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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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 years later, and DRM is still with us and they're still hopelessly trying.

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They "worked" in the sense that, when I managed to save up for a game on my minimum-wage salary, I bought a game that none of my friends had a cracked copy of. I remember buying EA's Caveman Ughlympics for that reason (it also came with some cool extras in the box).

But it didn't work in the sense of making me buy more games. I had hundreds of copied games and a couple dozen purchased ones, and if copy protection had been perfect, I would have had a couple dozen. The publishers always acted like I would have purchased the hundreds, which was impossible.

So it was really a competition between the publishers to out-protect the others more than between the publishers and the customers.

The C64 protection methods that drove me most up the wall were V-MAX! and Rapidlok, especially since V-MAX! existed in several different variations. Man, those were a pain. Harald Seeley (Alien Technology Group, who developed V-MAX! and WarpSpeed, and did a number of ports for companies like Cinemaware, was in my hometown of San Diego) eventually explained a lot of the tricks later on. Some good discussion here https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/?pg=vmax and here https://diskpreservation.rittwage.com/dp.php?pg=rapidlok .

I used to sell small business apps on floppy drives. For copy protection, one of the best tricks was to physically damage a sector and try to format it.

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 :)

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".

Paperclip 64 came with a physical dongle that you plugged into a joystick port. If the dongle wasn’t present, the software wouldn’t run.

The software itself was impressive, a full-featured word processor with an 80 column display.

especially in the time of 0-day warez. Interestingly, many thrived on the ShareWare business models (including John Carmack IIRC)

CRACKED BY MR Z...

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