After watching this a did a little search, and found someone who said, back in 2001, that they'd had the game for nine years and regretted never being able to complete it. Somebody else came along and said, 'That's weird, I've never had an issue jumping on that platform; here, I've taken screenshots'. He then mentions just how long he has had the game, having got the crack before it was even officially released! Isn't it a shame it took him ten years to learn he should have bought it? Very interesting, great work.
Vash The Stampede I found this one from November, 2009. Dude starts his thread assuring that he actually owns a copy of the game... www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=50148
I love the irony that those wanting to run the pirated game probably had to pay more to buy the RAM expansions to run it than it would have cost to buy the game legitimately in the first place.
Most people already had the extra ram expansion, it was a fairly cheap add-on and very popular by the time Leander arrived. Team 17 arrived in the same year that Leander was published and their policy was 1MEG games ONLY, so you can imagine the "inconvenience" of needing an extra 512K of ram to make a *FREE* pirated copy work :/
"Defeat hackers with a laser?" See, this is how it should work. See something bad happen? Fire a laser at 'em. Hackers stealing your games? Orbital laser their neighborhood down. Jon has the damn right idea.
I've always found the war between pirates and developers fascinating. Both sides equally so. Personally, I buy whenever it's an option, but I can't help but be at least somewhat impressed by some of the things modern hackers and pirates manage to pull off.
I'm always satisfied by these interactions, my favorite piracy protection are the ones that fuck with you like removing terrain and halving damage of hits. The ones that just stop it from launching aren't as fun.
Tiger White people don't need to play video games to survive. If you want to play a game or use a service, you need to pay to support the ones who made it originally
What people don’t understand is that piracy isn’t done out of malice or some desire to destroy gaming, it’s done because of poverty. The reason piracy is so popular is because piracy is, for many people, the only way to be able to get a game. A lot of gamers out there know how good it can be to relax with a game after a stressful day, but for those that can’t afford games and the increasingly expensive consoles or gaming computers, it’s their only outlet.
Swiggity Swooty So if the game developers get absolutely no money because of piracy, and the publishers waste their efforts, they should just live with it? I don't think that's how it works.
I recall someone telling me about the hole trick when I was little and I checked all my discs and held them up to the light to find the holes. I thought they were lying.
I used to be in the hacking scene back in the 80's. My friends and I would get audio tape copies of games from someone who had a real job. We were all college kids who could barely afford ram upgrades, let alone buying the latest software. We would rush home and begin cracking those tape copies, and later disk copies, and whoever cracked it first got to put their own logo on it. We were a team so the team name was always there but we got to be creative and put animations and whatever we wanted at the beginning to make it our own. Some people even told us they would load the games just to watch our animations because they were more interesting than the game. Overwriting the RAM vectors was the most common way of copy protecting games. Simply load a block over a RAM vector and as soon as the block was done loading instead of the OS printing OK or READY it would jump to code that was loaded and execute that instead, which would just load the rest of the program. Every now and then the code would overwrite itself to try to prevent us from keeping control. But in the end we always defeated it. Even when software companies used dongles attached to the serial port we defeated those. Sometimes they embedded their dongle check 50 times in an app in clever ways. All that was required was time. As an experiment I came up with several of my own copy protection schemes. You could format the floppy disk so that one or more sectors instead of being 256 or 512 bytes was 1024 bytes say. Reading that block would overwrite the RAM vector for the floppy disk. All you had to do was read the directory and the disk would boot. Try to copy the disk and it would boot. Try to delete a file, boot. Another trick was to punch a second sector hole in the disk and format the floppy not with 18 sectors per track but 9 sectors, twice. If you read the disk you would see a list of files, read it again and they were gone. It all depends on where the sector hole was when you began reading the disk. My protection scheme would format the disk with half the encoded data on the first 9 sectors and the rest on the other 9. The loader would keep reading the same sector until it got two different results, then it would XOR the two blocks to get the actual data. This would of course halve the actual size of the disk space but it was impossible to copy. There was no way you could format or read the entire disk without the special formatter I wrote.
GreetZ fellow 80s pirate! I alao cracked countless games and of course I also did my own protection scheme. We would make demos and protect them and give to teammates as a challenge to crack. You're scheme sounds awesome.
That's a really, really impressive way of combating pirates! Lots of modern games do similar stuff, like Batman Arkham Asylum not letting you glide or Serious Sam 3 adding the invincible red scorpion; though those games were cracked very shortly after release. I think the most impressive thing to me is knowing exactly *where* on a floppy disk to burn the hole. That seems crazy, to know a floppy disk so well that you can burn a hole in a specific spot and then have data try to write in exactly that location. Wow!
You just need to hit the right sector. It doesn’t matter where in the sector you burn a hole. The reason is that when you write to a sector, you never know where on the sector you start writing anyway. There is an encoding on the floppy that makes for valid bit patterns and invalid bit patterns. You can basically pick any illegal bit pattern to tell where a sector starts. I think hex 4489 was the normal Amiga System one.
Well.... this is awkward, a few years back i bought a copy of this game at a yard sale and when i couldn't get onto that platform i assumed the game become corrupt somehow 😂
@@panguin7803 While true, copyright law extends for a fair bit beyond a person's lifespan... so pirating would technically only be okay if the copyright owner says it is. :P
The best part of this is that this is actually DRM that CAN'T his legal owners. It's physical DRM. Modern games can't do things like this, so there're always cases where the DRM flags someone falsely and you end up with things like legal Alan Wake owners ending up with the pirate eyepatch and such (before they made it possible for everyone to get).
I was on browsing the Cutting Room Floor website the other day and saw that Puggsy for the Sega Genesis had an interesting anti-piracy scheme. From what I understand it would write onto the SRAM of third-party copying devices if they were detected. When playing this "modified' version of the game, which is essentially a demo, it ends abruptly after a few levels and displays a message from the TT Devs. You should make a video about how you came up with this idea and how you got the anti-piracy scheme to work.
Its not particularly complicated. Its as simple as writing a longword to a memory address you know for a fact can't exist on the cartridge for your game. Typically console developers are told what size cartridge they will be given to fit their game into. So if TT are told they can have a 2megabyte (none of this megabit rubbish!) size ROM cartridge, then they know what the total ROM size is. If they are able to write a longword to an address beyond that ROM size, then it means a copier is present, because obviously, the copier has to have enough onboard RAM to be able to load a Genesis/Megadrive game of any size on it. So I would imagine they simply write a longword to a memory address that is bigger than the current cartridge size, and then to a CMP.L instruction on the same memory address to ensure that what they wrote to that address is actually there. If its a genuine cartridge with no copier on board, then when they use the CMP.L instruction to check for what was written, there will be nothing there, obviously if what they wrote is there when they check, then its a copier, and then Jon can do similar things like he did in Amiga Leander.
