Given enough time, and enough focused ingenuity, any copy protection method can probably be circumvented. For the latest evidence of this truism, look no further than the Sega Saturn. A hacker has developed an external, plug-in solution that lets the two-decade-old system play games off a generic USB drive, without the need for heavy internal hardware modifications like a soldered, hard-to-find mod chip or a full disc drive replacement.

The news comes via this fascinating 27-minute video that outlines how a hacker going by the handle Dr. Abrasive spent years looking for a way past the system’s particularly robust disc-checking scheme. To prevent regular old CD-Rs from working on the system, Sega had the Saturn disc drive check for a microscopic “wobble” pattern etched into the outer edge of the game disc itself (a CD-R’s pre-set spiral pattern makes replicating the pattern with a regular CD burner pretty impossible).

In addition, the Saturn has an extra CPU dedicated exclusively to handling the CD sub-system. Before now, that CPU has been a frustrating black box for hardware hackers; they could send commands and get data, but they couldn’t decipher its inner workings to try to develop a workaround. Even opening the chip up to examine the ROM via microscope failed, thanks to an implant ROM process Sega used in creating the chip.