Metaforic: The R4 ‘killer’?
Pirates beware (?)
A newly-developed technology called Metaforic for the Nintendo DS claims that it can supposedly block the use of flash carts in the said handheld. DS piracy has been steadily going on for four years, since the release of the flash cart pioneer, Revolution for DS (widely known as R4).
At its very basic, Metaforge ‘detects the form of patching that the R4 cards use to play ROMS, and then proceeds to “kill” the ROM.’ CEO Andrew Mclennan further explains that ‘We take any DS game and inject a security scheme into the game itself. It turns each game into its own security system. Every time we apply it to a different game, it’s a different security system.’ He also claimed that the Metaforge is firmware patch-resistant so R4s will not be able to easily introduce a patch that will kill it instantly.
Mclennan says that the Metaforic is not 100% hack-free (duh, nothing is) but it will seriously give pirates a hard time hacking and coding (slowly and manually, since there’s ‘no way to automate’ the hacking for this new tech) and hopes that it will deter them from releasing ROMS at a rapid rate.
Nintendo has launched DSis laden with Metaforic in Japan last year and is slated for a Western release later this year.
Interesting to note however that that some flash carts already out in the market claim that they can bypass the Metaforic security system, but we’ll see what happens.
It will still be bypassed one way or another.
Reading these kind of posts reminds me of just how technology truly is ubiquitous in this day and age, and I am fairly certain that we have passed the point of no return in our relationship with technology.I don’t mean this in a bad way, of course! Societal concerns aside… I just hope that as memory gets less expensive, the possibility of uploading our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It’s a fantasy that I dream about almost every day.(Submitted using Nintendo DS running R4i SDHC ZKwa)