Lock a zelda III rom?!?

[Sunandy]

Hello community,

I worked since I was logging on to a Zelda III project. I use Hyrule Magic.
My question: How can I lock my SMC file for other users?
I do not want other users to change my worlds and levels, or even steal my ideas or my ideas as your output. I hope that does not sound conceited ...
Can you help me?

[puzzledude]

Sure it can be locked. Depends what you want. I'm assuming you want to make it incompatible with Hyrule Magic, which means incompatible for changes with this program (like Parallel Worlds), which is done in hex. Experienced people however, can still reverse the lock in hex, or make any change in hex directly. And can still make a repro-cart out of it.

Second option is to change the format from lorom to Exlorom and make some more additional hex edits of course. This also protects from gfx extraction (as well as any editing), but only a small amount of emulators will support this format, specially if you choose it to be 8MB, instead of 6MB expansion.

Third option is to prevent making phisical carts (since we know many repro cart makers are making huge money with Z3 hacks owned by Nintendo and the modders).

But of course this is a double-edged sword, since more "locking" means lower compatibility.

[KingMike]

The only way you could stop repros is to deliberately exploit emulator flaws in your hack, but of course when you do that, you are restricting your hack to increasingly outdated emulators (ZSNES).

Locking hacks always seemed a bit unnecessary, especially with the presence of unlock tools (ex. Lunar Magic). If someone really cares enough, they'd find a way around it or recreate it themselves. You'd probably only actually stop as many people as you would if you just say you don't want it hacked. So goes the nature of this hobby.

[Zoinkity]

You could make a repro unviable by forcing a reliance on some obscure hardware setup.  So long as the hardware reliance isn't easy (or at least time-consuming) to remove you'd be relatively okay.

However, being unable to directly dropping a ROM into an editor isn't going to prevent content theft.  Firstly, your stuff can always be rebuilt from screenshots.  Secondly, even heavy encryption and funny storage formats won't prevent somebody from doing an emulator ram dump (directly or via savestate) to get the straightened data, and short of rewriting the engine entirely that is standardized.

Just keep in mind that you can't prevent somebody who's intent on nabbing it.  You can, though, circumvent anybody who's somewhat lazy.