Genesis Firsts: Reverse Engineering

Late in 1992, Sega took Accolade to court for releasing unlicensed software on the Genesis. The resulting court decision sent shock waves through the gaming industry, setting a precedent about the legality of reverse engineering. The practice didn't start with the Accolade case, though, and there's a rich history of how it played out legally before Sega's case set the law in stone. Sega-16 examines the events leading up to the landmark Sega vs. Accolade case in our latest feature Genesis Firsts: Reverse Engineering. Enjoy!

I thought this happened on the NES first? Tengen Tetris and all.

That was strictly a licensing issues. There was no reverse engineering involved. The rights to Tetris were a total mess in the '80s, and there were at least four parties involved, all of which thought they had the legal rights.

Sega vs Accolade paragraph 2. Missing an "o" and a period. :)

Didn't it come out in a case involving Accolade or someone else that in order for a game to boot up on a Genesis, it had to use a 4 character code ass a key, and it turned out that Sega had the foresight to make the code "S-E-G-A", and since the name was trademarked or whatever, the unofficial publisher was found guilty of infringement?


EDIT: I just found mention of the code here-

http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/sega_..._decision.html

Apparently, Accolade really did use that portion of sega's own code:

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Even before Accolade began to reverse engineer Sega's games, Sega had grown
concerned about the rise of software and hardware piracy in Taiwan and other Southeast
Asian countries to which it exported its products. Taiwan is not a signatory to the Berne
Convention and does not recognize foreign copyrights. Taiwan does allow prosecution of
trademark counterfeiters. However, the counterfeiters had discovered how to modify
Sega's game programs to blank out the screen display of Sega's trademark before
repackaging and reselling the games as their own. Accordingly, Sega began to explore
methods of protecting its trademark rights in the Genesis and Genesis-compatible
games. While the development of its own trademark security system (TMSS) was
pending, Sega licensed a patented TMSS for use with the Genesis home entertainment
system.

The most recent version of the Genesis console, the "Genesis III", incorporates the
licensed TMSS. When a game cartridge is inserted, the microprocessor contained in the
Genesis III searches the game program for four bytes of data consisting of the letters
"S-E-G-A" (the "TMSS initialization code"). If the Genesis III finds the TMSS initialization
code in the right location, the game is rendered compatible and will operate on the
console. In such case, the TMSS initialization code then prompts a visual display for
approximately three seconds which reads "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM
SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD" (the "Sega Message"). All of Sega's game cartridges, including
those disassembled by Accolade, contain the TMSS initialization code.

Accolade learned of the impending release of the Genesis III in the United States in
January, 1991, when the Genesis III was displayed at a consumer electronics show.
When a demonstration at the consumer electronics show revealed that Accolade's
"Ishido" game cartridges would not operate on the Genesis III, Accolade returned to the
drawing board. During the reverse engineering process, Accolade engineers had
discovered a small segment of code - the TMSS initialization code - that was included in
the "power-up" sequence of every Sega game, but that had no identifiable function. The
games would operate on the original Genesis console even if the code segment was
removed. Mike Lorenzen, the Accolade engineer with primary responsibility for reverse
engineering the interface procedures for the Genesis console, sent a memo regarding the
code segment to Alan Miller, his supervisor and the current president of Accolade, in
which he noted that "it is possible that some future Sega peripheral device might
require it for proper initialization."

In the second round of reverse engineering, Accolade engineers focused on the code
segment identified by Lorenzen. After further study, Accolade added the code to its
development manual in the form of a standard header file to be used in all games. The
file contains approximately twenty to twenty-five bytes of data. Each of Accolade's
games contains a total of 500,000 to 1,500,000 bytes. According to Accolade
employees, the header file is the only portion of Sega's code that Accolade copied into
its own game programs.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger's quote

Accolade learned of the impending release of the Genesis III in the United States in January, 1991

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Wow, Accolade can see into the future! That was even before the Genesis 2 came out!

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Originally Posted by Article

While reverse engineering has long been a common practice on computers, console makers have always sought to keep their platforms closed in order to protect their licensing profits.

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There were no licensing policies until the NES showed up. I think reverse engineering was not uncommon in the Atari 2600 days.

Wasn't the 2600 lockout-free...? From what I remember, third party developers just needed to create code to run on the machine, rather than reverse engineer the CPU.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

Didn't it come out in a case involving Accolade or someone else that in order for a game to boot up on a Genesis, it had to use a 4 character code ass a key, and it turned out that Sega had the foresight to make the code "S-E-G-A", and since the name was trademarked or whatever, the unofficial publisher was found guilty of infringement?

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I mentioned the TMSS code. It's in the first paragraph of the Sega vs. Accolade section. Check the whole brief. Accolade never added the actual code to its games. That's why the appellate court ruled in its favor. The court said that it was permissible to copy the code to understand how the console worked, so long as the finished product you made didn't include it. That was the precedent set by this case.

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Moreover, with respect to the interface
procedures for the Genesis console, Accolade did not seek to avoid paying a customarily
charged fee for use of those procedures, nor did it simply copy Sega's code; rather, it
wrote its own procedures based on what it had learned through disassembly. Taken
together, these facts indicate that although Accolade's ultimate purpose was the
release of Genesis-compatible games for sale, its direct purpose in copying Sega's code,
and thus its direct use of the copyrighted material, was simply to study the functional
requirements for Genesis compatibility so that it could modify existing games and make
them usable with the Genesis console. Moreover, as we discuss below, no other
method of studying those requirements was available to Accolade. On these facts, we
conclude that Accolade copied Sega's code for a legitimate, essentially non-exploitative
purpose, and that the commercial aspect of its use can best be described as of minimal
significance.