Fortunately, that kind of "protection" is easy to bypass on a per-game basis. It was commonly used in the DS era up until the DSTWO could automatically detect and patch this behavior on-the-fly.
I genuinely wish more game programmers from other companies would provide the same level of insight into their work as you have Mr. Burton. Thank you so much again for enlightening us these incredible anecdotes!
Classic! I ran into that one and years later when Amiga emulation started taking off, the poorly cracked version was the only one circulating on Rom sites.
This is flippin brilliant. I’d heard of the laser thing but had no idea how it worked. The DreadPirateRoberts protection was pretty brilliant too. This has quickly become the channel that I’m most excited to see a new video from.
Genius! Both the first pirate check and the second! If I were a coder though... I would like to make ways to where the player thinks the pirated game is normal but instead have weird anomalies happen that make the game crash in crazy ways and have 4th wall breaks or even act as if it's haunted. It's as if the game is attacking the hacker back. Whether it be deleting save files or creating invincible glitchy looking enemies with ominous music. Something about this idea is really cool to me.
Just don't be like that one guy that made the Sonic fan game that would mess up someones computer and steal their personal info if it detected someone was trying to hack it.
Pusalieth True. It wouldn't be the ideal way of going about making anti-piracy code. Anti-piracy measures shouldn't be obvious to piraters. But it would be interesting to see. I just kinda like the idea of a game being in your face with its piracy measures. Maybe I'm the only one that would like to see something like them implemented just once.
PR Fo Yeah, definitely nothing like that. The only harm I would see the piracy I described doing would be deleting the game's save files or scaring pre-teen kids that try to pirate the game without proper the patches into thinking their game was haunted or something.
Tails19935 A clever way to get revenge, but the pirate might tell friends to avoid the game due to a poor experience. What if a couple of those friends would have bought it legit otherwise?
Cooljosh3k Wow. I never really thought about in that way. Very good point to make. However... you could say the same thing for Leander. How people couldn't get past level 4. That could deter people from buying it legit also if they heard it from someone that pirated the game.
Holy shit, thats so cool that you worked for Psygnosis. I remember their games being a huge big deal back then and that I was blown away by their art covers. They went and worked on the Wipeout series too and they have been hugely influencial for me and graphic design. Super cool that you got to work with them!
Reminds me of the kind of stuff Spyro 3 for the PlayStation did -- they used a different method to detect the cracks themselves, but did similarly sneaky things with inline logic, different each time, to throw pirates off.
Excellent video, reminds me of an old Gamasutra article about Spyro 3 on the PS1. That game was also littered with game-breaking anti-piracy code. For example eggs and gems are removed from levels so the player couldn't progress to later levels.
Oh yeah I heard of that one! ...Apparently the pirate game was so strong that it still only took four days, but that was long enough for the game to be a success.
Larry Bundy Jr : You like molyneux. I remember the original black and white, it was quite buggy so I used to check online regularly at work for patch updates, etc. The forums were FULL of people moaning like hell about the game, and (imho it got a worse rep than it deserved for bugs because of that), but I’d hazard a guess that 90+% of the people moaning were going on about stuff which wasn’t even in the final game.. they were all moaning about bugs in something which only existed in the pirated (probably beta) game..
Something similar happend with GameDev Tycoon, where the developer published a slightly changed copy on many pirate websites. In that copy, you will loose after a few hours because people will start to pirate your games. There were many people complaining about loosing because of this and asked how you could prevent people from pirating the games. The irony was perfect.
Kinda like when the developers of Game Dev Tycoon released a pirated version of their own game but gimped it so that the players in the pirated game would eventually be ruined by piracy.
The laser idea is neat. It was used by much newer game consoles too: the GameCube and the Wii copy protection both work by punching tiny little holes in the disc with a laser. DVDs are obviously read-only, but the protection worked because when manufacturing a spiral groove disc it's nearly impossible to predict how the grooves are going to line up relative to each other, so you can burn the holes in first, then use the laser again to etch a "barcode" in the inner portion of the disc that tells you which addresses were damaged by the laser (with some encryption). If you tried to manufacture a copy, you wouldn't be able to replicate the damage in the same exact locations. Then Datel figured out that you don't have to actually use a laser to punch holes in the disc post-facto, but instead you can just turn off the original data engraving laser at the right point in the data stream while burning the disc, and the effect from the point of view of the console drive is the same. And that's how they put out unlicensed stuff like Action Replay.
Early copy protection was often very noticeable by the consumer. Being required to read a certain word from a booklet(or similar) was common in those days. You don't have to do that nowadays
@@TheSwanies These days it just installs rootkits on your machine that leaves them vulnerable to malware, slows down the game considerably by constantly checking every program running on your computer or scanning the content of your filesystem, and requires you to be always online which never fails because servers are sized correctly for launch or at any time later and the game definitely works for years to come since those server you have to connect to totally stay online promise. It's so much better now!
@@jfolz there isn't an eye roll big enough. Yes, we know. That doesn't change his point in destroying the myth that anti piracy wasn't often highly visible and intrusive right from the start. And back then, it involved inconvenience work, not security holes.
@@FFKonoko yeah sorry you're totally right it's much better now that I can't play my single player games half the time because all the servers are overloaded because lockdown... Much less obtrusive than looking up a word in the manual that doesn't exist anymore.
I love it! One of the biggest issues I see now days are these pigs who think that they're not only entitled to steal other peoples content, they openly complain when their pirated stuff doesn't work or companies/individuals take steps to stop them. The world was a better place when people who did pirate stuff did so on the down low and there was a belief that you'd somehow get in trouble.
Piracy sabotage is a fun subject, and the developer responses are generally hilarious. If you pirate _Batman: Arkham Asylum,_ Bats's cape won't glide properly and the publisher will tell you "it's not a bug in the game code; it's a bug in your moral code." _Garry's Mod_ throws up an error with a long string of numbers (invalid edicts, or something), and anyone who posts this error to the forums gets VAC-banned because that's the piracy flag, and the long string of numbers is your account-unique SteamID. Grats, you've just outed yourself as a cheapskate. _Serious Sam: BFE_ has the invulnerable pink super-fast machine-gun scorpion enemy. And my personal favourite: _Alan Wake,_ where the only change has the protagonist wearing a skull-and-bones eyepatch, and the comic relief character wearing *two.* And probably the most infamous, _EarthBound,_ where the enemy encounter rate is insane, the enemies are far stronger and faster, and the game crashes and blasts your save file in the dialogue before the final boss battle.
Ah, a nice little story from the time where you could just sneak in tricky code without having to fear the compiler optimizing out your shenanigans. Great vid! :D
I remember having a pirated copy of this bought for me back in the day (my dad used to bring back games from the market each week) and it working fine, still on 3 disks, and I was also able to complete it so someone must have managed to defeat the protection at some point. I'll check to see who the cracking group were if I can get my Amiga working on a modern TV...
Miitanuk according to Galahadfairlight (check their comment for more details), SKIDROW properly patched the game after they noticed the level 4 bug, and fixed that. it used 3 disks because it removed some of the data (some intro images, nothing relevant) to make the crack "fit" in it, while the 4-disk crack didn't.
Man you're so genius! From pushing the genesis to it's full limits, to making somewhat impossible things possible, to even pirating pirates! you're so amazing and genius! I never saw a game developer that brilliant and probably will never see one!
Oh my! How have a not found you on UA-cam before this?! I love the sneakyness. My mentor who taught me some stuff mentioned some sneaky-sneak wonderfulness like what you did with multiple checks in different locations. :-)
I recall that Codemasters later did something similar with CD games, including patterns of benign slightly bad data that they could identify if they explicitly looked for it, but which error correction would fix on an ordinary read. Therefore any simple copy would lack the iffy data, which the game noted. They pursued the fine tradition of making the game run while changing variables to make the player suck too.
Jon, I absolutely love this channel. As someone who dreamed of being a games designer as a kid (sadly my path didn’t lead me there), this channel is absolutely fascinating. Thank you for posting these. I appreciate it!
That's interesting. So the pirate market would have been flooded with bad hacks. In the Internet age, people are able to talk and zero in on the best in breed hacks now.
This reminds me of reading a book discussing about copy protection and cracking it... It also praise laser lock as one of the ultimate lock, but the author came up with a rather interesting low cost way to achieve the same near impossible to duplicate lock at a very low cost. The author calls it "seamless lock", and it relying on the "seam" of the track on floppy disk. Where magnetic head finish writing and turns off. Due to the seam (outside of normal useful sector) being the start and end of the track, every time when you write to the track, the data is a little different. Even the publisher couldn't really duplicate the discs themselves either. Thus every copy of the program will need some sort of config tool to read the seam of the track and configure the program to look for the seam signature, and refuse to run when the signature check fails. It is so interesting in the 90s to see them come up with these so very unique and cool methods of protection...
Whenever I watch your videos, I have to listen to "Charly Lownoise & Mental Theo - Wonderful days" afterwards, because the background music always reminds me of that classic!
Holy shit dude, you nearly gave me a heart attack with that beginning! I imagine if they ever got through that bit, you would simply add three more variables in random places that do similar things, with five additional decoy variables? Joking aside though, man you are a _genius._
Hello Jon! One of the greatest things of gaming back in the day was the battle between developer and pirate. Games that I'd really enjoy always ended up getting my money. However, I'd always poke around inside to see if I was able to crack the game myself. Not because I had any interest in ripping it off, but just to understand the scheme used. Manual look-ups, code-wheels, that sort of thing wasn't hard to get around. It was the sneaky stuff I really appreciated. Physical defects on the disk are great like that. You could let someone copy the disk with a bit of effort, and then wreak havoc on them when they tried to play. Stuff like that was beyond my ability to get around. Besides, I had the disk, I didn't worry too much about it. You sir, are the sort of person I'd love to have as a guest on our podcast. Hit me back if you'd like to make an appearance.
Remember all those “top 10 unbeatable/unfinished games” lists? I wonder how many of those games are finished, but the people who make those lists don’t have legitimate copies?
Actually, I did crack Leander back then fixing that missing block by making sure that the dreadpiraterobertsflag was zero, but I wasn't in a group and my crack never circulated anywhere except fro a few friends. It was a great game and the protecting it this way was very clever. Kudos.
Heh, just found this in an old cracktro source of mine: "if you have leander you surely have noticed that you cannot get futher than level 1.4. my special crack instructions if you have an action replay modify address 7fed5 to 00 at the options menu and you can play the game with all cheats and passwords zxsp, lvft, ltus, espr, lucy, snow, sotb"
The problem is that laser holes are expensive, so I doubt this was actually the way it was done. I made a few methods to protect my stuff - eg speed up the system clock through the video port to make a smaller bitcell size (fit a lot more on each track than possible to write), move quickly to GCR encoding after boot rather than MFM encoding, use zero clock and data in the middle of tracks to create random noise, etc.. None of it was used, even though it could be duplicated by Trace equipment (with the correct script) - at Ablex and Spool - the two places everyone in the UK used to manufacture games (US Gold, Ocean, Psygnosis, etc) - this was because the publishers didn't have faith in new ideas, even at that time. In the end they always settle for something rubbish like slightly longer tracks, custom sync words, etc... Once cyclone arrived this meant it was game over for protection. Side note for fans of Leander... @Jon - you should make a video about the parallax technique and how you added it after seeing this at my house with Andy. Thanks for the credit in the game. ;) 'Impossible 16 colour on 16 colour scroll on the Amiga' ua-cam.com/video/V9uUAnmOIP8/v-deo.html It's 16 colour UN Squadron and 16 colour Strider on top of each other!
XboxAhoy has a wonderful video on the history of anti-piracy measures, which opened my eyes to how fascinating it all can be. Regardless of your stance on piracy, videos like this one are (imo) a pleasure to watch. Top quality content as always, Jon, thanks for taking the time to make & share this with us!
Jon: Apologies is this has already been asked loads, but what the music you use in the background to a lot of your videos (including this one). Is it from an old game/demo/.mod ? Absolutely love these videos by the way - Been a happy subscriber for many a month and delighted with all these awesome secrets !
This code reminds me of that really cunning antipiracy code inside Earthbound, that enables "crazy hard mode" and then bricks during the Gigyas fight, obliterating your save file.
Great little trick there, it's something that modern developers still do. Who can forget Batman Arkham Asylum's pirating trick that prevents Batman being able to glide properly, meaning you can't progress past a certain point, or Crysis' that makes all of your guns shoot chickens instead of bullets.
"So many publishers worked with developers to try and figure out ways of at least delaying the copying of a new game." Funny, that's Denuvo's selling point now, as if it was any different years before.
I have read about a disk based copy protection that rely on the software having access to low level disk I/O to read the entire track, not just the data in the sector. The book was published in the early 1990s in Taiwan (in Chinese of course) It works on the principle of the seam where the data writing started and stopped being unreliable and unpredictable. It check the whole track for bit perfect comparison to the stored copy. When copying a disk, it seems to be difficult if not impossible to properly replicate the random data caused by writing head shutting at the end of the track. Thus making a all software based copy protection that provide similar resistance to copy machine as laser would. I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere for a long long time (25+ years), not sure if anyone else used that method for copy protection. The same book also provided a TSR software that intercepted all INT13 access (on IBM PC of course), and monitored all low level I/O from game software. Once it is done monitoring, it saves the data it got from the monitoring into files. When the game is ran next time without the original disk, it will load the file and "play" it back to the game software, tricking it into thinking that the game disk exists. It was an interesting read.
