Why can’t PS5/Xbox discs be copied and shared? Like they have some special discs but can’t they be manufactured as fakes and still work?
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Yes, there is something special done to discs to mark them as official PS5/Xbox disks. I’m not going into the details, but there are intentional quirks on the disc that the game platform can pick up on to decide if the disc is real or not. One strategy for hackers to make them work anyway is to hack the firmware of the disc drive to report all discs as legit to the console.
But more to the point, blank disks are marked as such for the benefit of the burning disc drive. There’s information about the type, capacity, and capabilities of the disc pre-burned on the disc, not to mention the actual track around the disc for the laser to follow does exist. Even after burning, you can see this information and tell it’s a copied disc.
Forging real games would require you be able to make fully custom discs. That requires some serious manufacturing hardware, and would make the cost of piracy quite high, defeating the purpose.
One way I’ve heard of used the auto tracking of the disk drive to prevent them from being read and burned correctly in a PC.
A disk might have some imperfections in the track that can cause the track to kind of wobble a bit rather than making a perfect spiral around the disk. The disk drives laser is capable of making micro adjustments to compensate for this and stay in the right track as it spins.
The data about these micro adjustments is useless to the PC reading them, it just cares about what was on the track, not what needed to be done to read it so its discarded by the disk drive and never reported to the pc. . However a console disk can have a very specific intentional wobble early on in the disk that the console disk drives are designed to detect and report to the console that the disk is legit. Any PC disk drive that read this intentional wobble would just auto correct it as an error and it wouldn’t get recorded in any way so would be absent from the file that got burned into the copied disk.
I had a boot disc for my PS2 that would get the OS past the security checkpoint, then there was a special card to open the disc tray without using the eject button, which would reset the security protocol. Pop in the copied PS2 game disc, close the tray manually, hit a button, and worked like a champ!
I definitely remember Sega Dreamcast games being able to burned/copied. Me and my brother had a whole CD case of burned games. A lot of friends did too.
I remember when you could bypass Sony’s DRM with a black sharpie around the edge of the disc.
Seems like they learned some lessons
Can it also be because there is less demand? Here’s what I mean:
Back in the day, we all had big tower computers and cd burners. Then dvds became popular and we all got dvd burners. But then broadband proliferated more and more, streaming media became a thing (both movies and games), less desktops were sold – replaced by ever thinner and lighter laptops and so the user install base of BluRay burners was far less.
Less demand, less ‘minds’ with the equipment experimenting and ‘hacking’.
Thoughts?
License data is stored on an otherwise unreadable part of the disk. The firmware allows and instructs the disk drive on how to access and read that license. I’ve seen the license printed on the edge of the center hole for some disks. You can’t write that with standard burners. You can read it though, especially if you designed the head to move all the way to the inner edge. There isn’t one specific way however, some we prob don’t know about that are kept if others are discovered and exploited.
For a disc to be mass manufactured, a physical impression of the data on the disc must be created, it works like a stamp to press the content onto the disc.
For Xbox discs, the stamp is created with certain physical features in the data track that CANNOT be manufactured identically twice even by original manufacturers. For example the manufacturer burns over the same area twice with different track pitch, creating an overlapping destroyed tracks. Due to limited precision, NOBODY can create identical overlapping patterns twice.
Then the stamp is analyzed and the overlapping feature scanned, described and the description data is signed by MS and also written onto the stamp. The stamp can be molded to create child stamps to send to the factory to press actual discs.
When verifying the disc, the console reads the description data, verify its signature, go check the overlapping pattern to see if the patterns have readable/unreadable spots exactly as described, if so, the disc is genuine.
As long as MS make sure their stamps are not stolen, nobody can create another stamp to press Xbox discs of their own.
Not sure how Sony does the anti copying, but the tight control of stamps is also an important part for them.
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