On Wed, 02 Jul 2003 14:38:13 -0700, John Robertson <jrr@flippers.com> wrote:

There was a company in New York AIR that would read PALs and would also sell copies of their software. I forget the companies name but a google search first turned them up for me a few years ago when I was last looking.

Play with the search words a bit, something like PAL Disassembly cracking decoding...jeeze I just spent a few minutes and can't find the company....they were out there...

Chances are they're gone. The Digital Media Copyright Act made disassembling PALs, ROMs, etc. illegal. For a very biased view of the DMCA (that I happen to agree with, which is why you get this link and not another ;-), click here: http://zgp.org/~dmarti/dmca/ Basically because DVD manufacturers were too stupid to write decent encryption codes (or too cheap to hire a contracting firm that *knows* how to write real encryption code), they got their simple DVD encryption hacked. So they just got together with other companies too stupid, and/or too cheap, and got a law passed by a bunch of congressman/senators whose only definition of PAL is "someone who shakes your hand and gives you lots of money", that makes it illegal to even try to reverse engineer anything. Adobe uses this law to protect their simple eBook encryption instead of simply using something that works. Check out: http://www.freesklyarov.org/ the charges have been sort of dropped: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Elcomsoft/20010723_eff_adobe_sklyarov_pr.htm... Or just do a google search on "DMCA Adobe" for many more hits. I'm not normally too political (I do vote), but this is a stupid law, and anyone who has built a "Multi-game" or written a emulator after the laws passage (2000 I think) has broken this law. My reverse engineering of Cinematronics would be illegal now. -Zonn