Nice Phone picture at the end. Something rang in the back of my mind, on further analysis, I noticed the Entel Argentina logo on them. Used to see that often back when I was a child and my dad used to purchase Entel tokens to call on public phones.
This is always the best way to protect games, or protect anything in general = give the impression that the game is running properly, but actually it's not. Because if you just directly block the game or write a message "pirated copy!", then you're giving a target to the hacker. Actually in your case, you also gave a target, because it was always a specific platform on level 4, however if that had been randomized a bit, then it would have been even more difficult to find that target.
I love when developers do this. Crowteam did some funny anti-pirate measures with Serious Sam: BFE. You get so far in the game, and a ridiculous invincible enemy stalks you with a machine gun making it impossible to complete. These kinds of anti-piracy methods are much better than having horrible DRM implementations.
I asked Jon this exact same question on one of his Sonic3D videos and he responded! It's called `Movin` by MK2 - apparently that comment of mine has helped others because the places you can find it now has people commenting stuff about GameHut! Any advertising of this channel is GOOD advertising
At least this copy protection isn’t so bad, but what do you think about the more damaging ones, like the one on the C64 that causes the head of the disk drive to knock against the edge of the track and eventually gets the head misaligned? Still, a very interesting look into copy protection nonetheless.
It's very bad practice to cause damage to hardware or software. What if it was a legit buyer and the piracy detection routines triggered due to a bug? Not condoning piracy, just a thought....
@@ZX48K I agree. Code can be written with extra heavy protections, but especially with older systems without the OS shields, it would be easier to accidentally execute said code.
How did you ensure with manufacturing that the hole was always burnt in the exact right location? Would you think there were any false positives in this?
A good way to make sure there are no false positives is by guarding around the known bad location with data that is loaded first; then there would be an obvious read error if for some reason the hole shifted, so the publisher can replace the disk. But chances are, it wouldn't really be needed, as the factory would burn a hole in a known location relative to an indexing hole in 5.25" disks and relative to self-indexing spindle zero-index on 3.5" disks, and would get it right every time. The imaging duplicator routine that would make the disks would then simply need to align the MFM 0-sector with the index signal off the drive. Holes and laser etchings are not the innovation here, there were standard machines to do them and standard procedures to take them into account while duplicating, it was the disguised secondary copy protection routine.
"Sonic 3D Backup"
"There's nothing important on this disk"
I have even more respect for Jon now.
LOL I didn't even notice it, thanks for pointing out! :-D
So you (RarefoilB) consider sonic 3D not important?
GameHut says this disk is not being used by anything important at 0:34
WHAT THE FUCK IS A SONIC?
Well, it really is useless. With it being a backup copy, by now they are already millions of roms of the game, so there is no need for a backup.
Person: "Why can't I pass level 4"
Publisher: *Shoots Laser*
Hahaha. We can shoot a very powerful laser to make a small hole (in a software pirate)
After watching this a did a little search, and found someone who said, back in 2001, that they'd had the game for nine years and regretted never being able to complete it. Somebody else came along and said, 'That's weird, I've never had an issue jumping on that platform; here, I've taken screenshots'.
He then mentions just how long he has had the game, having got the crack before it was even officially released! Isn't it a shame it took him ten years to learn he should have bought it?
Very interesting, great work.
Wow, that is amazing.
Links or it didn't happen. All laughs, good story either way.
Lynn McGhee huh
Vash The Stampede I found this one from November, 2009. Dude starts his thread assuring that he actually owns a copy of the game...
www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=50148
dead link :/
Coding Secrets has become one of my favorite video series on UA-cam.
I love the irony that those wanting to run the pirated game probably had to pay more to buy the RAM expansions to run it than it would have cost to buy the game legitimately in the first place.
Most people already had the extra ram expansion, it was a fairly cheap add-on and very popular by the time Leander arrived. Team 17 arrived in the same year that Leander was published and their policy was 1MEG games ONLY, so you can imagine the "inconvenience" of needing an extra 512K of ram to make a *FREE* pirated copy work :/
Galahadfairlight, fair enough :)
And even then, they can't finish it.
Sir David No, he said they did eventually hack past this to make it playable, but it needed extra ram
Ya, but now they have more ram ;-)
he protec
he attac
but most importantly
he stop hac
ShayMay I don’t get this
he protec.s
he attac.s
but most importantly
he stop hac.s
he disassembl.s
he rewrit.s
he recompil.s
he crac.s
@@mustangrt8866 Your crackin me up, u must been written in a dis"Assembler.." Not such a zero after all.. 😄
Under rated comment lol
"Defeat hackers with a laser?"
See, this is how it should work. See something bad happen? Fire a laser at 'em. Hackers stealing your games? Orbital laser their neighborhood down. Jon has the damn right idea.
nah, ion cannons are a better orbital alternative.
That's kinda what I meant but I forgot the name at the time, lol.
You just break the legs. tcrf.net/Mad_Professor_Mariarti
Pew pew pew!
I've always found the war between pirates and developers fascinating. Both sides equally so.
Personally, I buy whenever it's an option, but I can't help but be at least somewhat impressed by some of the things modern hackers and pirates manage to pull off.
I'm always satisfied by these interactions, my favorite piracy protection are the ones that fuck with you like removing terrain and halving damage of hits. The ones that just stop it from launching aren't as fun.
Or the ones that spawns a monster on steroids, or turn your bullets into CHICKENS. OR A GIANT KILLER CHICKEN.
Jon frustrated millions of pirates with 512KB of RAM.
He can *PROTEC* us.
Tiger White people don't need to play video games to survive. If you want to play a game or use a service, you need to pay to support the ones who made it originally
Tiger White "I want to break the law, this person is preventing me from doing so, therefore he is bad" your logic sure is sound.
What people don’t understand is that piracy isn’t done out of malice or some desire to destroy gaming, it’s done because of poverty. The reason piracy is so popular is because piracy is, for many people, the only way to be able to get a game. A lot of gamers out there know how good it can be to relax with a game after a stressful day, but for those that can’t afford games and the increasingly expensive consoles or gaming computers, it’s their only outlet.
Swiggity Swooty So if the game developers get absolutely no money because of piracy, and the publishers waste their efforts, they should just live with it? I don't think that's how it works.
