Unique Hardware Id

[gruso]

I hope you do well and consider us later on then.

For what it's worth, there were a handful of commercial titles on the GP2X which didn't have any serious piracy problems. Some were on protected SD cards, others were (and still are) available for download. A good level of respect was shown to these releases.

(Slight tangent: Wind & Water Puzzle Battles took the unique step of creating a custom pixel art avatar based on a photo for people who bought the game (it might have been for a few bucks extra). These are the avatars that EvilDragon and many other members still use. )

The Pandora community is a little broader though - whatever connotations that may have. I know I'd be first in line to name & shame anyone pirating commercial Pandora software.

 

[Prometheus]

Considering the size of the Pandora community (and the fact that you're all lovely honest chaps!) we won't use any form of DRM (although watermarking may happen).

I have such a huge amount of respect for this, that I'm not sure there's a word for it.

I know I'd be first in line to name & shame anyone pirating commercial Pandora software.

Same here. It's not welcome here. (And anyone who would claim "But everyone pirates!" can shove it - not everyone does and they need to stop projecting their standards onto the rest of us. Some of us would never even dream of it.)

 

[skeezix]

I thought originally we could get a unique-id from the chip, but seems we can't

Are you sure? When uboot starts, it prints the CPU die ID number to the UART console which I thought was unique to each chip. Is that not true?

You are right, it does spit out something there. Offhand, how could we get the definition of that? ie: Spot-checking a few units may give us some idea, but is no proof. Is it possibly a batch-counter? should check the values in the prototype units and retail units and see.

My babysitters are back (*sniff*, but back to normal) so Monday+ I should be back to normal for free time, so I can check my units.

jeff

 

[Tobriand]

Just chiming in on the anti-piracy attitude around here.

I still remember the reactions to the idiot who decided it would be a good idea to go and crack all the GP32 games. Very roughly, he turned up posted that he had done so, and expected praise. He was very surprised when instead he was effectively chased out of the community.

By all means, stick to the devices you've planned for so far until you're profitable, but if you do decide to make a Pandora port, watermarking might be the best solution; social sanction is far more effective than any other deterrents, I think.

Also, consider making high scores synchronise with a server if appropriate. If you get too many simultaneous synchronisations then someone's not playing fair...

 

[chaosmage]

Couldn't you write a program that gets the SD Card ID, have the user run it to get the code. They send the code back to the company, then they download a version of the game that only works on that SD Card? Seems like one way to do it.

I seem to recall a few companies doing something like that (but on a hardware level) for Pocket PC back in the day.

 

[Kordman916]

How about just a simple serial key system?

 

[torpor]

Maybe you'd consider setting up a donation/developer fund so that those of us in the Pandora community who wish to contribute to the development of more polished, commercial games, can just send you a donation? I'd be willing to put in a hundred euro's or so, if it meant that you would consider the Pandora a little more closely as a target for your efforts, and while this isn't really a lot of money, its certainly close enough to pocket money to warrant consideration ..