[GBA] Tsukihime (Unlicensed) fails anti-piracy (emulator detection)

[randomsomeone69-real]

Describe the issue When starting Tsukihime, a garbled screen full of the caracter "ぞ" appears, then go away after pressing any button. After the developer presentation screen, the screen is going black with the music playing.

This has been confirmed when booting the game under mGBA (with the retail and beta BIOS).

Rom Information Specify the impacted rom filename and any associated hashes (sha256 preferred);. The easiest way to do this is to open the game in ares, and go to "Tools -> Manifest" and copy/paste the contents.

game
  name:   Tsukihime (J)
  title:  Tsukihime (J)
  sha256: cb6d9773ac6aaa9ee2b3c78909f288c7f72ce166145fe68e8570049b9eebdc32
  board
    memory
      type: ROM
      size: 0xfa8000
      content: Program
      mirror: false

[FitzRoyX]

I don't know where you guys find all this unmarked stuff, but this is once again an (unl) game, some kind of pc port conversion with DRM that prevents it from being played on emulators.

[randomsomeone69-real]

I don't know where you guys find all this unmarked stuff, but this is once again an (unl) game, some kind of pc port conversion with DRM that prevents it from being played on emulators.

I'm using the official CD-ROM to make the file. I dunno if there is some DRM/emulator checks (considering that VBA was 1st release in 2002 and the 3 emulators that were made before were a little bit sloppy) and VBA boots up the game perfectly, which is impressive (considering the huge inaccuracies that the emulator has), so I definitely point to an ares bug instead of a DRM check that fails.

[ExperimentT020]

Has this conversion ever been hardware tested?

[randomsomeone69-real]

There is not a lot of pictures about the game running on real hardware online (dur to the fact that this was a CD-ROM converter) but I've found a picture of a Game Boy Advance SP running this game on Yahoo! Auctions and on Aufcan.

There is as such a chance that this game can run on original hardware, but I'm making suppositions.

[LukeUsher]

@FitzRoyX is right, the game does contain anti-emulator DRM; there are patches around to remove it, but it does indeed work on real hardware

There is both an emulation check routine and a rom verification routine. Tripping the emulation detection check should indeed be considered a bug, so this is a valid issue