Old-School PC Copy Protection Schemes (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Old-School PC Copy Protection Schemes (2006)

vintagecomputing.com

31 pointsmmastrac22 comments

On the NES, EarthBound is notable for a defense-in-depth approach to copy protection (the last layer is interesting):

http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/05/earthbounds-copy-protec...

I wonder if that helped any, though. At some point players are just going to think "this is a terrible game" and tell their friends that. The "code wheel"/shareware approach seems gentler. Give them a taste of the game for free, and then put up barriers to incentivize them to pay for the game. (IMO the F2P model has taken this way too far in this direction)

Yeah, some games are a bit too subtle, like reducing player accuracy in an FPS. Others can be quite funny when players complain online.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-29-game-dev-tycoon...

It's pretty old and has been posted here before, but one of my favourite DRM examples/writeups is Spyro: Year of the Dragon.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131439/keeping_the_pir...

I wonder if you could do that with music, put a few off key notes or change a word in a song and have it uploaded to various sites? Would seem like you could have fun with people that way and still get yourself heard.

I thought I had read that DAT (digital audio tape) detected altered notes/frequencies to avoid copying, but it appears to only have been a proposed idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System#H...

People have done pitch-shifting and other tricks to get around YouTube's Content ID in the past.

And the fictional word "esquivalience" was added to the New Oxford American Dictionary to detect copies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Oxford_American_Dictionary#...

Copy detection for maps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

Just upload the song encoded at 24Kb/s mono off a CD that you dropped on the sidewalk and kicked around.

Seems to be how they did it during the late 90's early 00's.

Battle Chess 4000 by Interplay required the manual to be played, as it would ask challenge questions before it would let you play the game. The manual had about a dozen different games laid out, and a challenge question might be phrased like "On game 8, where is the white rook?" and you'd have to answer in chess notation like "D3".

I had lost the manual and Interplay sent me a new one after I had cut out the UPC code and mailed it to them for proof of purchase, which was awfully nice of them. Years later, after losing the spare manual, I got prompted with this question, and after a couple dozen tries just for fun, I blindly and correctly guessed the location of a specific piece on a specific board.

I'm not sure what the probability of that would be(probably smaller than 1/64) but I felt like I could've played and won the lottery that day :)

I've always been strangely intrigued by these old-school copy protection systems. It was interesting so see all the novel ideas the companies would come up with. I especially remember playing around with those code-wheels when I was a kid.

Here's an entertaining little video with a bit more information on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjEbpMgiL7U

I used to play _The (Even More!) Incredible Machine_, which had a similar scheme. You'd be given a page and have to look up a series of three items from the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6etb0_u_hk

Anyone else remember that game?

My dad had his own business selling copy protection he invented for 5.25" floppy disks back in the early 80's. It didn't use codes from the manual though it used some trick with the floppy where a special sector could be read but wasn't written under normal conditions when the floppy was copied.

I remember King's Quest 3 had a bunch of spells and/or potions you needed to use to win the game that required precisely worded commands, and they were only included in the physical manual.

Metal Gear Solid for the PS1 had something similar - it referenced a radio frequency on the back of the CD case, so if you copied the game but didn't copy the liner, you'd end up getting stuck.

What a joy to play that game. One of the first games (I'd played) to take on a cinematic feel all in-engine.

Regarding KQ3, I miss those little hint books you could buy for the game that came with the red reading window. Totally not necessary today, but it was a fun thing to have back then.

A number of the Infocom games required the use of various objects/information included in the game box such as decoder wheels. Wouldn't be effective today of course but it worked pretty well pre-Web when you didn't have easy ways to trade this sort of information.

KQ6, in addition to being one of the greatest adventure games of all time, had some of the best copy protection.

The manual had an extensive "encyclopedic" section that was part background material, part hint book, and part ingenious copy protection. For example it included the following 'poem' as background material about one of the game areas:

      Three roses laid upon the bower, 
      A scythe for he who cuts the flower, 
      A crown, a dove, most noble race! 
      Thy bones make sacred this dread place.

As it turns out, this poem is really a solution to a puzzle where you must walk on the floor tiles in a particular order to survive:

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WUw771rvxhc/hqdefault.jpg

There were several solutions that were cryptically hidden in the manual like this, such that people who hadn't read it would get stuck at various points.

The real genius however was that this was before the Internet, and so if you wanted hints you had to call Sierra on their special 900 (toll) number to get help.

I remember this as well! There were also some incomprehensible glyphs on the tower climb, leading up to the Winged One's(just prior to the Catacombs in your screenshot) that were only printed in the manual.

English class helped me finish King's Quest 3.

I had a printout of the spell book, and there was a typo in it. Since it was an uncommon word, I didn't catch it, and didn't think to look it up. In class, we encountered "soporific", and I thought, "oops, I guess 'soponific' isn't right..."

I think Bard's Tale 2 had a code wheel which I photocopied as a kid for playing on my C64. Wasteland had that little book you had to refer to for little text snippets.

Star Control II uses a starmap as copy protection ("tell me the constellation at these coordinates..."). I lost the starmap at one point, but if you can remember just one of the answers, you can just keep running the game until that answer is the correct one. (The copy protection is at the very beginning, and the game won't bug you during play.)

Is this a factor if you're playing the Ur-Quan Masters?

No; I lost the starmap when I still had some 5 1/4" diskettes that said "Star Control II" on them.

I recall dealing with a code wheel to play FA-18 on the Amiga, and word lookup for B-17.

The latter had a lovely manual btw, it could probably be used as a reference work for historians.

try, catch, try, catch, try, catch! Take that reversers!

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