sprado

Good catch. Indeed the GPU was Nvidia’s NV2A, not an Intel GPU. I will correct that in the article. Thanks for pointing it out.

Correct. And identity management is so important nowadays that most security-related certifications and regulations require it.

Thanks for the comment.

No, it is not AI generated. It was based on my research.

I think there is a mix-up here between Atari home consoles and Atari home computers.

In that section I was talking about early console platforms such as the Atari 2600, where the cartridge interface itself had no lockout/authentication mechanism comparable to what Nintendo later did with the 10NES. That is why third-party cartridges could exist and Atari’s main response was legal rather than technical.

What you describe for the Atari 800 is real, but it belongs to a different context: the Atari 8-bit computer line, especially floppy-disk software, where copy-protection tricks such as intentional bad sectors and timing-based checks were indeed common.

So I agree that Atari computer software often used copy protection, but that does not contradict the point I was making about the early console era.

True!

That would be a great follow up. Added to my list of next articles. Thanks for the suggestion!

After some time without posting on my blog, I decided to get back to it — and my first post after the break is about the history of video game security! There are also some great stories along the way, like Atari reverse-engineering Nintendo’s lockout system, or how simply changing the name of Link's horse became an attack vector on the Nintendo Wii. I had a lot of fun researching and writing this article, and I learned a lot in the process. I hope you enjoy it too!

Did you know there is a dedicated partition in the eMMC called RPMB that makes it possible to store data with integrity and authenticity support? In this article, we will learn what the RPMB partition is and how it works, its main use cases, and how to access it on Linux.