Retro Gaming & Hacking Games with Louis Zezeran

Joseph Carson:

Hello everyone. Welcome to an episode of the 401 Access Denied Podcast. I'm the host Joe Carson and a Chief Security Scientist and Advisory of CISO dodon, and it's a pleasure. We have a very special edition of the podcast today. Very rarely do we get to do a episode in person, which is actually something that we haven't done in a long, long, long time. So it's really great to do an episode with actually a person face-to-face. And this episode I'm joined with Louis. So Louis as the guest, do you want to give us a bit of a background about yourself. And also you do a podcast yourself, give us some background about your podcast.

Louis Zezeran:

Sure. So my name is Louis Zezeran. I'm Australian, I've lived in Estonia here, where Joseph also lives, for about 15 years. I run a stand-up comedy production company called Comedy Estonia, that's wild. I'm also an old-school retro gamer. I have a podcast called the Zez Retro YouTube channel. I just talk about stuff I like, I have my good friend Steve Nutter, and he's one of the industry experts on restoring and repairing, old CRT monitors, the old big box TVs. So we have a podcast called the Cathode Ray Podcast, we're talking about Steve's repairs, and it's very fascinating. So I'm interested in console mods, I'm interested in hacking, and I'm also interested in repairing old TV sets as well

Joseph Carson:

Fantastic. And actually in Estonia there's a lot of TV sets to repair, especially really retro ones, really old school. And that's what we're really here to talk about today is that there's a very strong relationship between the world of hacking and the gaming world, and especially the retro gaming. And for many people who don't really know maybe my background is, my background started in gaming. That was actually my entire career for the building up to it. I spent a lot of my youth doing gaming, and that was where, for me, it was a very interesting area. But then I started understanding about modifying them and trying to win the games and complete the games. Because when I was a kid, one of the things was we had a massive competition with all the other school friends and people in the community was around how many games you could complete, and you wanted to be the winner.

So for me, I think the big thing around this relationship between hacking and gaming is so strong and it has really the foundation. A lot of the hackers I know in the world today that I work with, they started in the same background. They started in gaming, moved into IT or system administrator, and then moved into the hacking world. So for me there's a big strong relationship, and you've spent a lot of your youth doing gaming.

Louis Zezeran:

Sure, the same. So let's set the precedent here, what were you working on? What systems or what sort of games? Paint that picture for us.

Joseph Carson:

Sure, absolutely. So basically the first game console that I ever got to play was the Atari 2600.

Louis Zezeran:

Nice.

Joseph Carson:

That was the first. When I was younger, I used to basically travel from... I'm originally from Belfast, from Northern Ireland, and we did just travel to Europe, to mainland, and I went to Belgium every year. And the kids that I went to in Belgium, they had an Atari 2600, and all we did all day long was play games; tanks, basically ping-pong, all the really famous games back then, Donkey Kong. So for me, that was the first games console. So when I came back, one of the things I wanted was a games console, I wanted my own. And my parents, they just couldn't, it was very hard to get the games consoles. It was not easy, they were actually quite expensive at the time. So my parents came with the next best thing, which was an Atari 800XL, which was a computer, but it also had games cartridges that you could play.

Louis Zezeran:

Right. Was that before the Atari ST?

Joseph Carson:

It was the Atari ST. Oh, okay.

Louis Zezeran:

Oh, okay, it was Atari ST.

Joseph Carson:

So it was Atari 800XL. So it was actually the next version up from the Atari ST. And for me of course it was in basic programming, so you had to start learning how to program. So I started actually not only playing the games... Because it came with a cartridge, but it also came with a tape cassette. And for me, basically one of the things I wanted to do was create my own. So I started creating my own games. I was about maybe eight or nine years old and started creating things like football league stats and games, and then quizzes, and then I started doing the in magazine games where you actually had to type the code from the magazines. And then you'd find a month later that they made a mistake in the original one and you had to go back later and correct it because you were, "What was the runtime error? Why was it not working?" So that was the Atari 800XL, that was my first system, and that really set me off into the world of exploration, hacking, coding, and gaming.

Louis Zezeran:

I think you said you're from Northern Ireland, sorry, was it? From Northern Ireland, now I'm from Australia, but I think there was something special that happened around that time in the United Kingdom, in the Anglo, even in Australia, we got the blow back from it, right. I had an Amiga 500 and I had access to also, a few months late, but all the computer magazines, Amiga Power, CVG, all that sort of... So I'm absorbing this UK gaming culture, I've got an Amiga 500. You had the Atari, very, very similar platforms, and there was a Homebrew scene then. And it was the magazines that you talked about. Kids, do you know there used to be code in magazines and you would have to type that out because there was no discs, this is before discs were even on the front. So this is something I think our American and other international friends may not have had. There was a particular UK Anglo hacking. It was the Sinclair, it was a C64, Commodore, Atari did this-

Joseph Carson:

And that was-

Louis Zezeran:

Part of the scene, yeah.

Joseph Carson:

The two distinct communities back then was what we have today. Well it used to be Nintendo vs Sega. Before that it was basically the Commodore versus the Sinclair Spectrum. So you either were a Sinclair Spectrum person or you were the Commodore 64 person. And that was kind of where you basically had that distinct community. And some people were saying, "Oh, the Commodore 64 was better or the spectrum was better." I had both, but the one that I probably spent most of my early days getting into hacking was actually with the Spectrum, because one of the challenges you had was about copyright.

