DaveC posted on Mar 16 2006 at 07:07 PM said:
As far as Sony trying to crush HB, they HAVE to. If everyone can just download free R0MZ to it they will be buying less of their expensive games. Free HB emu games do compete with commercial titles in the market because they are easily obtainable for free. Plus that leaves the door open for piracy of their commercial titles. 3RD party developers are also reluctant to publish for unsecure systems because of piracy concerns as well. So Sony MUST make the choice between HB or commercial, they obviously chose commercial. GPH made the choice to go open with their console but the result there is commercial support is nil.
From the viewpoint of appeasing shareholders, then yes, they have to do what they can to lock out "piracy". However, if I was really intent on "pirating" games, then I would go out today and buy GTA so I could use the current exploit, although I do believe (from what I've read) that only a limited number of 'I5O' dumps work with it.
I put piracy in quotation marks, because if I was
really serious about playing rips of commercial releases, I would put some effort into reverse-engineering the latest firmware update, and release a patched version which would masquerade as a revision to the current FW. The fact that I can't be bothered, and it seems nobody is either, speaks volumes.
If I was interested in mass-producing games, then I would build a pressing plant in some out-of-the-way location and make proper physical media copies, like the way the
real pirates do. Anyone who believes that this is impossible, just because Sony claim to have full control over UMD manufacturing, is just buying into the corporate fantasy of Total Market Control.
I wouldn't be surprised if, with a bit of work, it wasn't possible to upgrade a minidisc production facility to produce the higher-grade UMDs. The form factor is similar enough, so there would presumably be minimal retooling required, and all the development work would be in engineering the blanks for pressing the high-density foils.
Anyhow, I digress, and this is a GP2X forum.
For homebrew, I can accept Sony don't want to take the commercial risk of opening it up, but I think the least they could have done was designed in some kind of hardware-restricted sandbox, i.e. lock out the UMD when running homebrew, remap the IO address, etc. so make it difficult to just load in a dump of a game. That way homebrew developers could work within the specifications of the homebrew developer model, and commercial developers would have their software running under the commercial model. If this had been done, there would have been less incentive from the homebrew scene to actually break the existing protection.
The GP2X is a completely open model, and that hasn't really hurt the PC much over the years. I don't see the GP2X as purely a console, I see it more as an independent, open, general purpose platform in its own right. I have some ideas in this regard, and I would like to be able to come back with some news in a couple of months after I have experimented. Now that I have my own GP2X from Lik Sang which arrived yesterday, I can start pottering about. The problem from this point of view is that because the MMSP2 is a BGA part, I'll have to use whatever lines GPH have chosen to make available on the PCB...