Mysteries Of The CDRW and Backups Revealed

Talinom writes "Tom's Hardware has a story that details information regarding some of the new (and old) copy protection schemes out there, as well as results from several different CDRW drives. There are a lot of sites devoted to this topic, but Tom's is usually rather thorough."

Comments

Ah, copy protection from hell

[Dr. Eric Peters]

Yes, I still remember with horror the "good old" copy protections some amiga games compaines made. Non-dos disks that made the entire amiga shake as the disk drive desperately tried to read the crypted disk. The sound resembled snoring and could be heard miles away.

I had a friend who couldn't play some games late at night because the drive woke up his parents! Some games could not even be loaded on older drives because of the "shaking". In addition the disks also came with a nonstandard bootblock making all anti-virus software go mad and easy for viruses to destroy the game.

My drive finally gave up the ghost after a few years playing with them copyprotected games. The same fate happened to all my amiga friends at one point. Some were lucky to still have the commodore warranty still valid. Others had to fork out a fair amount.I was one of the lucky.

I myself, being a flightsim nut, used to play Falcon. Unfortunately it came with such a nifty copy protection that not even X-copy could make a backup. As a result I lost the game one day when the disk, despite good care, became corrupted. Unable to find a pirate copy I was (and still am) without a good game I paid honest money for. Sadly, I also bought F16 Combat pilot and the same thing happend to that one. Backup could not be made. The disk became corrupted....

Fortunately a friend of mine had a cracked version... I have yet to see a pirate suffer from a protection that is impossible to crack. The only suffering has been done by the owners of originals ( I am refering strictly to the owners of amiga non-dos copy protected games that were so common in those days).

These problems persist into today. Another friend of mine lost a hard drive and blames SafeDisc copy protection on a recent game for it.

So, can anyone here, with hand on heart, really say those copy protections did more good than harm?

Re:Ah, copy protection from hell

[vsprintf]

Yes, I remember Falcon. The disks didn't just get corrupted by themselves. The instructions told you to make a copy of the diskette and only run from the copy because the program had to write game data to the diskette--and just in case it became corrupted, which it did with regularity.

After dealing with many corrupted disks, I spent weeks disassembling likely sections of code. (I was pissed and had plenty of free time :) )

Eventually I found a section of code that wrote three bytes into a block of data, modified a couple of bytes of code that had just executed and branched back on itself.

The self-modified code now jumped into the data, which, with the changes, was now valid code, and there it was, the code that hosed the floppy.

I never played the game after that. Knowing that they were deliberately destroying my data made it impossible to get into the game again.

Tom's Hardware

[Sivar]

"Tom's is usually rather thorough."

Yes, Tom's Hardware is usually thorough, but it is also usually thoroughly wrong--at least, the reviews written by other than Tom. Read through them. Look at the numbers shown on, say, the CPU articles and see if they have anything to do with the conclusion. I'm serious--not trolling (at least, not intentionally :)

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[NanoGator]

"Crackers just disassemble the .exe file of most programs and remove the copy protection check on a assembly language level. It's quite clever how they go about it, sometimes. New schemes always seem to get defeated within days of release."

I read an article on 'Spyro the Dragon' in Game Developer Magazine. The company that made that game had an amusing protection scheme: They performed several checks in the game for copy protection code. If one of them changed, then one of the 'keys' that the main character (in the game...) had to find would disappear, preventing the player from progressing to the next level.

This meant that whoever was working on cracking the game had to play the game, level by level, and check for stuff that was missing. Heh.

It took them an entire month to get the game fully cracked. That's all the team really needed because that's about as long as a game lasts on the shelf. (I think it was for PC, not PSOne...) Any longer than that, and the copy protection wasn't really benefiting them a whole lot.

Personally, I find this story entertaining because I can imagine the crackers were tearing their hair out. Heh.

Security by Annoyance.

This makes me feel nostalgic for the old days.....

[Dr_Marvin_Monroe]

Remember "CIA", "Disk Assassin" and even "Copy II+".....wow, that cool new color copy program on Tom's sure takes me back....all those cool things...like modified TOC's....Half tracks....Modified sector headers....having to use the nibble editor.....

[salty sea pirate mode]
....there beeeen pirates in these waters since there was waters.....
[/salty sea pirate mode]

Re:Copy protection doesn't work.

[ergo98]

On a similar theme, the game Operation Flashpoint has a system they called "FADE", wherein a detected bootleg copy would lead to the player's weapons being much less effective. This is a brilliant strategy given how suggestive human beings are: Even for the times when a dupe is a 1:1 100% perfect copy, a less than skillful player will be sure that the real reason that they aren't hitting the enemy is because of FADE kicking in in the background.

Re:I suggest...

[Snocone]

It's not that they won't allow copy protection as such, it's that with the Macintosh Apple has always refused to support direct hardware access of ANY sort after System/driver/hardware upgrades.

After a few rounds of hardware-dependent protection methods breaking with no warning and Apple saying tough luck kids, software publishers generally got the hint.