You wanted to get the latest games but you couldn't get them, and they came then was tape cassettes. And with the tape cassettes, then they had this special code at the beginning. So you started getting into basically splicing, so you had to take the tape out or you may have got a tape that was destroyed, so you had to go and try and repair it. Or a certain part of the tape wasn't as readable. So you had to go and find ways to make sure you fix them. And that was really where you started exploring and making sure that you could bypass some of the regional locks, which was a pain. I'm pretty sure in Australia you had the same problem, was that when games come out in America, then they had the regional locks, and you couldn't play them in Europe, you couldn't play them in Asia or Australia, so you had to try and find ways around them as well.

Louis Zezeran:

Yeah, the region locking is also a thing. And also the difference between 50Hz and 60Hz gaming consoles is also the thing. And the classic example of that is Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Mega Drive or the Genesis for Americans. Now, the Genesis runs at 60Hz in America so it's got this fairly upbeat (singing). But the 50Hz version, because that's different specifications of the power, they didn't optimize it, so it just ran slower (singing). Now in the Anglo world, we didn't know that it was different. We just thought that's what Sonic-

Joseph Carson:

You thought that was what it was expected-

Louis Zezeran:

That's how Sonic runs at. And then all of a sudden we find out later Sonic's upbeat and he's moving around, and we're like, "Oh crap."

Joseph Carson:

Because that was the whole thing, it was much faster.

Louis Zezeran:

It was much faster because back then the consoles were, the regions were also about the power and 240 volts versus 110 in America, and different standards. So there was even that level. So yeah, you could remove a region lock on a game, but then the game might still actually be different for some other reasons you don't know.

Joseph Carson:

And that was some of the things... So my early days was about trying to get around those things so I could play the games that I wanted to. And some of the things, the tapes was all about splicing and removing the right protection, and be able to copy games. You had to get two tape cassettes and record from one to the other. So those were a lot of the areas. And even when you get into CDs, CDs had the magic bits around, so if you got a dark marker you'd actually draw around so it could read them, and therefore you could actually then play the games that were regional locked. So there's a lot of things, and even if you were the Nintendo, you would have, I think it was the Game Genie, and if you were a Sega person, you might have had the GameShark.

So those were basically the hardware mods that started coming out were people basically to try and get around. And that was the ability to then, they came with all of these... Because in the 70s, 80s and 90s, we had basically codes. Sometimes there was no save game, you couldn't save the game. So what you ended up doing was when you got to certain levels, it would reveal a specific code or you'd get codes, you had the enter to get back to where you were. One of the things games that I started recently playing was Dune the Battle of Arrakis. And that was exactly that type of game.

There was no save. What you'd end up doing, you got basically as you progress, you'd get the level unlocks. And a lot of these came with those pre-coded and also they had the ability to overwrite certain parts of the menu to add lives or to give you, let's say special weapons, or to make you run faster, or to unlock certain levels or abilities. So these basically were hardware modules that you'd plug in to the console and then on top of that you'd plug the game in. It was the blade to modify those bits as they went through.

Louis Zezeran:

As they went through. So I think you are introducing very well where we're trying to go with this episode, which I think. So we can look at hacking as it pertains to games from actually three... I was going to say two, but you may now maybe realize it's three; old school. One could be the software. So I could take my Amiga game and it would be cracked. So the copy control was taken out and anyone who's ever used an old Amiga 500 game, there's usually some sort of flashy screen that comes up and says, "Do you want infinite lives? Do you want level select? Do you want this?" And that was called a trainer. And so they might remove the copy protection from the code and then they might as well add this trainer menu that would show up first you want cheats.

So that's modifying the software. Then we've got modifying the hardware, so pure hardware, and that would be, I mean, getting in there, soldering. And so that, I'm trying to think of NES, maybe on the NES that might have been zapping the NES lockout chip. There were ways to sort of zap it and so it will go, "Ooh," and let you use a fake cartridge in there. Or it could be... These days the hardware hacking in a more modern time might be converting your 50MHz Sega Mega Drive to 60Hz so it plays those faster ones.

Or it might also be, there are many, many modifications now for enhancing the audio and visuals. So on the Sega Mega Drive, it's called a triple bypass, and it's just this big old mod chip, and you solder it in, and it's getting the video signal earlier back in the chain and extracting it out, doing better work than the original did, and pumping out a cleaner analog signal or a HDMI. And what you reminded me of there was this middle ground, which was a GameShark or a Game Genie as you said, where you would put in, it was a code, it was different to the level select code, a Game Genie code. And what that basically did is indicate to it which bytes to change in the game.

Joseph Carson:

In the memory.

Louis Zezeran:

In the memory. And that was live software hacking,

Joseph Carson:

Correct. It was in real time it was happening. So as you may have basically been doing, it allowed you to pre-configure it and it would change those bits into specific codes, hex codes, and then that would basically change the outcome of the game or your ability, adding lives, et cetera, which is actually very similar to what a lot of hackers do today. If they're looking at basically gaining access to people's environments or systems or software, what they're simply doing is sometimes they're changing those bytes in real time. And sometimes you only need to change maybe four bytes in order to provide you a elevated privilege account or to be able to change the code so that you can actually remote access it. So that's exactly very similar, is that those early methods of being able to unlock games are the exact same methods that attackers are using today to unlock access to people's environments.

And that's where that very strong relationship... And also the communities are very similar as well. Even when I go to a lot of events, one of the great things I enjoy is a lot of the events have these sometimes gaming themes. And even this year in DEFCON, in Las Vegas in 2023, they had the arcade area, which was fantastic, it allowed me to go back. Because one in my youth as well, I'm not sure about yours, that when you didn't have a games console, what you would end up doing is you'd go into the arcades, there was actually places you went to actually play the arcades. And it was Galaga, there was Space Invaders, it was things like Street Fighter. There was lots of basically simulations that you'd actually play in the arcades. And that for me was an area at DEFCON last year, they actually had the arcade theme where they actually had all these retro arcade games that you can go and play.

