM

Way to make everyone carry a cart around, just to play this game. O_O

Roto13 @ Mar 11th 2008 6:18PM

Try not to break your back.

jsutcliffe @ Mar 11th 2008 3:50PM

As a complete aside: Is this worth getting solely for the single-player experience? (I have no DS-wielding friends, woe is me!)

ryan_90 @ Mar 11th 2008 3:51PM

Actually it's not anti-piracy as many including myself first thought, its just a bug in the firmware that makes the game skip back to the ending, which would obviously take you back to the loading screens, anyone with an emulator has surely experienced this, it would happen in starfox 64 everytime you pushed the start button, so its simply a flaw in the R4 and M3 Firmwares although i should just say R4 since M3 is just a copy of the firmware, A fix should be out within the next few days anyways.

Truth is theres in absolutely no way Nintendo can stop the piracy since its impossible for them to tell if your using a flash cart or not, they both operate in the exact same way.

yoshimans @ Mar 11th 2008 3:57PM

Great work square enix. I really like anti piracy measures because piracy sucks. I was a pirate in the past but I stopped.It just feels ...wrong,downloading games is way too illigal for me now.

rk @ Mar 11th 2008 3:58PM

If ryan_90 is wrong, and is an anti-piracy thing, I give the hackers two days, tops, to figure out a workaround.

Ryan @ Mar 11th 2008 4:04PM

It's not anti-piracy trust me, There were similar games were going through a certain door or doing a certain thing just crashes the game but these have all been fixed now.

If it really was anti-piracy then why is it only the R4 and M3 it doesn't work on, there are about 10 different types of backup cards out there

ssrgc @ Mar 12th 2008 2:28PM

You have to look at the difference between the flash carts. For instance- R4 and M3 Simply patch on the go. M3 Real does not need to. If you look around you can verify this. People are not having a problem playing it on their M3 Real, while they are on others.

KamenRiderTakoyaki @ Mar 11th 2008 4:15PM

Bah, so I have to buy at least TWO copies of this game for my family?

ssuk @ Mar 11th 2008 4:28PM

I expect a R4DS patch in the next few days to sort this. Hell, there were patches for completely obscure games on the R4 recently, so this should be resolved very quickly.

Synergistic @ Mar 11th 2008 4:41PM

The anti-piracy on Earthbound was brilliant.

mintsauce @ Mar 11th 2008 5:14PM

Since we've established that this is not an anti-piracy measure, perhaps the story can be taken down, or at least amended.

HeyYouGuys @ Mar 11th 2008 5:53PM

That hasn't been 'established'. The only thing that has been established is it works on flashcards that don't modify the ROM.

Eric Caoili @ Mar 11th 2008 6:44PM

the discussions i've been following on the topic haven't yet come to a 100% conclusion on whether this is an anti-piracy measure or a "firmware bug." if it turns out to be the latter, i'll let you guys know.

ssrgc @ Mar 12th 2008 2:32PM

Their is code that was put in for the specific purpose of reading whether or not the ROM gets patched as you load it up. If it detects patching, it implements a timer.

Whether or not this is viable to call anti-piracy is up to you. I plead the fifth.

John B. @ Mar 11th 2008 5:34PM

Despite the fact that this is apparently not an anti-piracy measure, its still a good opportunity to speak my mind: where are developers getting the figures that so many people are software pirates? Out of my 10-15 friends that own a DS, 1 of them has a backup card, and he doesn't even use it for piracy - its just convenient to have all of your games in one place. 1/10 is probably still a high number because of the type of kids I hang out with (tech majors) - the average joe probably doesn't even know what a flash card is.

Raru @ Mar 11th 2008 5:39PM

Does anyone know where I can get the lil USB to DS cart adapter so I can copy all my carts over to my R4 card?

John B. @ Mar 11th 2008 5:42PM

Theres a really good one here -
http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com/
Its where I buy everything from. Good prices, fast shipping.

ManekiNeko @ Mar 12th 2008 8:27AM

That was highly annoying.

