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The part about the "copy protection" schemes was sad/amusing. So much work put into cracking and anti-cracking, and even cracking for the purpose of legitimate distribution, and wasting memory on profanity-soaked rants to the hackers... Everyone involved in the story looks back at it as "fun" and "challenging" but all I see is wasted time on everyone's part and software that is more difficult to use. Here we are, 40…
The part about the "copy protection" schemes was sad/amusing. So much work put into cracking and anti-cracking, and even cracking for the purpose of legitimate distribution, and wasting memory on profanity-soaked rants to the hackers... Everyone involved in the story looks back at it as "fun" and "challenging" but all I see is wasted time on everyone's part and software that is more difficult to use. Here we are, 40…
http://dmweb.free.fr/community/documentation/copy-protection...
Nearly 40 years later, I still wouldn't call it "wasted time".
Clarification siince the author does not mention this specifically: Disk drives dominated the C64 storage market in the US, Canada, and Germany, while cassette dominated the UK and elsewhere. Thus, US Gold had to convert US disk games to cassette for the UK market; I presume that the rushed jobs the article mentions were for especially popular games, or when there was an unusually short contractual deadline for deliv…
1. There was a lot of exotic copy protection going on, especially on disk. Putting data in sectors that could not be written by the standard disk copying methods was just the beginning. I don’t know if any copy protection of tapes was ever effective but I wouldn’t be surprised.
2. To enable the use of “turbo” loaders. Cassette games were released on standard cassettes that were maybe shorter than normal. But if you compressed the games using better algorithms, you could fit up to 20 games on one side of a standard audio cassette. Normally the turbo loader was placed first on the cassette. It would maybe take a minute or two to load. Then, the rest of the pirated games followed. You’d write down the index number of each game on the cassette cover so you could fast-forward to it. The reason this was called “turbo” was presumably because as the game took up less space on the tape, you didn’t have to wait as long for it to roll past the read head. The c64 could decompress the data faster than the Datasette could play it back, so there was no processing wait. Most likely even a game that could be copied straight over to another cassette, still had copy protection that prevented it from loading using a different loader than it was mastered for. Hence it needed to be cracked.
The part about the "copy protection" schemes was sad/amusing. So much work put into cracking and anti-cracking, and even cracking for the purpose of legitimate distribution, and wasting memory on profanity-soaked rants to the hackers... Everyone involved in the story looks back at it as "fun" and "challenging" but all I see is wasted time on everyone's part and software that is more difficult to use. Here we are, 40…
I suggest you read this page about the Dungeon Master ('87) copy protection which includes an interview with its main programmer and author of its (ingenious) copy protection. http://dmweb.free.fr/community/documentation/copy-protection... Nearly 40 years later, I still wouldn't call it "wasted time".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I often wonder about nostalgia related to computers/computing. It's strange because, even though I spent countless hours on my Commodore 64 as a teenager, and it had a major influence on my life (it basically introduced me to programming and set the course for my professional life), I just don't feel the nostalgia vibes. I got my hands on an old C64 a few years ago and fired it up. I tinkered with it for about 10 min…
For some reason I share that view. Maybe it is since computers got so much better? I got way more nostalgia for NES, which I still think is fun to play and play with my kids. Super Mario still feels good while C64 games feel clunky.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For some reason I share that view. Maybe it is since computers got so much better? I got way more nostalgia for NES, which I still think is fun to play and play with my kids. Super Mario still feels good while C64 games feel clunky.
I've noticed with "retro"-looking games like Stardew Valley, people will say they look like 80s games. No, they look like 90s games (at worst). People forget how primitive the graphics were at 320x200x16. They were great at the time, and people did some ingenious stuff to get the most out of those systems, but they couldn't display anything like what's called retro today.
Also many retro looking games adds pixel effects that weren't there on crt:s. Games of that era were quite smooth looking.
The part about the "copy protection" schemes was sad/amusing. So much work put into cracking and anti-cracking, and even cracking for the purpose of legitimate distribution, and wasting memory on profanity-soaked rants to the hackers... Everyone involved in the story looks back at it as "fun" and "challenging" but all I see is wasted time on everyone's part and software that is more difficult to use. Here we are, 40…
You take a floppy disk, use a pin to make a hole on the magnetic medium at a random place, then format the disk so that sector is marked as a "bad sector". You hardcode the sector ID in your app, then when your app runs, you try low-level formatting that sector. If it can be formatted, it's a pirate copy.
Floppy disks had physical read-only mode, so my app asked users to put their disks in read-write mode to work :)
For anyone else feeling a good hit of nostalgia, I highly recommend this excellent site with C64 games playable in the browser - and with netplay too! https://c64.krissz.hu/online-playable-games/
Wow. First time I've seen one of my old games in decades. Miner 2049'er sure looks like a game of the same name I wrote back in '82, age 17. Sold quite a few copies thru Sears & KMart in the US, distributors in UK sold a bunch more. Paid for a bunch of mid-80's parties.