And that was for me, that community is very, very close and the culture and the kind of ideas are very similar. It's all about either the right to repair, is one of the big things in the community. And that's where hardware hackers come in, is that they want to make sure that systems have a long life, they want to be able to repair it whenever they want to, the right to be able to update it and secure it, the right to modify it to do it what they want to do. So that's where a lot of the modifications come in. So for me, that committee and culture is very closely related. A lot of the techniques that I see attackers using today come out of that gaming retro environment.

Louis Zezeran:

I would also say as well, to add to that list of things that you said as right to repair; preservation. And this is one that's often touted by people who say, "Well, I'm not pirating, I'm preserving." And okay, there's a moral and whether you want... I'm not going on the moral things here. But there's many examples where if, and this is a little bit more as we move into the digital era, if it wasn't preserved, it would've been lost. So Sony is removing access to the PlayStation 3 store or something like that. Now you might say we don't have any right to that. Okay, I don't know. Then those games are not available anymore, and there is a charm to having it available.

My little cousins have a PlayStation 3 and my cousin in law he's like, "Yo, should we just hack it? Your one is." And I was like, "Yeah." But I already gave him a hacked Wii and it's fine. They like that and we play the hacked Wii, but I'm like, actually, you know what, I'm going to buy some PlayStation 3 games for them so they have that physical experience of opening a box, putting it in. I don't want to be the dick uncle, but I actually want them to not have every game, to replicate that experience of we've only got three games, so I'm going to have to grind away at these three games because that's all I've got.

Joseph Carson:

Yeah, that's going back to the old days of even TV where we only had four TV channels.

Louis Zezeran:

Sure, there we go. So is that a little curmudgeonly of me? I'm not sure. Look, I'll get them a PS4 soon enough, he's 12, right, so it's not a big thing.

Joseph Carson:

But I think it's really important because then it allows them to get good at one thing. Because one of the problems you have a lot is what I see in today's generation of kids playing games, they switch so quickly between games where they don't progress through the levels. They do something, they have short attention spans and they move to the next thing. When we only had a handful of games that you had to actually go through and you had to complete them, you had to go through-

Louis Zezeran:

How many games did you have on your Atari then? Because old man, two old men sitting here discussing that while I say, "Oh, they're kids and they've got all the games these days." When I think about it, I almost only had copied Amiga games and I had a couple stacks of those old disc things and I actually do reflect a little bit of, I had a Mega Drive with two games and an Amiga with 100 games. Which one did I like more? So how many actual cartridges did you have for this Atari?

Joseph Carson:

So for the Atari, between the cartridges and the tape, because I also was able to use the tape because that was one of the key things for the Atari, was I probably had a couple hundred, a couple hundred games. The competition we had going was around completion. So for me, the completion, I probably completed just over a hundred games or so from complete start to finish. And one of the agreements we had was not to change the difficulty level as well so you had to leave it as the default.

Louis Zezeran:

Were they copy games or originals?

Joseph Carson:

Definitely not all the originals. For me we had also had the exchanging of games as well.

Louis Zezeran:

That's a big thing. Sure, yeah.

Joseph Carson:

So when you basically had completed a game, what you would end up doing is you'd exchange with a friend, so then you'd swap. So we had a large community of basically exchanging them, and that was something that also was very important as well. So that actually, other people could reuse the games and try them as well, which is more difficult today because of all those ability to share games is also challenging today, especially in the modern consoles.

Louis Zezeran:

Definitely. I'm still as much as possible trying to buy physical discs, and I know there's a download and I know they can lock you out whenever you want.

Joseph Carson:

It takes a lot of space as well these days.

Louis Zezeran:

Takes a lot of space, but it still seems better to me than... I'm not going to get probably that Microsoft, whatever, the XS that's got no disc drive. I'm like...

Joseph Carson:

For me, I'm still a bit old school. I like to have the physical, the discs or the cartridges or whatever are local in the hard drive. I like to have it local. Then you can mostly sometimes play offline as well. One of the things my kids complain about is, "I can't pause because I'm playing online." I'm like, "Well I can." But I think it is definitely an area that, the less games I had, the more I focused on completing them and understanding. Some of the old games I remember the most was Chuckie Egg. Chuckie Egg was one of my old classics. And then The Treasure Monkey Island, which is being re-brought back again, which is fantastic. So Monkey Island was one of also my all-time classics.

Louis Zezeran:

It's The Secret of Monkey Island not The Treasure of Monkey Island.

Joseph Carson:

Was it?

Louis Zezeran:

The Secret of Monkey Island.

Joseph Carson:

Sorry. Correcting me, which is good. So, another one was R-Type was also one of my all-time favorites.

Louis Zezeran:

Classic shooter, yeah.

Joseph Carson:

1943 was it?

Louis Zezeran:

Sure, that's another, yep. Scrolling shooter.

Joseph Carson:

Star Flights, which was kind of one of more strategy games, which that probably was the one that I spent the most hours on because it was a big game and to complete that took many, many hours. I think I had so many... There was probably sleepless nights playing that game.

Louis Zezeran:

So do you think that children this day or young people, let's say growing up, still are able to get that joy of hacking? Because for us it was still achievable and you can still achieve it today by going back and just hacking an old system, but is a PS3, the game is so complicated that I can't just go and add a trainer or a level or something like that. And did that ability to experiment, that hobby side of it, that playing around side, did that contribute to hacker culture and what does that mean for the future?

Joseph Carson:

Absolutely. I mean it absolutely did contribute to the hacker culture that we have today. Even a lot of the young generation, they go back to the old school in order to learn.

Louis Zezeran:

Okay, so you can still learn from the old stuff.

