Scott Stilphen Posted August 16, 2002 Share Posted August 16, 2002 Turns out Video Gems wasn't the only company to employ "anti-hacking" protection in their code - in Custer, Bachelor(ette), and B.E.& E.E. Thanks to Thomas Jentzsch helping confirm my discovery. Btw, what company came first - Mystique or Video Gems? AFAIK, this is the earliest known instance of protection code being used (for games anyway...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris++ Posted August 16, 2002 Share Posted August 16, 2002 Let me guess...you found a condom around the ROM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inky Posted August 16, 2002 Share Posted August 16, 2002 The Activision games for the colecovision had copy protection in them. There was a register in them that looked to see if it was running off of the cart or other media. If it found other media, then it wouldn't run. Of course this was found and.. ahem.. 'corrected'.. and many many ADAM owners had Activision games on digital data pack. Of course not ME. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Turnspike Posted August 16, 2002 Share Posted August 16, 2002 Let me guess...you found a condom around the ROM. Even if that was so, under the DMCA, the Feds would have your head on a platter for busting their Trojan. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jhd Posted August 18, 2002 Share Posted August 18, 2002 Btw, what company came first - Mystique or Video Gems? AFAIK, this is the earliest known instance of protection code being used (for games anyway...) A few of the early games for the Tandy Color Computer had code that would over-write other parts of the game code. This prevented the game from running from RAM (it was designed as a cartridge ROM game). I remember a hack being published in one of the magazines to "fix" this, back in 1984. I think the game in question was Megabug (published 1981 or '82, if memory serves...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Stilphen Posted August 19, 2002 Author Share Posted August 19, 2002 [from Thomas] The protection can be disabled very easily. Just patch $EA at offsets $66 and $67 (from $D0, $19). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Cafeman Posted August 20, 2002 Share Posted August 20, 2002 How do you implement copy protection, anyway? Can you tell from your program if you are running on a cart VS an emulator? I'd think not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Jentzsch Posted August 20, 2002 Share Posted August 20, 2002 It's called 'copy protection' because we came to the conclusion, that it should stop other companies from pirating the games. The implementation is only a simple checksum that prevents hacking. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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