Most perplexing and frustrating game copy protection/anti piracy methods

[Beeblebrox]

Reading on another thread about copy protection methods over the years made me think of those I found obscure or downright frustrating, involving weird widgets and codecs that came with the games. 

 

I'll start off - two in particular spring to mind. 

 

The first was Fighter Pilot which came with a little plastic widget/view finder which you could adjust the size of as you held it up to the screen to reveal a code through the lil window, that then needed entering. Man that was hit and miss!!! 

 

Another was Kult which IIRC involved a window template codex, some symbols, lots of frustration rotating said symbols and colour matching to match it all up before you could actually load the game. 

 

If you misplaced the widgets that was it.. No more gaming!! 

 

Any others that had obscure widgets and methods that caused moments of computer rage? List em here. 

If you have any pics even better. ?

 

 

Edited March 18, 2022 by Beeblebrox

[zzip]

Dongles

 

And the "Open the manual to page 43, go to the third paragraph and enter the 5th word"  method,   annoying when you misplaced the manual!

[marauder666]

@Beeblebrox    That was lenslok. Bloody useless,  if you had a crappy tv, it didnt work.

 

[Beeblebrox]

31 minutes ago, marauder666 said:

@Beeblebrox    That was lenslok. Bloody useless,  if you had a crappy tv, it didnt work.

 

@marauder666  that was it - awful little widget! ?

[TGB1718]

46 minutes ago, zzip said:

Dongles

Had one of those, when I opened it up it had a couple of resistors across the paddle inputs and the

values of the resistors removed, all I did was measure the resistors so easy to "break" 

[+gnusto]

The most annoying to me was non-repro blue. Back then photocopiers were actually what their name said, and they would take a picture instead of scan to duplicate. The nature of the cameras used made them almost blind to blue, particularly lighter shades. So people took to printing manuals that were light blue on dark blue. Which is freaking almost impossible to read even as a human. I can't remember what DOS game it was that did this, but I ended up getting the charts from a swap meet (somebody had transcribed them by hand and then copied that) because it was SO much better than trying to parse the blue mess.

[Rybags]

I cracked Leaderboard.  Wasn't really frustrating or anything though.

It had a dongle which would have been fairly easy for anyone to simulate - simultaneous left/right on joystick 2 which could be achieved by holding both buttons on a set of paddles.

If they'd have gone for up/down at least it would have made things a little bit harder.

 

Machine Lightning assembler on the C64 was annoying.  From memory there was disk protection but the manual was on red paper that was almost the same luma as the ink.

I tried to transfer it to tape but the inbuilt binary save would substitute zeros for the assembler program area.

That was easily overcome by just doing a routine that copied it to lower memory, then I saved it and adjusted so it loaded to the proper location.

 

The Thorne/EMI cartridge games - no devices and linear layout.  But I tried to crack a couple and got nowhere.

I don't know how their protection worked - maybe they rendered softsprites to the Rom area or something.

Most carts had some indirection to write to the Rom area at worst, but some were more sophisticated.

Super Cobra I remember not being able to crack properly.  So instead I just added some VBlank code which wrote back the addresses that were being corrupted and it worked.

Edited March 19, 2022 by Rybags

[Gunstar]

5 hours ago, TGB1718 said:

Had one of those, when I opened it up it had a couple of resistors across the paddle inputs and the

values of the resistors removed, all I did was measure the resistors so easy to "break" 

I made my own to replace a missing one in a English tape copy of Leader Board Golf sent to me as a gift from a friend in England.

[Heaven/TQA]

Wasn’t AR:The City one of the hard ones?

[eflake]

I about ran my 1050 into the ground and many wasted hours trying to back up my original Ultima 3 disks, could not get it to work. Was playing and swapping out the disks so much the labels started turning dark from my greasy fingers. Wanted to keep the originals from further degradation and play on the backup.

[Paul Westphal]

On 3/18/2022 at 5:25 PM, Rybags said:

I cracked Leaderboard.  Wasn't really frustrating or anything though.

It had a dongle which would have been fairly easy for anyone to simulate - simultaneous left/right on joystick 2 which could be achieved by holding both buttons on a set of paddles.

If they'd have gone for up/down at least it would have made things a little bit harder.

 

Machine Lightning assembler on the C64 was annoying.  From memory there was disk protection but the manual was on red paper that was almost the same luma as the ink.

I tried to transfer it to tape but the inbuilt binary save would substitute zeros for the assembler program area.

That was easily overcome by just doing a routine that copied it to lower memory, then I saved it and adjusted so it loaded to the proper location.

 

The Thorne/EMI cartridge games - no devices and linear layout.  But I tried to crack a couple and got nowhere.

I don't know how their protection worked - maybe they rendered softsprites to the Rom area or something.

Most carts had some indirection to write to the Rom area at worst, but some were more sophisticated.

Super Cobra I remember not being able to crack properly.  So instead I just added some VBlank code which wrote back the addresses that were being corrupted and it worked.

Excellent! I just recieved a OEM copy of Leaderboard Golf and was wondering what I could do to bypass the dongle ( next to creating my own ). Well timed and much thanks!

[ivop]

On 3/18/2022 at 8:43 PM, gnusto said:

The most annoying to me was non-repro blue.

