alt Hacker News> The decryptor used a table held in a small SRAM that was powered by a battery.
IIRC Sega’s System 16 did something similar. Was that board’s encryption cracked in the same way?
Was this style of anti-piracy measure widely used at the time, or was it only on a few 68000-based systems?
The 68k was unique in that it included in its design the ability to act as a Harvard Architecture processor (where instructions and data have separate signal pathways rather than being together in the same address space [1])
It did this via the function code pins, which signaled differently depending on whether the chip was requesting instructions or data, in supervisor or user mode. No other consumer-grade chip had this as far as I know.
Sega's System 16 was also 68000 based (as was the Megadrive/Genesis), but I don't know anything about their protection scheme.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture