Hey everyone,
There have been some interesting revelations recently regarding the copy protection on Sega Saturn game discs. 
For those of you who don’t know what I am referring to, Sega Saturn original game discs have an additional ring around the edge of the CD, which bears copyright writing relating to Sega. Whether it is normal data with unusual patterns, specially burnt data or even a complete hologram is not known. However, to this day nobody has been able to reproduce it on writable CD media, hence the term ‘copy protection’ - it has worked pretty well so far!
The protection can be defeated, however, by using a ‘mod chip’ fitted to your Saturn. However, this is not practical, hence the search for a more general method with which to simply burn the ring to CD-Rs. Over at the recent SegaXtreme topic (which, interestingly enough, has a bounty for the lucky ‘winner’ of the breaking competition), a member claims to have intercepted the data which these chips send to the Saturn, fooling them into allowing CD-Rs to boot.
Also, at Club CD Freaks, another member claims to have determined the starting sector (position on the CD) and obtained identical reads of the data for several games. Many people are now beginning to think that the data is readable, but just harder to read.
I still think that it will be the writing that will cause the problems - I haven’t yet seen a detailed explanation for the Sega writing on the ring. However, a member at CD Freaks has written a pretty versatile CD-writing tool which claims to be able to start burning at any position on the disc or miss out areas from being written - surely quite good opportunities for the ring data!
I’m just posting this topic to ‘round up’ help - I find the recent discussions very interesting and would be intrigued to see how far the ‘investigation’ goes. 
Be sure to check the topics!
Hot topic: forums.segaxtreme.net/index.php?showtopic=15520 (more relevant information on later pages)
forums.segaxtreme.net/index.php?showtopic=15171
Hot topic: club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=59813 (again, recommend to read later pages first)
club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=132193