I remember Colossus Chess had a manual on red paper that was also nigh impossible to photocopy.

 

[Rybags]

It was pretty easy work - from memory just a simple check on PORTA - probably something like:

LDA $D300

AND #$F0

CMP #$30

 

[Lostdragon]

On 3/18/2022 at 7:26 PM, Beeblebrox said:

@marauder666  that was it - awful little widget! ?

Literally the spawn of Satan's loins. 

 

Hard enough job to get Fighter Pilot to load on cassette on the 800XL as it was and then to be greeted with this, when your using an RF cable on a crappy little colour portable TV your folks picked up dead cheap... 

 

Cruelty, just plain cruelty. 

[+DjayBee]

1 hour ago, Rybags said:

It was pretty easy work - from memory just a simple check on PORTA - probably something like:

LDA $D300

AND #$F0

CMP #$30

 

Not that easy.

1. It was in some 30 places

2. more like

0646: 5D D0 D2          EOR $D2D0,X	# EOR PORTA (X=$30)

1734: 59 52 D2          EOR $D252,Y	# EOR PORTA (Y=$AE)

06BA: 2C 00 D3          BIT PORTA	# 13 occurences

4C7F: AD 00 D3          LDA PORTA	# 9 occurences

0C88: AF 00 D3          LAX PORTA	# 1 occurence

376E: 0D 00 D3          ORA PORTA	# 3 occurences

3ABA: 4D 00 D3          EOR PORTA	# 1 occurence

1BD9: 2E 00 D3          ROL PORTA	# 1 occurence

1F4C: 4E 00 D3          LSR PORTA	# 5 occurences

21D2: 6E 00 D3          ROR PORTA	# 1 occurence

 

[Rybags]

OK, I don't recall it being that hard to crack.  That would have been around 1986-88 without the benefit of the sort of tools we have today.

[+yetanothertroll]

I'm not sure this anecdote had any connection to reality at all or was merely a tall tale that grew taller with every retelling, or even which platform this maliceware was even for, but apparently this guy developed and sold a program with a copy protection key disk that had to be in Drive 1 at all times, so you had to have at least a second drive for your data, and if the key disk were ever damaged, lost, or just plain wore out, even if you had mailed in your registration form, all i's dotted and t's crossed with proof of purchase, well too bad, so sad, cough up another few hundred bucks for a completely new copy. I'm not sure exactly what the copy protection scheme was, but it appeared to be overly complex enough, including "encrypted" unique serial numbers scattered around that were re-read, re-verified, re-re-salted, re-re-re-checksummed, and re-re-re-re-written to the diskette every few minutes, that it had to have been deliberately designed to wear out as much of the key disk as possible as soon as possible.

 

Now that I think a bit more about it, there was some issue with ever exporting your own data out of this absurdly hyperproprietary ultrasiloed program if ever you got sick of his [censored]. The data files may have been "encrypted" somehow using the program's unique serial number or fingerprint or some such nonsense, so if you ever needed a replacement key disk, guess what, a mere new copy bought at full retail price wouldn't work, you had to pay even more for a custom built duplicate key disk if you ever wanted to see your own data ever again. Remember, 80s, so "data portability" was still something that had to be whispered about in the dead of night in meetings of secret societies. You did remember to send in that registration form, right?

Edited July 12 by yetanothertroll
Oh wait, ISTR it gets even worse

[pirx]

a reverse memory - an ideal protection - not against "pros", but against casual buddy to buddy copying.

Future Composer from WFMH. We cracked it <10 minutes after removing the floppy from a mail. It was a super obvious "JSR PROTECTION" somewhere in a boot sector—3xNOP and using a backup disk only afterwards.

[Rybags]

A good protection method in software is to have the result stored somewhere but the dependency to occur much later in the load or gameplay process.

I've not seen first hand but C64 had a good one also - you can store into locations 0 and 1 which are in fact the 6510 data port and DDR.

RAM also gets whatever is written but only VIC can access it.

So to get the result back, generate a display then use sprite collision register to read each part back.

 

I cracked a fair few games in the day though mostly cartridges.

I don't think I ever worked out a Thorn EMI one - Soccer was an especially tricky one.

Cart protection evolved from simple wipe loops that you could find in a couple of minutes, to using indirection then getting more complex again.

I do suspect some games probably used the actual softsprite render routines to overwrite parts of Rom.

 

The hardest protection I found on disk was probably AR:  The Dungeon.  It encrypted each loaded part.  I think I decrypted 1 or 2 stages and gave up after a while.

[Wrathchild]

AR: City's protection wipes the floor with The Dungeon as the latter was done by a different team and doesn't have half the tricks employed by the first.

 

Notable I have seen are Bounty Bob Strikes Back, especially the cartridge version which uses a time critical bank switching technique.

 

Mr Do! Is also riddled with small and often latent checks which subtlety disrupt the gameplay if found to have been altered.

[+yetanothertroll]

I also heard of a game, for a different platform than Atari, one that used the CPU to control the disk drives at a pretty low level, that if it detected an attempt to crack it, would thrash the disk drive, including giving it commands that would bang the arm against the sides so as to damage it or at least throw the head out of alignment. Unfortunately, trying to play it on the next hardware version always triggered this thing

Edited July 12 by yetanothertroll
45+ year old FUD