Joseph Carson:

You can still learn from the old stuff because it still has relevance. But the new modern gaming scenario is much more difficult for kids to understand it by modifying them. They do look for ways around them, they are exploring them. They are looking for basically either codes or unlocks or ways to simulate. So that still is happening today, but it's not as easy, it's not that combination of hardware and software.

Louis Zezeran:

If you were a hacker or you had a kid that had such inclinations today, maybe in the old days you'd get in there and hack some hex and binaries and stuff like that. Maybe today it's like, "Oh, I'll download a copy of Unreal Engine or download some gaming engine and fool around with that. It's not hacking as such, but it's programming.

Joseph Carson:

Yeah, it's programming. I mean, when you think about is we look at even some of the large gaming distributors and companies today, when we go look, even a lot of gamers are trying to be trying to upload their games and bypassing some of the restrictions, some of the reviews, so they'd be automatically uploaded. So that was one of the most recent ones, I think it was in Steam, in order to bypass the Steam engine's detection and then basically get it published. And those would either allow them to get money quicker, or it could actually contain malicious code as well. So some of the things that those engines had to be aware of. And then also targeting, if you look at the recent attack on Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto, the guy who actually did it, the hacker was from the Lapsus$ group.

He was on bail after Hacking Nvidia. So he'd hacked Nvidia and was now on bail staying at a hotel, and ended up using an Amazon Firestick with a phone, keyboard, mouse and stuff, and using that hacked into Rockstar and then basically was able to capture pre-released images and videos off Grand Theft Auto. So you look, one is hacking games, but also hacking the companies as well. One of the big things that I recently got into was... Because I do a lot of reverse engineering and when you're doing reverse engineering, what that means is you're using disassemblers, which takes basically existing code or execution and reverses it back into original assembly language. So that's what a lot of reverse engineers do is basically they're using things like IDA, they're using MEDD debugger and other types of tools. And that will revert the code that they have in the binary into the assembly code.

And for me to learn, what I went back and actually started doing was going back and actually coding and assembly, and actually creating games. Because a lot of the Atari games, the 2600 were written in basically assembly language, which was the Mos CP, the Mos processor 6502 if I remember. So in order to become better at understanding and reading assembly code, I actually went back and started writing games in that assembly language, which it's a very good... I think actually it'd be great for the younger generation also to really start to learn how things work behind the scenes because that's really where you start to understand about how things really work. When you want to get into modifying or you want to understand about changing hexes and changing configurations, and be able to become better at something is understanding how it works in the background, understanding how it works behind the scenes.

And that's what a lot of hardware hackers do is they want to modify things to do something differently. Whether they want to modify their smart kettle to send emails or to do lots of tasks. Or they want basically to... Some of the interesting things is around controllers. I've seen a massive industry around making fun things out of controllers or actually making controllers out of interesting things as well.

Louis Zezeran:

A friend of mine, Robert Dale Smith, you want to check him out, and he's a dude who's been modifying those Fisher Price kids controllers and turning it into a genuine controller by using a couple of raspberry Pi's on the inside of that.

Joseph Carson:

And that's what I mean. One of the things as well is for me to stay... Because one is I love retro gaming still today, and the problem I have got is getting access to some of the old hardware is becoming more and more difficult and also it takes up a lot of space. So basically, I think probably similar to yourself is I went into the emulation world, is using emulators, and that's also a lot of areas where to take old things and be able to play them in modern systems today. I mean, Windows has been great because Windows backwards compatibility and Windows 11 today you can still run DOS programs from the 70s and 80s and will still run today. Which is impressive when you think about backwards compatibility.

But if you look at even some of the games consoles is that backwards compatibility ends with between version three and four, that's sometimes what frustrates me is you bought a bunch of games for let's say even a PlayStation 2 and only the earlier versions of the PlayStation 3 could play those. And then later versions I had the buy the 4 version. You might have it in the old console, but you can't play it in later... So that's where the emulation came in is that we can actually take those older games and play them in modern systems. So one of the things for me is I've taken a bunch of Raspberry Pis and made them retro Pis. I've got a bunch of 8-bit arcade sticks, the old style arcade controllers.

Louis Zezeran:

Yep, I've got one of those, yeah.

Joseph Carson:

And using those to get that same feel. So I'm still today playing Sonic the Hedgehog, still playing Street Fighter, still playing R-Type and even you recently got me into DoDonPachi.

Louis Zezeran:

Okay, bullet hell.

Joseph Carson:

Oh my goodness, that is intense.

Louis Zezeran:

Intense bullet hell.

Joseph Carson:

Hell, that is intense.

Louis Zezeran:

Okay, so that is a good point that I hadn't thought about. So there's emulation, and to dive deeper into the idea of emulation, so a retro Pi is typically referred to as something called software emulation. So that's where someone's written some code on Windows and it'll read the Super Nintendo file that's being dumped from a cartridge, and accurately emulate it. Now there's levels of accuracy. So then you could have something called a cycle-accurate emulator, which is not just like, "Oh, I made it work," but it's like, "My internals work the same as those internals."

Then the other super nerdy level at the end of all of this is what's referred to as hardware emulation, which would be an FPGA platform, which is a hardware chip that can be programmed to emulate another chip. So this chip can be giving certain instructions, it works functionally identically to that chip. So you can have one big FPGA that's sitting there and someone's, as you said, okay, I've programmed the Atari CPU, I've programmed or taken the schematics of how the Atari sound chip works, I piece them together in this FPGA, and that's hardware emulation. And it can often show weird quirks that were in the original hardware, they'll turn up there because it's a one-to-one recreation. And that's a very fascinating area because no one's programming CPUs, but they are doing a lot of FPGA development.

