Hector Martin

Is that one of the laser "scratches"?

One of the six, yeah. Next I need to decode sector headers from the image optically and match that up with the BCA data...

Neat that the PC pits mostly survived the blast. I guess it just vaporizes the aluminium?

I guess that the "dots" on the bottom of Action Replay disks for GameCube simulate these scars well enough to trick the protection system?

Datel discs just embed the same errors directly into the bitstream (at the same logical addresses but no longer the same angular position). I don't own one so I don't know if they're visible, but I don't think they are?

Basically the idea of the protection was that you cannot predict which sectors you hit with a radial scratch, but it turns out the check doesn't care about angular relationships, so you can just encode the "scratch" into the data from the outset.