Begin dit jaar kon je in mijn review van de Everdrive 64 V2 lezen dat er enkele games niet werken op dit backup medium, en dat Banjo-Tooie daar één van was. Maar sinds bijna twee weken (sorry oud nieuws, bite me) is het dus door een crack wel degelijk mogelijk om deze titel nu te spelen in zijn volle glorie. Normaal gesproken zouden we hier geen aandacht aan geven maar wanneer een Nintendo 64 game na twaalf jaar gekraakt wordt is dit toch wel een grote uitzondering. Overigens zijn er nu nog twee games die niet 100% gekraakt zijn en iets zegt me dat daar binnenkort ook verandering in komt.

Title : Banjo Tooie USA Crack and Save Fix
Start-date : 10.20.2000
Release-date : 09.23.2011
Coder : LaC
Type : Crack+SaveFix
Platform(s) : N64 APS format)

Release-note :
I'm back! This crack was started in 2000 but I never finished due to real life and almost 0 interest. This game's protection is very similar to Jet Force Gemini, except much worse. It uses an unknown feature that was introduced in the 6105 CIC chip.

Jet Force Gemini was the first to use this feature even though Zelda:OOT was the first game to have the chip. I can only guess the reason was because it was requested by Rare to use in JFG, they must not have had time or didn't care on Zelda. Basically the new feature was an excryption key. You send the chip a 128bit string and it responds with a 128bit key.

On JFG they only sent 1 string which was easy enough to write a crack for. Back when I first worked on the Banjo Tooie crack I noticed they sent lots of strings and got lots of keys back that they used to decrypt the data they were loading from the cart. I was determined to figure out how the key generation worked. So I spent many weeks trying to figure it out. Eventually I gave up and started recording the decryption keys as I played through the game. I stopped at about 43 because I got bored and real life got in the way. Apparently there were only 224 left to find. I never did figure the actual algorithm out so this crack had the final version with all 267 strings, which Tooie and Azimer found.

When I made this, I also challenged some dudes in #n64dev to find the actual algo. X-Scale figured it out here: http://goo.gl/Ub9FG So this crack actually includes the algo instead of a lookup table. Please note this release date is over a year ago because I was too lazy to send Acey the crack to actually release. Ha. I gave it to some people to test and no one leaked it? WTF?

Special thanks:
Acey for 64scener!
Marshall for the 64drive.

Jovis

Read the intro scroller for more gabbing.