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The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

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Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#101

Post by [deleted] »

ev1 wrote: post #93
m463 wrote: post #58

Back in the 1980's I think there were a lot of interesting schemes. The solution was to just get an updated version of copy2pc or copywrite and they would have a fix. But I remember a few schemes that were interesting workarounds. One was the hole in the disk, one was a laser-burned dot on the disk. I recall with the hole in the disk - the software would try to read and if it succeeded it was a copy. The second one w…

I'm on the (significantly) younger side, is there some kind of trick or reason behind these questions, or what they're for?

[deleted]

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#102

Post by jcranmer »

ev1 wrote: post #98
HexagonalKitten wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, to keep you out of a racy game before central ID registries like login-with-FB. They're old-people questions.

Did people not just search it on whateever engine was available at the time? (Yahoo?)

At the time the game was released, the internet might be available in a modem that would go at the blazing fast speeds of a thousand bits per second. And of course, tie up your phone line in the process. The WWW hadn't been invented yet, let alone search engines.

Having been a kid during the formative years of the Internet, I can tell you that the notion of "you can find everything on the internet" doesn't really start coming into play until the early 2000s. In the late 90s, having to do research generally meant schlepping yourself to the library and finding encyclopedias or other research materials. Or, if you were lucky, maybe you had something like Microsoft Encarta, an encyclopedia on a CD-ROM!

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#103

Post by m463 »

ev1 wrote: post #98
HexagonalKitten wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, to keep you out of a racy game before central ID registries like login-with-FB. They're old-people questions.

Did people not just search it on whateever engine was available at the time? (Yahoo?)

ha :)

This was the dark ages, when people could lose phone numbers, forget birthdays and when stuck in a game - suffer without hints or cheat codes.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#104

Post by csl »

outworlder wrote: post #63
csl wrote: post #14

Very clever and great article! But it sounds pretty easy to write a cracker for it: Just rewrite the machine code to jump over the check. Or did I miss anything? Edit: Guess it depends on the details and amount of "obfuscation" that he mentions.

> Just rewrite the machine code to jump over the check Sure. It's even easier today: not only we have specialized software for cracking things, but we can even dump the memory contents and inspect them, patch up while the program is paused, and then rewind and try again from the same location. If we mess up, we can quite easily restart, just run the program again from our fast NVME drives(it will probably come straig…

I did basically everything you mention, back in the day, although on a C64.

In many ways, things were much easier back then: Direct access to most of the hardware, flat memory layout, smaller and vastly simpler ISAs, smaller programs (meaning shorter disassemblies to wade through), no protected mode so you could overwrite anything in RAM and so on. And you wouldn't even have to do it live in-memory, just disassemble the program piecewise from disk. People did extraordinary things back then, and you vastly underestimate their capabilities. Sure, you had to write a lot of tooling yourself, but it was simpler times.

I am not trying to detract from the copy protection mechanism, which truly is ingenious. I was just genuinely curious whether I was misunderstanding anything from the article.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#105

Post by garmaine »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #79
garmaine wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The PSX copy protection, for example, couldn’t be written by standard CD-R writers.

I'm talking about understanding how it works on a code level . You don't need to write the special disk out if you're patching the code, like this article does.

Yeah but you'll have to hunt for and fix the code wherever it is on every disk, which could be subtly or completely different between applications. "Recalculate track 9" is a simple program that would have worked on any Western Security DRM disk.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#106

Post by ogurechny »

ev1 wrote: post #98
HexagonalKitten wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, to keep you out of a racy game before central ID registries like login-with-FB. They're old-people questions.

Did people not just search it on whateever engine was available at the time? (Yahoo?)

If you got the software from pirate BBS, you would meditate on its file list to check for presence of notes, hints, FAQs and release info files if that information was not attached. Newsgroups/echomail could have it posted, too, routinely, or as an answer to someone's question.

That was a bit later, though. In the age of physical disk swapping, you would ask friends, or prepare for an audience with That One Guy Who Has Everything And Knows Everything.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#108

Post by LocalH »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #94
Symbiote wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is/was the usual British usage. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_disc The OED includes these references: 1947 Math. Tables & Other Aids Computation 2 229 The program of the Symposium was as follows:..4. ‘Magnetic and phosphor coated disks’ by Dr. B. L. Moore. 1952 Electr. Engin. (U.S.) Aug. 745/2 When the heads are in position, the disk is rotated past them while information, in the form of coded magn…

> The last one has K for magnetic disks and C for optical discs. The Wikipedia article affirms this convention as well, which begs the question: solid state disk drive? solid state disc drive? solid state brick drive?

I would go with disk, if I were going to refer to it that way, due to the relation to hard disk drives.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#109

Post by IIAOPSW »

Way back when monetized flash games were a thing, there was a problem of ad piracy (people who would decompile your game and then upload and monetize it as their own). The conventional wisdom at the time was that piracy could only be delayed, not prevented. The reasoning was that a piracy check has to read the sites URL at some point and the hacker can just search for the only command in all of actionscript which does that.

My game contained a very standard check url type protection. This was not the real protection. This was the piece of code which the hacker was supposed to notice and remove. Early on in the game there was a function call to get the total number of bytes in the file and then divide it by the number of expected bytes. Ostensibly this was to calculate the size of the loading bar. I stored this information in a forgettable global variable. On the surface this looks like the sloppy coding one expects from flash devs. But the real purpose was so that I could later check if this number was not 1.0 and trigger the true copy protection. Long story short if the number of bytes were incorrect then the game becomes unplayable after a few levels. I thought that was a nice touch since these hackers usually didn't play though enough of the game to test if their hack worked.

Re: The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd

#110

Post by kgwgk »

karmakaze wrote: post #67
kgwgk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think diskette was derived from disk, where disk refers to “8-inch floppy disk introduced by IBM under the name of diskette”? https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_450... I’d say IBM called floppy disks diskettes by opposition to hard disks, which were huge at that time: https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/winchester-pio...

No IBM person would say hard disk, it was always DASD. I suspect that the 'hard' prefix gained usage after the introduction of floppies.

I don't say they were called hard disks. They were called disks (DASD is the whole device, not just the storage disk). And of course they were hard!

And then they introduced little disks (a 8-inch floppy was small and light compared to existing disks) and called them diskettes.

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