Tiger White Wanna play a game without paying for them? Steam has a ton of free to play games :D
I recall someone telling me about the hole trick when I was little and I checked all my discs and held them up to the light to find the holes. I thought they were lying.
I used to be in the hacking scene back in the 80's. My friends and I would get audio tape copies of games from someone who had a real job. We were all college kids who could barely afford ram upgrades, let alone buying the latest software. We would rush home and begin cracking those tape copies, and later disk copies, and whoever cracked it first got to put their own logo on it. We were a team so the team name was always there but we got to be creative and put animations and whatever we wanted at the beginning to make it our own. Some people even told us they would load the games just to watch our animations because they were more interesting than the game. Overwriting the RAM vectors was the most common way of copy protecting games. Simply load a block over a RAM vector and as soon as the block was done loading instead of the OS printing OK or READY it would jump to code that was loaded and execute that instead, which would just load the rest of the program. Every now and then the code would overwrite itself to try to prevent us from keeping control. But in the end we always defeated it. Even when software companies used dongles attached to the serial port we defeated those. Sometimes they embedded their dongle check 50 times in an app in clever ways. All that was required was time. As an experiment I came up with several of my own copy protection schemes. You could format the floppy disk so that one or more sectors instead of being 256 or 512 bytes was 1024 bytes say. Reading that block would overwrite the RAM vector for the floppy disk. All you had to do was read the directory and the disk would boot. Try to copy the disk and it would boot. Try to delete a file, boot. Another trick was to punch a second sector hole in the disk and format the floppy not with 18 sectors per track but 9 sectors, twice. If you read the disk you would see a list of files, read it again and they were gone. It all depends on where the sector hole was when you began reading the disk. My protection scheme would format the disk with half the encoded data on the first 9 sectors and the rest on the other 9. The loader would keep reading the same sector until it got two different results, then it would XOR the two blocks to get the actual data. This would of course halve the actual size of the disk space but it was impossible to copy. There was no way you could format or read the entire disk without the special formatter I wrote.
GreetZ fellow 80s pirate! I alao cracked countless games and of course I also did my own protection scheme. We would make demos and protect them and give to teammates as a challenge to crack. You're scheme sounds awesome.
That's a really, really impressive way of combating pirates! Lots of modern games do similar stuff, like Batman Arkham Asylum not letting you glide or Serious Sam 3 adding the invincible red scorpion; though those games were cracked very shortly after release.
I think the most impressive thing to me is knowing exactly *where* on a floppy disk to burn the hole. That seems crazy, to know a floppy disk so well that you can burn a hole in a specific spot and then have data try to write in exactly that location. Wow!
I guess you just burn a hole, check the disk's integrity and save the location of the failing block/sector for later use.
But could you do that efficiently for a large batch of disks?
You just need to hit the right sector. It doesn’t matter where in the sector you burn a hole. The reason is that when you write to a sector, you never know where on the sector you start writing anyway. There is an encoding on the floppy that makes for valid bit patterns and invalid bit patterns. You can basically pick any illegal bit pattern to tell where a sector starts. I think hex 4489 was the normal Amiga System one.
I like the transition from one comment saying disk to the next saying disc.
I've got a habit of typing disc, since we don't deal much in magnetic disks lately!
Well.... this is awkward, a few years back i bought a copy of this game at a yard sale and when i couldn't get onto that platform i assumed the game become corrupt somehow 😂
Dirty pirate...
even if it was piracy, surely Leander is legacy software by now
@@Zimodo fight me!
Sad that you bought the game from a guy who tried to get it for free
@@panguin7803 While true, copyright law extends for a fair bit beyond a person's lifespan... so pirating would technically only be okay if the copyright owner says it is. :P
The best part of this is that this is actually DRM that CAN'T his legal owners. It's physical DRM. Modern games can't do things like this, so there're always cases where the DRM flags someone falsely and you end up with things like legal Alan Wake owners ending up with the pirate eyepatch and such (before they made it possible for everyone to get).
TheMadScientistRael Yup, that is DRM done right for once.
so people who bought the game can not make backup copies of it?
YumekuiNeru exactly no drm isgood, it will eventually fuck the consumer or history.
That's awesome. I love reading about the devious ways developers defeated pirates.
I was on browsing the Cutting Room Floor website the other day and saw that Puggsy for the Sega Genesis had an interesting anti-piracy scheme. From what I understand it would write onto the SRAM of third-party copying devices if they were detected. When playing this "modified' version of the game, which is essentially a demo, it ends abruptly after a few levels and displays a message from the TT Devs. You should make a video about how you came up with this idea and how you got the anti-piracy scheme to work.
Its not particularly complicated. Its as simple as writing a longword to a memory address you know for a fact can't exist on the cartridge for your game. Typically console developers are told what size cartridge they will be given to fit their game into. So if TT are told they can have a 2megabyte (none of this megabit rubbish!) size ROM cartridge, then they know what the total ROM size is. If they are able to write a longword to an address beyond that ROM size, then it means a copier is present, because obviously, the copier has to have enough onboard RAM to be able to load a Genesis/Megadrive game of any size on it. So I would imagine they simply write a longword to a memory address that is bigger than the current cartridge size, and then to a CMP.L instruction on the same memory address to ensure that what they wrote to that address is actually there. If its a genuine cartridge with no copier on board, then when they use the CMP.L instruction to check for what was written, there will be nothing there, obviously if what they wrote is there when they check, then its a copier, and then Jon can do similar things like he did in Amiga Leander.
Fortunately, that kind of "protection" is easy to bypass on a per-game basis. It was commonly used in the DS era up until the DSTWO could automatically detect and patch this behavior on-the-fly.
@@subtledemisefox how did it automatically patch it on the fly?
I genuinely wish more game programmers from other companies would provide the same level of insight into their work as you have Mr. Burton.
Thank you so much again for enlightening us these incredible anecdotes!
he hac
he protect
but most importantly, he protec
Angel Avila lmao
Angel Avila
This needs to be a meme, and a t-shirt.
secure
more like
s e c c c
He Snacc
He hacc
But most importantly
He doesn’t cracc
Up you go
delightfully devilish
ray wt seymour
Steamed disks
Ahh, Super Nintendo Chalmers, I hope you're ready for an unforgettable gaming session.
I hope she made lots of spaghetti!
Classic! I ran into that one and years later when Amiga emulation started taking off, the poorly cracked version was the only one circulating on Rom sites.
Holammer that’s hilarious
This is flippin brilliant. I’d heard of the laser thing but had no idea how it worked. The DreadPirateRoberts protection was pretty brilliant too.
This has quickly become the channel that I’m most excited to see a new video from.
Squiggs!! :D
No way!! This is so cool! Hi friend! ❤❤❤
I seriously can't believe you found me out in the wild somewhere, hahah. Small world!
