GTA-IV 1.06 Update - is there more to this than meets the eye? Should we be concerned?

Hi All,

Recently I updated GTA-IV with official update 1.06, there have been a few discussions about this update causing problems. I'm not looking for a fix as that is covered elsewhere.
But is there more to this than meets the eye?? Let me explain a little more, after updating my game would no longer load it just goes into a infinite loop. Many other users have also
reported the same thing.

My concern is that this update seems to detect the BDROM emulator weather it's Hermes or Standard, and why do I think this? Well think about this logically :-

1> When I dumped this game onto the console (Internal HDD) I literally copied the entire BD-ROM into the relevant GAMEZ directory meaning the copied data should be identical to that on the original BD-ROM.
2> Before the update the game ran perfectly from the internal HDD, after the update the infinite loop issue occurs.
3> I have the original game disk if I run from the original game disk from the XMB then it works just fine.
4> We know that the data on the HDD was copied from the original BD-ROM so should be identical.... so where is the difference in these two scenarios?
5> The only difference I can see is that in one case booting the original BD-ROM works and booting from multiman using Either Hermes or Standard emu fails.

Surely this means that the update is detecting the BD-ROM emulator or that fact that were not running from the BD-ROM drive?? If this is the case then should we be concerned?
GTA-V is on its way is this update a taster of things to come? If games can detect the emulators or the fact that they are running from HDD does this pose a problem for future releases?

Again I'm not looking for a fix to this issue just pondering the cause of the issue.

FYI: PS3 FAT :) / Rogero 4.30 / Multiman 4.16

Well, it seems like Black Ops 2 can detect home brew and ban consoles or accounts from their servers, maybe Rockstar is doing the same. You say it runs fine from the disc so it must be a different method. I wonder how it works on the official BD emulator on DEX.

I was just in a hacked lobby today on GTA IV.
So I guessing it something with your system.
But they were running 3.55 with a 4.31 spoofer installed so I don't know if that makes a real difference.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by indirect76

Well, it seems like Black Ops 2 can detect home brew and ban consoles or accounts from their servers, maybe Rockstar is doing the same. You say it runs fine from the disc so it must be a different method. I wonder how it works on the official BD emulator on DEX.

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Interesting point I have never tried running it on DEX, to be honest I think this situation needs to be looked into more deeply, just reading recent threads there seems to be a lot of games that are now becoming problematic. Unfortunately I'm not a programmer or at least not
a great one. It really needs one of the devs who fully understand this stuff to take a look at this update to see exactly what its doing. If they can find out what its doing then it maybe possible to create a generic fix for the CFW or BD Emulators.
Ultimately there should be no need to "crack" or patch these games, just look at the above situation, when an original BD-ROM game is dumped onto the HDD it contains the exact same data as the original disc, the issue lies with the games ability to detect emulators or cfw.
If we can effectively hide / stealth the CFW and Emulator from the game then it will think that it original and run regardless. It may not be a simple fix but one that needs some attention. Otherwise we will all be waiting for games to be fully cracked etc etc...

Ahhh bring back the days of Marauder II and Xcopy on the Amiga :p

GTAIV update 1.06 was released on 23 March 2010. Before the first jailbreak. So I'm pretty sure it hasn't got any BDEMU check. Any problems your having with it is because of your custom firmware. 1.06 worked fine on 3.55 CFW (even diskless with my patch) and it works fine for me currently on 4.21 Rebug. It seems to be a problem with Rogero CFW as another user in the GTA boards had problems running it too: http://psx-scene.com/forums/f276/gta...ng-hdd-109394/

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Three-Socks

GTAIV update 1.06 was released on 23 March 2010. Before the first jailbreak. So I'm pretty sure it hasn't got any BDEMU check. Any problems your having with it is because of your custom firmware. 1.06 worked fine on 3.55 CFW (even diskless with my patch) and it works fine for me currently on 4.21 Rebug. It seems to be a problem with Rogero CFW as another user in the GTA boards had problems running it too: See above

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I don't know about the release date but the update has only become available since I recently updated to Rogero 4.30 probably because this CFW works on-line :) You could be right It may be specific to this firmware, Its pretty strange that it works on this firmware when using the original disc though, maybe there is a bug in the emu software itself? maybe the firmware itself can detect disc emulation??
Wish I had more knowledge on PS3 debugging, it's an absolute age since I've done any assembler programming in fact it was 68k on the Amiga using Devpac.... that really is an age ago :)

I would say its probably a small bug with the BDEMU stuff. Because nearly all of my games work for me disk & backed up on internal. Its just been GTA: Episodes of liberty city that didn't work at first until I resigned the eboot with the control flags patched.

Going back to your thread opener though. I think its only a matter of time though until game developers or sony really do start detecting jailbroken ps3's somehow and stopping us from running the game. I'm sure someone will always find a way around it though :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Three-Socks

I would say its probably a small bug with the BDEMU stuff. Because nearly all of my games work for me disk & backed up on internal. Its just been GTA: Episodes of liberty city that didn't work at first until I resigned the eboot with the control flags patched.

Going back to your thread opener though. I think its only a matter of time though until game developers or sony really do start detecting jailbroken ps3's somehow and stopping us from running the game. I'm sure someone will always find a way around it though :)

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I would imagine that Sony must be under a huge amount of pressure from the game studios as they will want to protect their games from piracy, the PS3 was originally a very secure platform.
However it just shows how clever and determined the first few PS3 crackers were. Since my early days in computing mainly on the Amiga, I was amazed by the lengths some companies would go to with copy protection schemes, only to find within hours / days of the games release it would be cracked, de-protected and posted to loads of BBS's.
The logic behind copy protection seems a strange one to me, companies must spend $100,000s writing protection yet how many protections remain unbroken? If they spent less money on the copy protection and lowered the prices of the game then more people would buy them. But as with many things greed always seems to prevail..... Rant over :)