Games on Flash Drives. Discuss.

**jcap** · December 18th, 2009 09:16 AM

Originally Posted by =sw=warlord

As shown with Halo 2 xbox and now MW2.

I don't know what the deal is with MW2, if it's just glitches or actual mods on the consoles, however the point still stands that people can't be trusted. Hell, the MW2 case, I believe, is just a glitch. Imagine if the infinite ammo glitch couldn't be patched because some faggot modified their version of the game.

The Halo 2 case is an example of extremely poor security measures on both the game hardware side, due to the limitations of the original Xbox. Halo 2 should have done a checksum of every single map on boot, which would then compare against a table of known checksums. If there's no match, then no load. Now, if that check were to be bypassed via a modified exe, the Xbox should do a checksum against that exe and compare against the ONLY KNOWN latest exe when they sign into LIVE. LIVE would have the master table. If there's a match to a known good checksum, then it allows you to sign in. If it matches against a known BAD checksum, then it should ban you immediately. Additionally, it should run a checksum of every client's map in the party lobby as it's loading the map, to just make sure nothing was swapped out somehow. I believe this is basically similar to how Halo 3 and XBL work today.

**Jean-Luc** · December 18th, 2009 10:11 AM

I think the idea of USB games has promise, but I'm a little concerned about lifespan as USB drives all fail after a certain amount of writes to the drive. However, that could probably be circumvented if the developers force the software to do all its writing on the hard drive.

**=sw=warlord** · December 18th, 2009 10:14 AM

Originally Posted by jcap

I don't know what the deal is with MW2, if it's just glitches or actual mods on the consoles, however the point still stands that people can't be trusted. Hell, the MW2 case, I believe, is just a glitch. Imagine if the infinite ammo glitch couldn't be patched because some faggot modified their version of the game.

Well it seems a little odd that you get infinite ammo, no cool down for any weapons including chopper gunner and AC130.
I think if the USB stored all the cache files and just loaded maps straight to the ram and installed savegame folders for the hard drive you would have a pretty good system.

**Phopojijo** · December 20th, 2009 10:50 AM

Originally Posted by thehoodedsmack

Games on USB? Reminds me of the N64 cartridge days. We might not even have to install anything. In fact, it might be great for combating piracy if it was all read-only. The only thing you'd need to save to your computer would be save-files.

Exact opposite...

Being read-only is what makes CDs and DVDs so piratable.

You'd need writeback to allow the USB to know how many devices it's been installed on.

The trick would be streaming from an unreachable partition on the drive... allowing the user to cache asset files to their harddrives (/give option to install it there...), but keep the small stuff inside the USB stick... so tiny that the lower bandwidth of USB would be negligible performance wise, but enough that simply having the assets wouldn't allow piracy.

...
...

Or you could just trust your fucking users.

((I mean for piracy, not cheating of course... and there's a big difference why: Pirates who steal your game, tell their friends, and increase your long-tail sales/may even purchase your game... or its sequels... themselves. Cheaters who abuse your game, give negative word-of-mouth, and decrease your long-tail sales. That said, the best anti-cheating method is dedicated servers. Period.))