Joseph Carson:

Yeah, they're doing basically the mapping of what it would've been before with modern processors. And one of the things that is important, because to your point is that they play as they were originally. Because one of the things I find is sometimes there's a lag or that the sound is not the same, or the visuals are a bit off. So what you do with the software emulations, it's not as clear or as accurate as it was in the original, but with the hardware emulations, sometimes you can get it better.

Louis Zezeran:

Absolutely. So you can get a clean out of a platform like the MiSTer FPGA, you can get a clean analog RGBS signal out of that, it is the reference standard. So you can modify your Mega Drive to triple bypass and it should be as good as that. But then there's this other weird layer, so let's take the NES. So I want to get RGBS analog video out of that. The NES never did that, it never had the ability to produce that higher standard of that. And what a color is in the NES is unclear. So you can have the MiSTer FPGA, but because out of the composite video, what a color is wasn't completely set. So we're still interpreting again what that was due to the limitations of those original hardware.

Joseph Carson:

Yeah, absolutely, and that was the difference. Because when the games consoles came out then, it was like how many colors they could actually represent. That was like, "This can do 2 million colors." Even if you go back to the original Ataris had, what was it? Three. And then you think about the progression over all those years about the capabilities that they had. And that's one of the things is that with the emulation side of things is that sometimes you're even getting much better results than they actually were originally. And even today as you said you're doing .... There's a bunch of them around, but not many people use them. But to be able to take some of those older consoles and play them in modern TV sets or projectors or wherever it is, you also have to try and modify and make sure that the output is the same.

Louis Zezeran:

Oh, this is just a rabbit hole, a rabbit, rabbit, rabbit hole. So we can modify our console to output the best analog video that combines very well with the CRT. But if you stick that into a flat panel, it might not go very well because it's sending in a very low quality signal and due to the way the flat panel works. So then we need something called a scalar in the middle. And so the scalar and what it is you can't just get any... A scalar meant for live video is not good for pixelated 8-bit retro games. The algorithm that up scales it isn't the same. So go into all of that. So then we've got devices like Mike Chi's RetroTINK for 5X and the 4K, and they're specifically designed that I'm expecting a retro game signal and I'm going to blow it up.

Now where this is going further in the future, there are HDMI mods for many, they almost all have a HDMI mod these days. And where this is actually going, what I think, let's say I had five old consoles and I want to play them all on my flat screen, where I think this is going is that we will have a very simple HDMI mod in each of them that will just output basically what the 240p lying double to 480p and it'll just output that. And then we're going to have an external scalar that'll take all of those, take the 480p and then upscale it rather than having that upscaling technology in each thing. So cheaper HDMI mods in each machine. And I'm already seeing things like that on the Nintendo 64, there's a friend of mine, he lives in Sweden and he's an N64 hacker, and he's made an N64 HDMI mod basically out of a Raspberry Pi.

Joseph Carson:

So everything's basically going through and being upscaled into the TV. So you only have one device?

Louis Zezeran:

One device doing the upscaling, it'd be a RetroTINK 4K or something like that. And then having very cheap, cheap as possible HDMI mods that are just basically taking analog video, converting to digital, and then pushing it back out to an external scalar. That's where I think that... And that's a rabbit hole, I'm sorry for boring you all, this is what I know about, right.

Joseph Carson:

But I think definitely one of the things is that I find that that's definitely going to be not even just for older consoles, but as we move through formats, that's going to become something that's going to become needed in the future for sure. To make sure that we can still use old stuff and having that life cycle. I find that, and this is going back to that right to prepare and the thing you mentioned is preserving things for longer life, is we don't want to have something that after two years you can't use it anymore. The devices I had lasted 10, 15 years. Even some of my old stuff that I still have in my office basically is still working from 30 years ago, I can still use it. But the problem is that newer hardware is having a two, three, maybe maximum four years of a life cycle, and for me, that's not what we were used to.

Louis Zezeran:

No, and there's an argument there about ...and from that stage, but then there's also an argument about, well, we're just losing a piece of art. So then that art's gone and we no longer can enjoy that piece of art anymore. I think it's sort of a dual sided thing.

Joseph Carson:

Yeah. And it's also making sure that we're not getting waste, we're not creating waste. One is the environmental aspects of things is that when you have something that could last for longer, you had no need. And that's where a lot of hardware hackers came from is making sure they could repair things. I had a PlayStation 3 that the Wi-Fi module went on it, which meant that one is that you can no longer use the controllers using wireless and you also couldn't connect to the Wi-Fi. So everything had to be now cable, and going to repair that, there's nowhere that does it so you actually had to do it yourself. That's where you really get into is you want to make sure that devices last as long as they possibly can and forever.

Louis Zezeran:

That's a good point about that repairing consoles. A friend of mine, his online handle is Volta, he's a great hardware hacker, and one of the little chips that you can buy from him. So there's a problem with the Nintendo Wii U, the NAND chip, the main internal little bit of memory, it's dying and it's dying, being corrupted, and it's basically just bricking Wii Us, and it's becoming a problem. So he designed this little PCB jig that will sit over there and it will replace the NAND with just an SD card. So it's a failure of the machine, they're dying, they're bricking-

Joseph Carson:

So it's design?

Louis Zezeran:

It's a design, it's a bad design or maybe just, okay, whatever. And that is something, it's not just upscaling or making better, it's like repairing a common fault in that console-

Joseph Carson:

Making it better.

Louis Zezeran:

Making it better, well, making it better, not improving the functionality, making it work again from zero to working if that's better. So there's that repair ability of we need to come up with some modern solution to repair this old hardware.

Joseph Carson:

And that's actually one of the things that I find is that when I talk a lot to hardware hackers, that is their ethos. That's their main goal is to make sure that these devices can be preserved and that when batteries die or when chips fail or when they were designed not great in the first place, is that their whole goal is to make sure one is the right to repair. Is that the right to longevity and the right to be able to preserve that for a lifetime. And that's the main goal. And during that process, they might find vulnerabilities. With... they might be able to do interesting things with it.