Small UA-cam, heheheh!!
Haha! "obviously not being used for anything important"
Next video: writes over unimportant CD marked "Sonic X-Treme level editor"
I really love how some of the Psygnosis cover art was done by the same guy who did the classic album covers for Yes.
Amazing art.
Listening to Yes as I read this
Genius! Both the first pirate check and the second! If I were a coder though... I would like to make ways to where the player thinks the pirated game is normal but instead have weird anomalies happen that make the game crash in crazy ways and have 4th wall breaks or even act as if it's haunted. It's as if the game is attacking the hacker back. Whether it be deleting save files or creating invincible glitchy looking enemies with ominous music. Something about this idea is really cool to me.
Just don't be like that one guy that made the Sonic fan game that would mess up someones computer and steal their personal info if it detected someone was trying to hack it.
Pusalieth True. It wouldn't be the ideal way of going about making anti-piracy code. Anti-piracy measures shouldn't be obvious to piraters. But it would be interesting to see. I just kinda like the idea of a game being in your face with its piracy measures. Maybe I'm the only one that would like to see something like them implemented just once.
PR Fo Yeah, definitely nothing like that. The only harm I would see the piracy I described doing would be deleting the game's save files or scaring pre-teen kids that try to pirate the game without proper the patches into thinking their game was haunted or something.
Tails19935 A clever way to get revenge, but the pirate might tell friends to avoid the game due to a poor experience. What if a couple of those friends would have bought it legit otherwise?
Cooljosh3k Wow. I never really thought about in that way. Very good point to make. However... you could say the same thing for Leander. How people couldn't get past level 4. That could deter people from buying it legit also if they heard it from someone that pirated the game.
Holy shit, thats so cool that you worked for Psygnosis.
I remember their games being a huge big deal back then and that I was blown away by their art covers.
They went and worked on the Wipeout series too and they have been hugely influencial for me and graphic design.
Super cool that you got to work with them!
Reminds me of the kind of stuff Spyro 3 for the PlayStation did -- they used a different method to detect the cracks themselves, but did similarly sneaky things with inline logic, different each time, to throw pirates off.
**sonic 3D backup disc**“Now this isn’t for anything important”
Sweet mother of jesus what have you done
Oooohyeeeeah! Good ol' school. Did many of such timebombs and delayed retaliation tricks back at these times :)
Excellent video, reminds me of an old Gamasutra article about Spyro 3 on the PS1. That game was also littered with game-breaking anti-piracy code. For example eggs and gems are removed from levels so the player couldn't progress to later levels.
Oh yeah I heard of that one! ...Apparently the pirate game was so strong that it still only took four days, but that was long enough for the game to be a success.
Amazing how incredibly stupid someone can be to phone in and complain that their pirated game doesn't work.
Should have asked for their address. :D
Larry Bundy Jr : You like molyneux. I remember the original black and white, it was quite buggy so I used to check online regularly at work for patch updates, etc. The forums were FULL of people moaning like hell about the game, and (imho it got a worse rep than it deserved for bugs because of that), but I’d hazard a guess that 90+% of the people moaning were going on about stuff which wasn’t even in the final game.. they were all moaning about bugs in something which only existed in the pirated (probably beta) game..
Something similar happend with GameDev Tycoon, where the developer published a slightly changed copy on many pirate websites. In that copy, you will loose after a few hours because people will start to pirate your games. There were many people complaining about loosing because of this and asked how you could prevent people from pirating the games. The irony was perfect.
Happy Ska my god, that's perfect
Happy Ska I know that example, that one was perfect! The exact reason I bought it on Steam (first time I bought a game on Steam by the way xD) ^^
Kinda like when the developers of Game Dev Tycoon released a pirated version of their own game but gimped it so that the players in the pirated game would eventually be ruined by piracy.
The laser idea is neat. It was used by much newer game consoles too: the GameCube and the Wii copy protection both work by punching tiny little holes in the disc with a laser. DVDs are obviously read-only, but the protection worked because when manufacturing a spiral groove disc it's nearly impossible to predict how the grooves are going to line up relative to each other, so you can burn the holes in first, then use the laser again to etch a "barcode" in the inner portion of the disc that tells you which addresses were damaged by the laser (with some encryption). If you tried to manufacture a copy, you wouldn't be able to replicate the damage in the same exact locations.
Then Datel figured out that you don't have to actually use a laser to punch holes in the disc post-facto, but instead you can just turn off the original data engraving laser at the right point in the data stream while burning the disc, and the effect from the point of view of the console drive is the same. And that's how they put out unlicensed stuff like Action Replay.
I miss when copy protection was unnoticeable by the consumer.
Doing It Right
Early copy protection was often very noticeable by the consumer. Being required to read a certain word from a booklet(or similar) was common in those days. You don't have to do that nowadays
@@TheSwanies These days it just installs rootkits on your machine that leaves them vulnerable to malware, slows down the game considerably by constantly checking every program running on your computer or scanning the content of your filesystem, and requires you to be always online which never fails because servers are sized correctly for launch or at any time later and the game definitely works for years to come since those server you have to connect to totally stay online promise. It's so much better now!
@@jfolz there isn't an eye roll big enough. Yes, we know. That doesn't change his point in destroying the myth that anti piracy wasn't often highly visible and intrusive right from the start. And back then, it involved inconvenience work, not security holes.
@@FFKonoko yeah sorry you're totally right it's much better now that I can't play my single player games half the time because all the servers are overloaded because lockdown... Much less obtrusive than looking up a word in the manual that doesn't exist anymore.
I love it! One of the biggest issues I see now days are these pigs who think that they're not only entitled to steal other peoples content, they openly complain when their pirated stuff doesn't work or companies/individuals take steps to stop them. The world was a better place when people who did pirate stuff did so on the down low and there was a belief that you'd somehow get in trouble.
Piracy sabotage is a fun subject, and the developer responses are generally hilarious.
If you pirate _Batman: Arkham Asylum,_ Bats's cape won't glide properly and the publisher will tell you "it's not a bug in the game code; it's a bug in your moral code."
_Garry's Mod_ throws up an error with a long string of numbers (invalid edicts, or something), and anyone who posts this error to the forums gets VAC-banned because that's the piracy flag, and the long string of numbers is your account-unique SteamID. Grats, you've just outed yourself as a cheapskate.
_Serious Sam: BFE_ has the invulnerable pink super-fast machine-gun scorpion enemy.
And my personal favourite: _Alan Wake,_ where the only change has the protagonist wearing a skull-and-bones eyepatch, and the comic relief character wearing *two.*
And probably the most infamous, _EarthBound,_ where the enemy encounter rate is insane, the enemies are far stronger and faster, and the game crashes and blasts your save file in the dialogue before the final boss battle.