Raru @ Mar 11th 2008 5:47PM

Nice Try RICK TROLL!

Does anyone really know where to find one...

Ryan @ Mar 11th 2008 5:49PM

HAHA i lol'd

"Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and dessert you"

moominsean @ Mar 11th 2008 11:30PM

does it with the ttds also. didn't do it for over an hour, now it does it randomly about every 10 minutes or so. i am enjoying it, so i'm going to buy it tomorrow. can't say the same thing about revenant wings... that games sucks.

Xanto @ Mar 12th 2008 12:29AM

I'll have to agree with Ryan, it works fine on the CycloDS so it has to be a firmware issue

atastysammich @ Mar 12th 2008 12:33AM

Eh, what's one game out of a couple thousand? It's hard to be mad when they're so polite!

Aaron @ Mar 12th 2008 2:24AM

Oh, you silly non-technical people. It's incredibly -obvious- that it is indeed an anti-piracy measure, and I'll explain why.

The vast majority of DS flashcarts in circulation patch the ROMs to get them to boot on the DS, whether it's on-the-fly or before it's even loaded onto the cart. Every twenty minutes or so, the game compares its CRC to its expected CRC. If it's running on a legitimate cart (or one of the flashcarts that has true clean ROM support, like the CycloDS), it passes the check and the game continues. If the CRC differs (which it will when patched as the R4 and many others do), it displays the screen and restarts.

I honestly can't see how anyone could think it's a 'firmware bug' causing the game to 'glitch out'. Anyone with even the smallest amount of real-world programming experience, or hell, even common sense and an eye for discrepancy, can see that it's a calculated anti-piracy measure.

Anyone looking to 'fix' this problem has a few options available to them:

1) The firmware could be modified so that when patched, the proper CRC is produced. This method is nigh impossible as far as I understand CRCs.

2) The firmware could be modified to patch the ROM at a very low level so that the CRC produced post-patching is considered correct. This is possible, but would be damn difficult to implement, considering what they've got to work with.

3) The firmware could be modified to boot this particular ROM image 'clean', allowing the piracy check to be bypassed as it is on legit carts and clean-rom flashcarts. I'm not sure if this is possible, however; I'm not familiar with the documentation of the R4 et al.

However it's done, I expect it'll be done soon... don't discount human ingenuity.

Regardless, any of these methods will take time. The copy protection is brilliant in that it's giving a serious delay to being playable on the majority of flashcarts (and don't misunderstand, this is what copy protection is generally for: delay), while still giving players a taste of the game. I wouldn't be surprised if many end up buying it before it's fixed.

Dio @ Mar 12th 2008 4:30AM

The R4 team fixed Phantom Hourglass in the same day it was dumped ;D

Matdredalia @ Mar 12th 2008 10:56AM

Wow, good job being a condescending twit. Yeah, being rude to people is REALLY the way to enlighten them and get them to listen to you. Pffbt. Grow up.

Ahrel @ Mar 12th 2008 2:51AM

lol, they should have done this for all of their games (released and coming).

But yeah I don't know anybody who pirates games on the DS through flashcarts. I do know plenty with flashcarts -- they use it for the various homebrew apps and games out there. We're all still waiting on Cave Story DS.

sillypatterson @ Mar 12th 2008 4:43AM

Dio:

Unless the team can make a flashcart that's dependant on patching the ROM to make it boot... boot without patching it... this is unlikely. :P

Yan @ Mar 12th 2008 7:03AM

did this problem occur in the japanese version too? if not, then it may be a anti-piracy thing.

heroinmonkey @ Mar 12th 2008 2:13PM

This is not an anti-piracy measure and has nothing to do with CRC's. This issue is not comparable to the Earthbound software.
It doesn't compare CRC's at all. If it were anti-piracy then it would fail on the majority of the Flashcarts. (which it does not).
If you save your game often, it reduces the instances of the 'Thank you for playing' screen. (People have completed the game despite receiving these messages.)
If it WERE an anti-piracy measure then don't you think Square Enix would've made an announcement (as this would be newsworthy within the gaming community).