One of the great hardware hackers we had on a recent podcast episode was Sick Codes. And he's done multiple hardware hacks over the years, but he was able to take a John Deere tractor and take actually the console basically for the tractor itself and play Doom on the console. And I've seen now we've had this whole community afterwards, is that after he did that, he did models to make it work. Is that what's happened is that there's been a bunch of other hardware hackers later who've been playing it on things like MRI scanner, hospital devices and so forth. So there's this community that can continue that onwards.

Louis Zezeran:

I want to ask you then Joseph about the balance between. So it's not cheap to produce a modern video games console, no doubt requires hundreds of millions, billions, whatever. So that company needs some protection for their return on investment. I can get it. We have many several key examples of where piracy has killed a platform too soon. So that was the original Famicom, that was the Sega Dreamcast, Dreamcast also had that. So clearly there needs to be some protections in there for them to get their return on investment means we get a console. But how long does that go on for? When does Sony not give a shit about the PS3/PS4 anymore. They still care about the PS3 and it's super old. Where's that balance of I want the right to repair, I want to use it forever, I want to hack it, but I get that if they don't get some software protection or hard piracy protection, we'll never have it in the first place. What's the balance?

Joseph Carson:

Absolutely. So I completely agree is that I think that the right to repair is that make sure that there is the ability to do it after a certain period of time, is when they decide to end of life it. When this console is no longer available, they're no longer selling it, they're no longer producing and making money off it. Then you get into this open source side of things where we have the right to repair. And I think this is really where you can look at... One of the great books that I read recently was Console Wars, and it was the exact same thing is that when Nintendo and Sega were battling it out, and the Console Wars definitely a great read for the audience. It was for me, it was also showing the big conglomerate company, which was Nintendo at the time, and then you had this new energetic Sega that wanted to penetrate to market.

But what happened is that they has locked the complete supply chain in to themselves, which meant that exclusivity, you had to have their console to play this game and those game creators could not make it for other because it was exclusive rights, and that really locked down the market. It meant it was a monopoly.

Louis Zezeran:

But there's a good reason that Nintendo did that is because of the Atari video games crash. So the Atari 2600 had unlimited pirates and that just caused the bubble, which caused the crash. So then Nintendo, you might argue over corrected by becoming crazy locked down, you couldn't just make your own cartridge. You had to buy cartridges from Nintendo, you could only push out so many games per year. Crazy restrictions because they had monopoly, but you can also see why they got there.

Joseph Carson:

Absolutely. I completely agree with why they got there, but they did over correct. They did do it too much where basically they locked a lot of... Because that whole scenario resulted in some amazing games. That competitiveness is good and to make sure then one, it brings the price down, it makes it much more affordable for a lot of people and it also makes it much more for game creators to create. But yes, absolutely the privacy side of things and also locking things down. I agree with it, but when those devices become end of life, obsolete, people want to be able to continue using them. And I think the limitations on preventing that hardware from working, I think there's some companies you've seen in recent years, some audio devices that decided that, "Okay, we're end of living it so you can no longer use it," and I disagree with that."

If you bought the hardware and you decide to no longer support it. And this is where we get into, I've had discussions where not only the right to repair, but also what you get into is the right to even warranties, security updates as well. When that device is no longer to be able to get security updates, is that should other people be able to create it for free on the open source market? So yes, there should be security warranties. There definitely is hardware warranties, but when they expire, when they're no longer valid, I think this is where organizations should be willing to say, "Okay, this platform is no longer something that..."

Of course there might be certain parts of it that you're using in your modern systems and you might want to try and continue those to be proprietary and to be locked out. But for the rest of it, the right to repair schematics and things that are commonly problems, open it up to the community and let the hardware hackers be able to make it great. Because what that does is it makes the brand of the company much more acceptable. "It's not that I have to choose you because you're the only one, but I choose you because you're doing the right thing and you're doing great things," and it's a two-way...

Louis Zezeran:

I love what you're saying, I just can't see Sony doing it. I keep thinking about the PS3 right now because maybe it's at that stage of its life. PS4 is still selling games, I get it, fine. PS3 it's long gone, they are not selling consoles. They make this sort of money off hardware, well they're not making PS3 games anymore. So it's done for an income and they've closed down the PS3 store. Okay, so should they open source those designs, allow us to update it? What if there's still Sony proprietary code and chips embedded in the middle of that?

Joseph Carson:

If there is proprietary, I think that's where they have... If they're still using that in current systems then absolutely that's what they want to protect. But for example, common failures in old systems, the areas that actually commonly break, whether it being the hard drive or whether it being those Wi-Fi chips, is that you might say for those specific parts, here's the schematics and here's how you can fix it. So making that more open, I think Apple has actually done a pretty good job with that more recently, even though they've been more difficult to take apart the devices because everything's been glued. So some organizations are making the right to repair a little bit more... They're still controlling it, they're still having official representatives and stuff, but they're making it more available. I think companies like Microsoft are here and there, Nintendo not and Sony not. Those are two companies where the whole systems are running proprietary and locking things down.

Louis Zezeran:

I think that's also, you said three examples and they were all video games console manufacturers, and I think that is different to John Deere. I think that is different to some other piece of consumer hardware that you might have around your house. They're just really different industries. Different microsystems. Yeah, Microsoft got so screwed by the Xbox being hackable. I guess Sony got so screwed by... Because they don't make money on the hardware, they're making money on that software sale, so they need-

Joseph Carson:

Now it's subscription, it's all about subscription.

