I hate watching videos! So I asked some AI to provide a summary.
In this YouTube video titled “The Arcade Game that Crashes Itself for Anti-Piracy Reasons,” the speaker discusses the anti-piracy measures implemented in the arcade game Tempest. These measures include checksums used to verify the integrity of the code and copyright strings, as well as checks for genuine hardware. The speaker explains the checksum calculation process, provides examples of the code used, and discusses how the game detects genuine hardware by auditing random number generation in the POKEY chips. The purpose of these measures is to deter piracy and make it more challenging for hackers to modify the game. However, it is now easier to disable or delete these anti-piracy measures, although finding unmodified versions of the Tempest arcade cabinet remains challenging.”
Pretty interesting that they leveraged how the random number generation happened to determine if the hardware was authentic or not.