Ah, a nice little story from the time where you could just sneak in tricky code without having to fear the compiler optimizing out your shenanigans. Great vid! :D
Time to pirate Leander, thanks!
LOL
thiefrules welp
👌
www.myabandonware.com/game/leander-7db
only took 25+ years
I remember having a pirated copy of this bought for me back in the day (my dad used to bring back games from the market each week) and it working fine, still on 3 disks, and I was also able to complete it so someone must have managed to defeat the protection at some point.
I'll check to see who the cracking group were if I can get my Amiga working on a modern TV...
Miitanuk according to Galahadfairlight (check their comment for more details), SKIDROW properly patched the game after they noticed the level 4 bug, and fixed that. it used 3 disks because it removed some of the data (some intro images, nothing relevant) to make the crack "fit" in it, while the 4-disk crack didn't.
He said at the end of the video that a full hack was released.
According to some comment on this video: VheNpiSZxf0 - the game was fully hacked five days after release and there was no hole...
Man you're so genius!
From pushing the genesis to it's full limits, to making somewhat impossible things possible, to even pirating pirates! you're so amazing and genius! I never saw a game developer that brilliant and probably will never see one!
Oh my! How have a not found you on UA-cam before this?! I love the sneakyness. My mentor who taught me some stuff mentioned some sneaky-sneak wonderfulness like what you did with multiple checks in different locations. :-)
I recall that Codemasters later did something similar with CD games, including patterns of benign slightly bad data that they could identify if they explicitly looked for it, but which error correction would fix on an ordinary read. Therefore any simple copy would lack the iffy data, which the game noted.
They pursued the fine tradition of making the game run while changing variables to make the player suck too.
But only suck after a while, not immediately.
The problem then is, you "might" get reviewed online badly, because it was impossible to win a race.
Jon, I absolutely love this channel. As someone who dreamed of being a games designer as a kid (sadly my path didn’t lead me there), this channel is absolutely fascinating.
Thank you for posting these. I appreciate it!
you wouldn't want that path anyway
So, this was the floppy equivalent of cardridges trying to write to non-existent memory on a legit copy. Very sneaky.
Outside998 I think the original PlayStation had similar technology.
The very first crack by "The Company" released in the same month as the game works fine with a loader disk, no need for extra ram.
That's interesting. So the pirate market would have been flooded with bad hacks. In the Internet age, people are able to talk and zero in on the best in breed hacks now.
Possibly some of the best videos I’ve seen please make more in regards to development and how things were achieved these are amazing
This reminds me of reading a book discussing about copy protection and cracking it... It also praise laser lock as one of the ultimate lock, but the author came up with a rather interesting low cost way to achieve the same near impossible to duplicate lock at a very low cost.
The author calls it "seamless lock", and it relying on the "seam" of the track on floppy disk. Where magnetic head finish writing and turns off. Due to the seam (outside of normal useful sector) being the start and end of the track, every time when you write to the track, the data is a little different. Even the publisher couldn't really duplicate the discs themselves either.
Thus every copy of the program will need some sort of config tool to read the seam of the track and configure the program to look for the seam signature, and refuse to run when the signature check fails.
It is so interesting in the 90s to see them come up with these so very unique and cool methods of protection...
This might be the most awesome channel on UA-cam!
Whenever I watch your videos, I have to listen to "Charly Lownoise & Mental Theo - Wonderful days" afterwards, because the background music always reminds me of that classic!
Holy shit dude, you nearly gave me a heart attack with that beginning!
I imagine if they ever got through that bit, you would simply add three more variables in random places that do similar things, with five additional decoy variables?
Joking aside though, man you are a _genius._
Hello Jon!
One of the greatest things of gaming back in the day was the battle between developer and pirate. Games that I'd really enjoy always ended up getting my money. However, I'd always poke around inside to see if I was able to crack the game myself. Not because I had any interest in ripping it off, but just to understand the scheme used. Manual look-ups, code-wheels, that sort of thing wasn't hard to get around. It was the sneaky stuff I really appreciated. Physical defects on the disk are great like that. You could let someone copy the disk with a bit of effort, and then wreak havoc on them when they tried to play. Stuff like that was beyond my ability to get around. Besides, I had the disk, I didn't worry too much about it.
You sir, are the sort of person I'd love to have as a guest on our podcast. Hit me back if you'd like to make an appearance.
Ohhh man that is some incredible code!! I love how people kept calling in not knowing what was happening 🤣
Enjoy watching all ya videos. None to technical or too long . Keep them coming
J'aime tellement Travellers Tales, et tes vidéos sont trop plaisantes, tu est une personne bien inspirée
very interesting to see a idea of putting a hole on disk I had years ago! Glad to see someone did it? Great set of videos, john (Runecraft).
Remember all those “top 10 unbeatable/unfinished games” lists?
I wonder how many of those games are finished, but the people who make those lists don’t have legitimate copies?
I'm a coder myself and this is fascinating to me!
Subbed and liked good sir! xDDD
This was so interesting and fascinating! Please keep up the great work. It's always going to be a good day when one of your videos pops up
Ingenious method you devised to protect your work. Very entertaining content as always .
Did any of the pirates ever figure out the hole in the disk? Great video, I love learning about these techniques.
Actually, I did crack Leander back then fixing that missing block by making sure that the dreadpiraterobertsflag was zero, but I wasn't in a group and my crack never circulated anywhere except fro a few friends. It was a great game and the protecting it this way was very clever. Kudos.
Heh, just found this in an old cracktro source of mine: "if you have leander you surely have noticed that you cannot get futher than level 1.4.
my special crack instructions if you have an action replay modify address 7fed5 to 00
at the options menu and you can play the game with all cheats and passwords zxsp, lvft,
ltus, espr, lucy, snow, sotb"
The problem is that laser holes are expensive, so I doubt this was actually the way it was done.
I made a few methods to protect my stuff - eg speed up the system clock through the video port to make a smaller bitcell size (fit a lot more on each track than possible to write), move quickly to GCR encoding after boot rather than MFM encoding, use zero clock and data in the middle of tracks to create random noise, etc..
None of it was used, even though it could be duplicated by Trace equipment (with the correct script) - at Ablex and Spool - the two places everyone in the UK used to manufacture games (US Gold, Ocean, Psygnosis, etc) - this was because the publishers didn't have faith in new ideas, even at that time. In the end they always settle for something rubbish like slightly longer tracks, custom sync words, etc...
Once cyclone arrived this meant it was game over for protection.
Side note for fans of Leander...
