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LensLok!

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Softwar...

Trying to play Elite on Christmas Day and repeatedly failing to enter the correct two letters!

I hated those things. Tomahawk on the Spectrum had a Lenslok - and our little 14" CRT TV had an external flat bit of glass that required you to unfold the lenslok and hold steady at just the right place. Even worse than it was on a normal curved screen.

Most of my Elite experience was later on the Amiga version (no lenslok). It was a little anemic on the Spectrum.

Thankfully I won a Multiface memory snapshot device in a magazine competition and could bypass all this stuff...

If I remember correctly when the 128K Spectrum came out they changed some bytes in the top end of the 16K ROM that had been used frequently by games as an Interrupt Mode 2 vector table (point I register to be the high byte of the address) so that they could page in and out between the old and new ROM.

Elite was affected so Firebird (subsidiary of British Telecom) would let you get a new tape that fixed this bug but it also removed the LensLok protection code.

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