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Originally Posted by CRV

There were no licensing policies until the NES showed up. I think reverse engineering was not uncommon in the Atari 2600 days.

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I mentioned Nintendo being the one to start licensing agreements. I was referring to console makers from the NES on. All pre-NES consoles were lockout-free, I believe.

This caught my eye:

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* Nintendo had final approval over a publisher's games, packaging, artwork, and commercials. Simply put, Nintendo had the last word over every aspect of the game creation process, and controlled everything from what a game's box looked like to how it was advertised.
* Nintendo made a profit from the sale of every 3rd party game. Approximately $5 of the sale price from every title released made its way to Nintendo's coffers.
* Nintendo had the right to reject a game or part of it. Even if the overall title was accepted, Nintendo could step in and censor it or order a particular part of it eliminated entirely.
* Licensees had to order at least ten thousand cartridges. Since Nintendo controlled the manufacturer of actual game carts, it had the right to determine how many each publisher got. With a minimum order of 10k, at a cost of between $9 and $14 per cartridge, Nintendo was guaranteed to make a killing on each third party game, even if it was a failure.
* Nintendo reserved the right to sell as many cartridges to publishers as it chose. Say your company was working on what was to be a sure hit. You'd want to up the minimum order of ten thousand cartridges, right? You could, if Nintendo allowed you to. It regularly played favorites among licensees (as evidenced by Namco's first sweetheart contract) and could snub those publishers it didn't favor by denying them the requested allotment of cartridges.
* Licensees could only release up to five games per year. If a publisher wanted to release more, it had to negotiate for a separate contract through a subsidiary (like Konami's Ultra line and Acclaim's LJN brand).
* All releases came with two-year NES exclusivity. This effectively meant that all games appearing on the NES could not be released anywhere else. Moreover, they couldn't be released outside of the U.S. and Canada.

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Wow. It's almost insane how much of a stranglehold Nintendo had on the industry. It's also obvious why they held such a high market-share during the period.

Great stuff. :) I remember gaming mags talking about the Accolade stuff back in the day but not as in depth.

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Originally Posted by Article

At its commerical height, it had been rife with software that was horrible, since there were no parameters established to gauge the quality of what was being produced.

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I have never quite believed this theory of what caused the console crash, though. There were shitty games at the time but not really moreso than other eras. A good portion of the 2600's best titles are from 1983, and newer systems like the ColecoVision and Vectrex had very few shitty games. Also there were no parameters governing quality of computer games yet that industry was doing just fine.

Perhaps PC gaming industry as a whole wasn't big enough to cause an industry-wide crash...?

Around 1983, the primary usage of the PC revolved around work, with games being part of the "bells & whistles" that came with the package. Shitty games wouldn't cause people to stop buying PCs. If the PC market was flourishing, the PC Gaming industry as a whole would flourish, regardless of the quality of the games because at the end of the day, the PC was still being sold; and as long as the PC was being sold, anyone could enter the market as a game publisher. Furthermore, most PC gamers of the era were buying PC Games for themselves. It's like buying like buying air-freshener for your car. The market could be flooded with shitty car-air-fresheners, but it's not going to stop you from using your car, or buying a new one if/when you get the chance. Companies may go out of business, but chances are, after some time, you'll come across something you like.

The sole function of the consoles, on the other hand, was to play games. If the games don't sell, the consoles don't sell. Furthermore, the majority of the people paying for the games were not ones playing the game they paid for. It's like buying tires for someone else's car. You buy someone a set of tires and they come back complaining two of them blew out on the highway and they need another pair. So you buy them another pair of tires and they come back complaining again. There's a high chance you'll begin pondering the benefits of the public transportation system...

The 2600 games may have hit their peak in 1983, but they got tangled in a nasty price war, ensuring that a lot of the folks producing quality software couldn't stay in the business, because they were losing money (see the board about Working Designs); confused & irritated consumers, confused because they weren't sure what to buy & who to trust, irritated by their confusion; and the inevitable conclusion that comes from the combination of price-wars and confused/irritated consumers.

Console makers & game publishers of latter eras learned from the mistakes of the past and tried to implement a system or three to make sure that atlesast they survive. Nintendo policies, unfair as they maybe, also ensured that 1) Nintendo would make profit, (the basic rule of survival for any business) even if games didn't and 2) it would be difficult for all but the few dedicated publishers willing spend a lot of time/money to publish games by the buttloads. Nintendo eliminated their own risk, and they effectively filtered out a crop of potential me-too publishers that had jumped on Atari's bandwagon. (Granted, not every title bearing the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" was a gem, but imagine if everyone with a computer and basic coding skills decided to try & publish games for the NES.)

Nice article :)

-d

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Originally Posted by Mendicant

Around 1983, the primary usage of the PC revolved around work, with games being part of the "bells & whistles" that came with the package. Shitty games wouldn't cause people to stop buying PCs.

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On IBM PCs, not computers like the Commodore 64 which were bought by most people primarily for games. Sure, most were pirated but there were still a lot sold in that time.

According to Wikipedia, "Aggressive pricing of the C64 is considered to be a major catalyst in the video game crash of 1983." :D