@Jon - you should make a video about the parallax technique and how you added it after seeing this at my house with Andy. Thanks for the credit in the game. ;)
'Impossible 16 colour on 16 colour scroll on the Amiga'
ua-cam.com/video/V9uUAnmOIP8/v-deo.html
It's 16 colour UN Squadron and 16 colour Strider on top of each other!
You should have also pinched my 8-way barrel scroll for Leander too. lol.
ua-cam.com/video/V9uUAnmOIP8/v-deo.html
XboxAhoy has a wonderful video on the history of anti-piracy measures, which opened my eyes to how fascinating it all can be. Regardless of your stance on piracy, videos like this one are (imo) a pleasure to watch.
Top quality content as always, Jon, thanks for taking the time to make & share this with us!
More of these, please!
Very neat
I loved this video Jon! I could listen to these stories all day
Jon: Apologies is this has already been asked loads, but what the music you use in the background to a lot of your videos (including this one). Is it from an old game/demo/.mod ?
Absolutely love these videos by the way - Been a happy subscriber for many a month and delighted with all these awesome secrets !
It's in the description.
D'oh so it is, sorry ! I'm usually quite conscientious at doing a bit of research before blurting out a question as well. Thanks though :)
This is utterly ingenious and I love it!
This channel is one of the best that I've found, man, I have respect for you :)
This code reminds me of that really cunning antipiracy code inside Earthbound, that enables "crazy hard mode" and then bricks during the Gigyas fight, obliterating your save file.
This is ABSOLUTELY brilliant!!
My favorite Amiga game. This is genius. Love it! Well done.
I love looking back at a time when games were much simpler and there was still plenty of room for experimentation!
I really liked this one! I hope you have more.
Great little trick there, it's something that modern developers still do. Who can forget Batman Arkham Asylum's pirating trick that prevents Batman being able to glide properly, meaning you can't progress past a certain point, or Crysis' that makes all of your guns shoot chickens instead of bullets.
This is ingenious. Also +10000% coolness for Psygnosis.
"Hello? Yeah I can't seem to get past level 4 can you help?"
"YOU FOOL! YOU JUST ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD!"
Hats off to you, Sir. -428. It took ages to be sure. One of the sneakiest. Comparable to the later Spyro on the PS1. :D
"So many publishers worked with developers to try and figure out ways of at least delaying the copying of a new game." Funny, that's Denuvo's selling point now, as if it was any different years before.
Except Denuvo is nowhere near as effective.
@@MajoradeMayhem and denvuo is actually really bad, makes games lag when it really shouldn't
I have read about a disk based copy protection that rely on the software having access to low level disk I/O to read the entire track, not just the data in the sector. The book was published in the early 1990s in Taiwan (in Chinese of course)
It works on the principle of the seam where the data writing started and stopped being unreliable and unpredictable. It check the whole track for bit perfect comparison to the stored copy. When copying a disk, it seems to be difficult if not impossible to properly replicate the random data caused by writing head shutting at the end of the track. Thus making a all software based copy protection that provide similar resistance to copy machine as laser would.
I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere for a long long time (25+ years), not sure if anyone else used that method for copy protection.
The same book also provided a TSR software that intercepted all INT13 access (on IBM PC of course), and monitored all low level I/O from game software. Once it is done monitoring, it saves the data it got from the monitoring into files. When the game is ran next time without the original disk, it will load the file and "play" it back to the game software, tricking it into thinking that the game disk exists.
It was an interesting read.
I would love to see more of this topic, its really interesting
Love the variable name!
Thank you for taking the time to make these videos. I love this shit
Nice Phone picture at the end. Something rang in the back of my mind, on further analysis, I noticed the Entel Argentina logo on them. Used to see that often back when I was a child and my dad used to purchase Entel tokens to call on public phones.
It was a fun cat and mouse game back in the day, but eventually the pirate scene always won.
Gotta love it. I thirst for more coding techniques.
This is always the best way to protect games, or protect anything in general = give the impression that the game is running properly, but actually it's not. Because if you just directly block the game or write a message "pirated copy!", then you're giving a target to the hacker. Actually in your case, you also gave a target, because it was always a specific platform on level 4, however if that had been randomized a bit, then it would have been even more difficult to find that target.
Wow. This is outright savage and genius. Glad I wasn't around back then
I love learning about stuff like this
This is soooo cool! You're one seriously smart guy.
I love when developers do this. Crowteam did some funny anti-pirate measures with Serious Sam: BFE. You get so far in the game, and a ridiculous invincible enemy stalks you with a machine gun making it impossible to complete. These kinds of anti-piracy methods are much better than having horrible DRM implementations.
This is genius. You made my day with this one. :D
Very insightful and clever. Great!
Brilliant, just brilliant how copy protection was made back in the days.
Fun episode!
Interesting stuff man, great vid!
Where is the Gamehut intro music from?
I asked Jon this exact same question on one of his Sonic3D videos and he responded! It's called `Movin` by MK2 - apparently that comment of mine has helped others because the places you can find it now has people commenting stuff about GameHut!
Any advertising of this channel is GOOD advertising
Thank you! I've been asking for weeks with no luck. You da man.
@@Ali-Britco THANK YOU! :-)
@@christopherfrost Glad I could help!
That is glorious! Bravo!
Just adding that Leander is a great amiga game. The genesis port Legend of Galahad is also pretty good.
At least this copy protection isn’t so bad, but what do you think about the more damaging ones, like the one on the C64 that causes the head of the disk drive to knock against the edge of the track and eventually gets the head misaligned?
Still, a very interesting look into copy protection nonetheless.
It's very bad practice to cause damage to hardware or software. What if it was a legit buyer and the piracy detection routines triggered due to a bug? Not condoning piracy, just a thought....
RAMChYLD
They had shit like that? What was the cost for a C64 DD? 200$? 300$?
@@ZX48K I agree. Code can be written with extra heavy protections, but especially with older systems without the OS shields, it would be easier to accidentally execute said code.
How did you ensure with manufacturing that the hole was always burnt in the exact right location? Would you think there were any false positives in this?
A good way to make sure there are no false positives is by guarding around the known bad location with data that is loaded first; then there would be an obvious read error if for some reason the hole shifted, so the publisher can replace the disk.
But chances are, it wouldn't really be needed, as the factory would burn a hole in a known location relative to an indexing hole in 5.25" disks and relative to self-indexing spindle zero-index on 3.5" disks, and would get it right every time. The imaging duplicator routine that would make the disks would then simply need to align the MFM 0-sector with the index signal off the drive.
Holes and laser etchings are not the innovation here, there were standard machines to do them and standard procedures to take them into account while duplicating, it was the disguised secondary copy protection routine.
I had always wondered how these pirate detection scripts worked, and this was a great insight and laugh
Ingenious! Thanks for that!