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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

#21

Post by h2odragon »

Firehawke wrote: post #8
h2odragon wrote: post #2

I never did BBC Micro, but in the early PC days there were "Copy II PC" add in ISA cards that the floppy cable passed through on the way to the drive. With their software most any floppy disk could be copied with a standard PC drive; and with a bit of hacking you could do things like read Victor 9000 floppies. There was only one floppy I could never get, a licensed Scrabble game that insisted on writing scores to its…

The "Copy II PC Option Board", yeah. I knew a guy who had one, and it definitely could handle a lot of stuff that you normally couldn't. Interestingly, you really wanted an early-era board because they were forced to water down the later revisions so they couldn't copy newer protection schemes.

The original company got bought out by Central Point, they'd been running for a bit before then. They were not quite totally opaque in "API" then, there were like maybe 3 asm examples floating around BBS and net.* era usenet.

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

#22

Post by AndrewStephens »

carapace wrote: post #5

Who recalls the provenance of this old legend about the fellow who challenged his pal to decode a certain floppy? It was a bog-standard DOS boot disk (IIRC) that he could put in his machine and boot normally. But his pal put it in his computer and... nothing doing, no boot. Analysis of the floppy availed not. The challenge went unmet. What did our hero do to make the floppy? .esrever ni nups evird eht os ytiralop eti…

Was this fellow a white haired gentleman in a velvet smoking jacket who travelled in a police box? He was always solving problems like that.

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

#23

Post by panzagl »

berkut wrote: post #18

Slightly off-topic, but since when were floppies referred to as "disc", as opposed to "disk"? I thought it was from Diskette? Is it a language / region thing? Optical discs were "disc", but at least growing up in the UK in the 80s/90s with DOS/Windows, I'm pretty certain I remember them always being "disk" for floppies? Am I misremembering?

From the US 80-90's (c64/Amiga/DOS), I remember it as "disk". I always thought "disc" was European in origin.

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

#24

Post by speps »

carapace wrote: post #5

Who recalls the provenance of this old legend about the fellow who challenged his pal to decode a certain floppy? It was a bog-standard DOS boot disk (IIRC) that he could put in his machine and boot normally. But his pal put it in his computer and... nothing doing, no boot. Analysis of the floppy availed not. The challenge went unmet. What did our hero do to make the floppy? .esrever ni nups evird eht os ytiralop eti…

> He opened the disk drive, desoldered the power wires to the drive spindle motor, and reattached them with opposite polarity so the drive spun in reverse

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

#25

Post by VikingCoder »

I remember my tech-savvy uncle was used to PCs which could read double-sided floppy disks. His jaw about dropped out of his skull when he saw me do the 0.5 second floppy-disk-flip that Apple IIc gamers got used to doing, because they could only read from a single side of the disk.

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

#26

Post by userbinator »

jedberg wrote: post #20

My favorite copy protection was on some games I had (I want to say they were Microprose games? But I could be wrong) where they would cut the hole in the disk just slightly bigger, and then take advantage of the fact that in DOS you could talk directly to the hardware to convince the read head to go just a little too far. Then it could read the magic 41st track to load the game, but no disk copy program could copy it…

Some of the "floppy extender" programs used more than the usual number of tracks, so unless the 41st was hidden somehow so that its existence was a secret, it would be no harder to copy than all the others.

Of course, that may well be why it was so successful --- the extra track wasn't well known, and information travelled much slower back then.

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

#27

Post by karmakaze »

berkut wrote: post #18

Slightly off-topic, but since when were floppies referred to as "disc", as opposed to "disk"? I thought it was from Diskette? Is it a language / region thing? Optical discs were "disc", but at least growing up in the UK in the 80s/90s with DOS/Windows, I'm pretty certain I remember them always being "disk" for floppies? Am I misremembering?

I remember it the same way. But then if floppies are diskettes, what's the non-'ette' disk referring to?

DASD Direct-access storage device[0]

Disk Pack[1] perhaps?

Answer seems to be the 8" floppy disk[2] which only IBM called "Diskette-1" and 5-1/4" ones called mini-diskettes, floppy diskettes, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-access_storage_device

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_pack

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#8-inch_floppy_disk

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

#28

Post by CobrastanJorji »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #3

Fully online, streaming gaming a la Stadia, will be the ultimate in copy and cheat protection. Since you don't have access the the actual code, you won't be able to modify or hack it to either cheat or bypass protection.

There's another benefit here that I haven't seen yet. Suddenly it becomes potentially reasonable to fully trust "clients". That enables much better anti-latency schemes which, combined with the clients probably being on the same low latency cloud network as each other, could potentially produce some really fantastic results. But you'd probably have to design the game engine around it.

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

#29

Post by kgwgk »

berkut wrote: post #18

Slightly off-topic, but since when were floppies referred to as "disc", as opposed to "disk"? I thought it was from Diskette? Is it a language / region thing? Optical discs were "disc", but at least growing up in the UK in the 80s/90s with DOS/Windows, I'm pretty certain I remember them always being "disk" for floppies? Am I misremembering?

No idea, but someone uses disc here: https://jdebp.eu/FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-...

(btw, diskette comes from disk)

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

#30

Post by karmakaze »

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.

My thoughts exactly. I spent a good amount of time learning about and cracking various schemes. It was never about distribution but about bragging rights and the different ways code was obfuscated. Most were disappointingly simple, others had more layers, very rarely found ones that needed special effort beyond say a person-day or two to solve.
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