antime
Extra Hard Mid Boss
Since the security mechanism knows where the data should be, no damage should be possible. If it doesn't find what it's looking for, it might retry a couple of times but will eventually conclude that the disc is not a valid Saturn disc.
You're right in that some area of the disc must be read to distinguish Photo-CDs and VCDs from other, non-legit CDs, but the CD system could simply refuse to hand over all data if the disc isn't validated. As long as the CD filter functions are set up correctly, the VCD card can play movies without any further support from the main CPUs, so it's a possible solution.
If anyone is writing an app to test this, beware that the Action Replay's import functionality doesn't interfere with the results. The cart ROM contains a complete multi-region IP.BIN which is probably copied to somewhere, and if it's written to the CD system's buffers you'll have to reset the subsystem. (Anyone up for doing a complete reverse-engineering of the cart?)
You're right in that some area of the disc must be read to distinguish Photo-CDs and VCDs from other, non-legit CDs, but the CD system could simply refuse to hand over all data if the disc isn't validated. As long as the CD filter functions are set up correctly, the VCD card can play movies without any further support from the main CPUs, so it's a possible solution.
If anyone is writing an app to test this, beware that the Action Replay's import functionality doesn't interfere with the results. The cart ROM contains a complete multi-region IP.BIN which is probably copied to somewhere, and if it's written to the CD system's buffers you'll have to reset the subsystem. (Anyone up for doing a complete reverse-engineering of the cart?)