Stealth Patches - what are they and do you need them ?

[AndWhatBitch]

pretty simple question.. what are stealth patches for the games.. what do they do.. are they required for anything is it something you do when you back up your game whats the story

[nailed]

Ever heard of those stealth radar devices used to hide your car from police radar?  These patches are the same thing.  And just like those radar devices, we really don't have much confirmation it works... but it's better than nothing.

[AndWhatBitch]

what is it stealthing from.. and is it something you actually make from the disc or what

[rossmac18]

Ever heard of those stealth radar devices used to hide your car from police radar?

Someone's been watching Knightrider a bit too much.  Radar detectors alert you when there's a police radar nearby but that's hardly the same thing and kinda screws with your metaphor.

[GoldenGraham]

I thought the stealth patches were used to make your xbox 360 dissappear when you do acid so you dont smash it..

[nailed]

Ever heard of those stealth radar devices used to hide your car from police radar?

Someone's been watching Knightrider a bit too much.  Radar detectors alert you when there's a police radar nearby but that's hardly the same thing and kinda screws with your metaphor.

OK, not the greatest analogy, but radar stealth exists. It's called a radar jammer http://www.radarbusters.com/support/jammers/Default.asp, which, on a side note, don't really work.

And what does the stealth do on the 360?  It hides the fact the drive is modified from the 360 itself and, in turn, Microsoft.

[gigabite]

When you apply the stealth patch to your dvd drive it locks the firmware (no reading or writing to it allowed -sort of like read only mod on computer ) so if you connect to XBL supposedly can't get banned or anything because they can't read your firmware so they don't know you modified your firmware so they can't ban you

gigabite

[iam]

OK, not the greatest analogy, but radar stealth exists. It's called a radar jammer http://www.radarbusters.com/support/jammers/Default.asp, which, on a side note, don't really work.

Still a bad analogy since a jammer doesn't *hide* you from anything, it only messes the signal sent to the radar.
Actually, in aviation, in tells the radar you're there when sending the jamming signal, so it does the oposite of hiding 

[oddysea]

pretty simple question.. what are stealth patches for the games.. what do they do.. are they required for anything is it something you do when you back up your game whats the story

Well this seems to have gone off topic ... to answer your question: Never actually seen one but assume this contains the PFI + DMI information for a particular game. Thus if you apply this patch to an older ripp of a game it now is compatible with stealth firmware (xtreme only). This reports the DMI (disc manufacturer information) and the PFI (physical format information) as it was on the original thus making the 'stealth' version of the copy 'look' like the original. This is an assumption as I haven't used these ... I ripp the games with all the stealth info in the ripp.

[Grandmaster]

From what i understand the firmware stealth just gives the same checksum as if it were original thus making it stealth to m$. The game patches as far as i can tell are just the best that we can do to prevent them from being detected but we still dont no for sure if they will detect this or not. Im sure if they do start banning there will be a major load of cases reporting this on these threads.