Louis Zezeran:

So they won't take that away. So sure. I think got to look at these industries a little bit differently. Because the console, even back to when we were growing up, again, the console... I never understood consoles at first. I'm like, "I got an Amiga, it can be programmed. Why do I even need this other thing. And I know what I'm doing, I can load the disk, I can copy the disk, I'm clever." But there were people that just wanted to insert the cartridge and have a go.

Joseph Carson:

Yeah, I think from that culture side of things is that one is that there's us who want to consume, but then there's also those who were making money in the piracy side of things, the criminal guys and those marketplaces that went up that makes it much more widespread. I think those are the ones that was definitely stopping the sales and taking money from the companies. For me, I was willing to pay money for the game. It was more accessibility. It was more about getting the game versus actually not paying for it or getting it at affordable price as well.

Louis Zezeran:

At least now in the current generation, we don't have region locks anymore, massive.

Joseph Carson:

Today it's no longer regional locks, but it's content locks. So they've moved into where in certain locations you may not get certain content. So if you look at even into the streaming market, there may be here in Estonia, we might have different content on Spotify or Netflix, games that you might not have in other regions. So they're getting into it now.

Louis Zezeran:

"So use NordVPN to get access." Okay, yeah.

Joseph Carson:

So VPN is one way that many get around it, but definitely it's moving away from those traditional regional to content. And the content now has specific locations where it's allowed to go. And that's where you get into the subscription side, is where you've subscribed to, whether it be the PlayStation Plus or whatever, PlayStation Store, or you've got the Microsoft Suite, now you have access. But those content are limited per country and per location. So it's even more not just about region one, region two, three and four and five and so forth. Now it's about country A, country B, country C, and those content specific locks. So VPN is one that many people get around it, that's what they use.

Louis Zezeran:

Yeah. Okay. So what they giveth, they taketh away as well. So yes, I can go to Japan, buy a Nintendo Switch, just play the game and there's no region locks and that's fun. But okay if we're talking about media, other services, I mean maybe, I'm trying to think in video games industry, I don't know. Are there DLCs locked to region?

Joseph Carson:

From a hardware perspective I haven't seen even... Because for anyone who was going to consume the games consoles, one of the things was that the limitations you had was the regional lock and the power, and the output for the TV. Those were the three things that you would've limited saying, well one is that the power supply in the US is different from Europe, so therefore you want to get something from European power. The other one was the regional lock so if I bought a US one I would have to only get games from the US. And then the third one was around the output of the TV and the hertz, 60 to 50Hz

Louis Zezeran:

PAL and TSC.

Joseph Carson:

And that would basically be your decisions about what you're buying. Today most things are powered through USB or in reversal, basically power, USB-C. And it just means that I don't have to worry about the power difference between North America other than the plug itself, the adapter. Now you have basically there's no region lock, but there is content locked. But of course that's around where you're accessing it from. So if I travel and go to different places, you're going to get the content from that region unless you use a VPN.

Louis Zezeran:

Do you know anything about the EU's efforts to normalize that and say, "Nah, you can't differentiate between EU countries." Is that something you know about?

Joseph Carson:

So they are getting into the digital rights in the EU, is that what they're looking to do is equalizing it. So there was a Digital Services Act, which is basically getting into making sure that everyone has equal content at the same time. And I mean there's great things, that got away with roaming charges that we all had, which was a pain. It also meant from a taxation and also accessibility. So it has really made things much more equal across and also everyone getting it at similar times.

Louis Zezeran:

But have we seen that trickle down to consumer services like Netflix having a show in Germany but not having it on Estonian Netflix or something like that?

Joseph Carson:

Not yet.

Louis Zezeran:

Not yet. Okay.

Joseph Carson:

That still is there, but I'm hoping at some point in time that it gets opened up. I think it sometimes comes down to sometimes different countries have different age for PG-13 and stuff, so there's different restrictions. So not all countries have equal for that. So sometimes they have to modify it. Sometimes it also comes down to, some countries require you to have in the subtitles other language. So from basically a localization perspective as well. So you might not have it ready for certain subtitles until a certain date. But a lot of that today is being eliminated with things like basically automation and Artificial Intelligence, that those things can be done within seconds. You don't have to go through. But of course there's a review on the restrictions that sometimes they have to get into. But I do see that either being eliminated with automation and AI in the future, or at least the time that that takes to be significantly reduced, where it comes out immediately across all regions.

Louis Zezeran:

Right, because I can see Netflix complaining, going, "Oh, we've got to make Estonian subs and Latvian subs and add all of that for all these other countries." And they've made a business decision, "Ain't nobody paying for stuff in Estonia, there's only five of us here, so we're not going to bother to localize it for that Estonian market." And okay, you might say, "Well tough luck, if you want to deal with all of us you've got to deal with 26 languages," or whatever it is.

Joseph Carson:

Automation, I mean the translation is so quick today with machine learning and deepfakes, you can simply use that in order to translate it immediately, or even having the whole virtual assistance in virtual worlds. So for me, I think that will be something that should disappear as technology improves rather than actually from basically the vendors and suppliers, and services themselves. So I'm curious yourself, what games are you still playing? Are you still gaming much today or what games are you still playing?

Louis Zezeran:

In my old age, I love a big controller. I love something that I can hold, something physical. Maybe it's my little movement against all this digital stuff. So I'm playing the new DoDonPachi release on PlayStation 4. DOJ got re-released recently by M2 Shot Triggers. It's an excellent port of a classic version of DoDonPachi and it's on PS4. I've got a very nice PS4 stick, a big arcade stick. And that is one that is powered actually by hardware hacking. So arcade sticks are quite easy, buttons are really just on and off little switches, but it's the circuit board, and that could be one that is a Microsoft one that's going to the Xbox.