People should let the programmers stick to programming before spouting propaganda as factual.

It's not an anti-piracy issue.

Logic ftw!

sillypatterson @ Mar 12th 2008 2:48PM

@heroinmonkey

Logic? No, you're not using -that-. Think.

Every single slot-1 card that can boot the ROM 'clean' has no issue. Every single card that cannot, ie. ones that patch it, do. I simply can't see how you could be so thick as to not see the link between this and a CRC-related anti-piracy measure.

You incorrectly stated that it's not happening to the majority of flashcarts. On the market, R4s outnumber CycloDS by a large margin. It fails on every single R4. As I explained previously, it -doesn't- fail on certain flashcarts because those flashcarts don't alter the game's data to boot it, giving the checker nothing to find.

Anyway, enough conjecture. Let's try logic. Over on GBATemp, there's an undub project for the game. For those not familiar, this is where English voices are replaced with the Japanese voices from the original game. This project was stopped short when, to his surprise, the moment the ROM was altered, he began getting "Thank you for playing" messages and resets at semi-random intervals on his CycloDS, a card that's confirmed to work fine. Why did this happen? Does the CycloDS have a 'firmware bug' too?

Nope. As I previously stated, and by god please don't let it go over your head this time too, FFCC:RoF has an anti-piracy measure that checks its code via CRC or a very similar method, and upon detecting a discrepancy, it waits a certain amount of time, displays a happy picture, and dumps you out of the program. Flashcarts that patch or require patching (M3/R4/Supercard SD/DSTT/many others) will trigger this, ones that don't (CycloDS/Acekard/NinjaPass) are fine.

How can you possibly look this in the face and dismiss it with nothing but empty words? Must've voted for Bush... twice. :P

Dinglenugget @ Mar 12th 2008 6:23PM

Looks like the "protection" has already been cracked by a group called "B0xxle"...

"Game: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles - Ring of Fates
System: Nintendo DS
Release Group: b0XXle

Why is it realeased again? b0XXle has fixed the "Thank you for playing!" screen error. It no longer does it! ROM has been re-dumped, injected with ARM7fix, and ran through the M3 game manager using 4xDMA/Force R/W. The result? No more "Thank you for playing screen!" And a 100% working game. Enjoy."

some dude @ Mar 13th 2008 12:37PM

Wrong.

Not sure what rom cart/ds combo this thing actually works on (if any), but the general consensus is that it's crap and throws up a pair of white screens when run.

jumb @ Mar 14th 2008 6:35PM

Just want to confirm that the b0XXle release is a hoax for R4 users.

xCuteBunnyx @ Mar 12th 2008 10:14PM

Its true that I didnt know about R4's for the DS until I came to this site.
But I did know that you could have modded your DS but I didnt know how, and I didnt want to risk anything.
But yea I didnt know about the R4's, but i still dont have a R4.
I saw a 8 year old with one though.

mko @ Mar 14th 2008 9:38PM

Ahoy mateys! Just for the record issue has been solved with a AR code. (At least on R4)

MT @ Mar 15th 2008 6:29AM

I can confirm this, the problem is fixed on the R4. Just finished the first dungeon without trouble.

Zero-kun @ Mar 16th 2008 12:34PM

Hmmm.... This is rather bizarre.
a) The Japanese rom had none of this, it played perfect. o.o
b) I thought that a ROM dump was when you take EVERYTHING OFF THE ORIGINAL CART. If this screen is coming up randomly, and it's coming from the ROM, shouldn't that mean the cartridge of the game has the same issue? *Yes, I know it doesn't have the same issue, but it just strikes me as odd.* It doesn't make sense that this screen does not occur on an original copy, yet comes up in a ROM. Unless it's the way it's been dumped. x_x"
Anyways, I've heard it works on a select bunch of flash cards (Nearly everything except R4DS/M3 Simply apparently), so in one sense this hasn't really beaten pirates, just singled out the few using incompatible cards. You think something similar could happen with KH 358/2 Days? :O