Now we can get ones that you plug those into a Raspberry Pi and there is a way to hardware hack the key off at original PlayStation controller and then upload that into the Raspberry Pi. And then the Raspberry Pi is then appearing like a genuine PlayStation controller to the PS4. So you can buy a board that can do this or I just got a Pi and installed it myself. So I'm playing on a PS4 with a nice arcade stick. Besides that I've got also got a nice steering wheel set up with a nice T300 Thrustmaster wheel, a couple of pedals. So I might be playing Assetto Corsa or Gran Turismo 7 or something like that.

Joseph Carson:

Likewise, I've been playing basically either, what is it? WRC as well.

Louis Zezeran:

Nice, nice. Have you got some sort of wheel or are you playing with a controller?

Joseph Carson:

Playing with the wheel. So we have the full seat set up. Wheels, pedals, gear shifter. So it's pretty cool.

Louis Zezeran:

First of all, you've got room for all that stuff? Not bad.

Joseph Carson:

I don't have a lot of room for that. We have a group of guys who that rotates around. So at certain parts of the year we decide who's going to store it and use it so that we don't have taking up space all the time. But definitely it's a fun way to just let some steam off and just basically test your driving skills in the WRC. For me, some of the old games I'm still playing, I'm still playing R-Type, R-Type is one that I go to. It's a very difficult game, afterwards you end up with your hands are so tired basically from shooting. But I've also went to, I use a RetroPie mostly. And with the 8BitDo arcade stick, because I do like the block. I do like that it brings back the old time from the arcades itself.

Louis Zezeran:

Sure. That feeling of that yeah.

Joseph Carson:

That feeling of being in the... And also it allows you to do a lot of the moves and the special sequences much easier, rather than control pads because I always find the D-pad, that pad that you're trying to do, you can't get the same feeling.

Louis Zezeran:

It's not the same. The Street Fighter II, I grew up the same, watching it at the arcades. For a shooter like R-Type, nah, you need the...

Joseph Carson:

You need the controller, yeah.

Louis Zezeran:

You need that stick. And so even there's so many different ways of hardware hacking here. So I was talking to you previously about, I've done work on lag testing controllers and there's a setup you can use with a MiSTer FPGA and you have to solder onto that. So the FPGA MiSTer fires off a button, press, and then that goes back into that and it's measuring the round trip. And that's how we're accurately measuring controller lag. And that's done with special bits of hardware or a screen lag. So measuring display lag. And that's done with a device called a time sleuth. And it's basically a HDMI signal generator with a little photo strobe in it. And the cable comes out, goes to the TV, it starts strobing, and it's got its own little photo sensor. And so again, it's measuring the round trip, so it is hardware hacking, it's not even hacking, this is like a totally new thing, is very common.

Joseph Carson:

That's one of the reasons for this episode itself is that whole such overlap between the hardware hacking and the gaming. And all of this comes together because a lot of those techniques is the same things that hardware hackers in my industry has been using for many years, was whether being into the radio hacking or radio signals into Wi-Fi, into Bluetooth, even basically from getting into even modifying signals. So really there's such an overlap in this industry, which is impressive that even though they slightly move along side by side and sometimes use techniques from each other, is that I think the community can learn from each other for sure. But it's been an interesting... For me, I love it. It's what got me into the industry and it's something you're still doing today. I do find my controller does have periodically a lag. So if I'm playing Mario Brothers, and that one little button push, and all of a sudden he's still running and you're going, "No."

Louis Zezeran:

It can be with a Pi. That could be in the Pi, that could be in the Pi. Software lag is a hard one to work out sometimes. What I do know is your eight-bit arcade stick is very good, so it's not that is what I know.

Joseph Carson:

I know and I've tried different... I do find when the cable's connected that it is much better. I do find basically, because you have in the arcade stick itself, you've got three options. You've got the 2.4 GHz dongle, you have the cable, or you can go Bluetooth. When I do find the Bluetooth sometimes, if you've got a lot of signals around you, you might get a bit of overlap. If you use a dongle, it's pretty good. And if you used the cable, pretty good. But I do think it's in my Pi, I did change, I was using a three and I did move to the four. I'm interested to see if the five will-

Louis Zezeran:

A little bit faster.

Joseph Carson:

A little bit faster.

Louis Zezeran:

My measurements of the 8BitDo arcade stick is that the Bluetooth, the 2.4, and the cable, they're all pretty similar. Yes, there's some microseconds, a millisecond between them, but more or less, none of them is bad. So what that tells me is if you feel the cable is better, that's probably the bluetooth stack or something around that having a problem inside of the Pi. Is where it's at... and USB connection is bypassing that.

Joseph Carson:

Yep. Something that I'm going to have to look at and we'll probably look at together. Louis it's been fantastic having you on the show, chatting and talking about gaming.

Louis Zezeran:

Without waiting for the flag of...

Joseph Carson:

Yeah, for the audience, definitely follow Louis on his podcast as well. And look forward to having more conversations and more discussions about gaming. I've got this urge now to go and play some retro games.

Louis Zezeran:

Thanks very much.

Joseph Carson:

So many thanks for being on the show. Many thanks for having a great conversation. For the audience out there, we'll make sure that all the things we talked about are on the show notes and tune in every two weeks for the 401 Access Denied Podcast. Really talking about for many of the audience out there who are in the hacking world, you're going to probably feel so much overlap in the discussions we have had around the retro gaming world and some of the old school things around the reverse engineering to modding the hardware, to modding the software, to the signals, to basically getting around restrictions and copyrights and right to repair. So it's been a fantastic conversation. Many thanks for being on the show and everyone out there, take care and stay safe and see you soon.

Louis Zezeran:

Thanks Joseph. Thank you.