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A History of Copy Protection
GamerGirll1138 writes to tell us Next-gen has an amusing walk down memory lane with their history of copy protection. There have been some crazy schemes over the years to ensure that you paid for your software, everything from super-secret decoder rings to ridiculous document checks. "With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel."
it doesn't treat me like some criminal. I don't want my software to stop working because I had no internet access, and I now have to go out of my way and call technical support. I don't want my software to install root-kits on my PC because it thinks I might be a pirate. I don't want copy protection to be less useful than the pirated version. And so on and so forth.
Quality product at a reasonable price.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
On the other hand I think this will eventually reach a breaking point and these normal people (who are the paying customers) will stop putting up with said crap. That will be an interesting development for sure.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
Aw man, you mean that secret decoder was just a copy protection scheme? And I wasn't really saving the world? That's it! I was in support of RIAA/MPAA/BSA before but now they've just wrecked my childhood fantasy! I'm going to go poke an eye out and buy a parrot!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I remember the Ultima book back when a laser copy was expensive. The colors were pastels, which wouldn't copy on the copy machines of the day, so to pirate the game, you had to spend about as much in color copies as buying the darn thing. Course, I had a friend whose dad's office had a copier... ahh. smell the piracy.
meh
http://www.next-gen.biz/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10800&Itemid=2&pop=1&page=1
Amusing is sending those of us who actually RTFA to the LAST page of a 4 page article. This article is the straight man in a comedy duo, only without the funny man. That's sort of amusing in an ironic way.
Just think, without copy protection, we wouldn't have been able to distribute our viruses so easily. With all these kids trying to download cracks from any site that offered them, our bits have gone far and wide.
Thanks copy protection!
Oh man, I remember moving up from the Commodore 64 to the Mac LC. Because 90% of the C64 software we had was "Load 'n Go" stuff for $1 (literally!) there wasn't much worry about copy protection. I can't remember a single thing we had on that system that had copy protection. The Mac however did have some surprises. We actually sent our first copy of SimCity back to Maxis because we didn't realize that the Red Card with the weird symbols was important and that strange dialog box (I was like 10 at the time, gimme a break) at the start was also important. I thought it was broken because every time you started the game it would throw disasters at your city constantly. The tech support guys were apparently trained to treat anybody asking about the copy protection like a theif, and never bothered to tell us what we had to do either (hence the useless return). Luckily, I figured it out with the second copy (unpacking the box myself instead of letting my brother do it and finding the red card made a big difference).
Later on I played Chris Crawford's (I think that was his name) Patton Strikes Back. This one was interesting it that it let you run about halfway through the game, and then stopped and asked "are your papers in order"? It then directed you to a specific page in the manual and had you type in a specific word (third word on the second paragraph for instance). There was a slight problem though, the manual had apparently been revised a bit after the copy protection was put in place, so about 5-10% of the time, your game would be destroyed halfway through because it failed the copy check. That was after we got AOL and it was my first foray into piracy, as getting halfway through a tough game and then losing because the copy protection was buggy was a real outrage. This was the days before games released patches, so as far as I know unless you crack the thing there's always a chance of losing the war because of the copy protection.
I read the internet for the articles.
We should call it what it is - copy restricton. It doesn't protect your copy nor your ability to copy. I could understand if it were called copyright protection, but that's just not the case.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Funny how any form of digital media goes from retail to electronic, only to be more protected, then only to be broken. It will only be a losing battle between publishers, users, & crackers. If you can see or use any product, someone can break the protection. The only sure way of non payers using a piece of software, don't release it (or create it for that matter)
DONT DONT DONT COPY THAT FLOPPY! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4837609090332617729
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
Many of these schemes can't prevent copying data, like CSS, online authentication or dongles, so they try to prevent execution.
Even when used legitimately, a computer is going to make at least one copy of the program/data, first into main memory, then into the various levels of caches.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
A couple of problems with that.
First off, it's no big deal to snoop USB, which makes dongles pretty easy to crack.
You have to petition the USB folks so you get a unique vendor's ID, which is a pain. Plus, they are finite.
You'd have to get Microsoft to give you a digital certificate to make your dongle driver legit - also a pain. And you'd have to go through a driver installation just to load your software, more of a pain.
Finally, dongle bound software is just as crackable with a monitor. There has to be some code that goes out and checks the dongle, then returns "yes this is authorized" or "no let's not run". Just zap that bit and the dongle goes away.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It wasn't very effective as copy protection, but the game had an awesome add-in as it immersed you into the world of arcaheology and adventure:
Henry Jones' Grail Diary.
It was in a nice leather-like enclosure, and the paper had a parchment texture. There were lots of pictures with clips and notes addeds, all written by hand.
The copy protection part was a series of descriptions of the Grail according to various authors - which were referenced by Indy as he investigated various items.
BTW, in the LucasArts' adventure games, a trimmed down copy of the grail diary was included only for the copy protection. But it wasn't as good as the original.
As an Indy fan, I would buy the original Last Crusade game again *JUST* for the Grail Diary.
Vault Corp. what a product. Actually it was ingenious, even if your 5 1/4 disk wore out the little mark would register with the copy protection software. All you needed to do was swap out the back up disks with the original. I hear at Comdex a certain individual told a certain hacker what he would unleash with the next update a worm on anyone that broke the protection scheme. Company was closed about 6 months later.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
An extremely useless article even by slashdot standards, but I remember two copy protection schemes that sucked even more:
Lenslock - used by a few 80s home computer games. I'm fairly certain it might have been a UK-only thing. It was horrible. You had to fold this crappy bit of plastic a certain way and hold it over a part of the screen. If you were lucky, and your TV wasn't too large or too small, you might be able to make out the decoded letters which you had to type in.
And then one we used at work: Parallel port dongles. I used to work in electronic CAD and all the software used this, the result being you needed 5 or more dongles all plugged in at the same time to do any useful work. In the end we got someone in the workshop build a kind of "dongle motherboard" where you could plug in multiple dongles more conveniently than having them hang out the back of the machine, and more importantly pull them out to swap between machines.
Happy days ... No, actually sucky days. I'm glad I use almost completely free software now.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
...and completely without copy protection. I can honestly say that I have only gotten cracks for games I already own a full license to, but I would have never needed to if the games hadn't been virtually padlocked with a faulty key.
I bet a lack of copy protection would also lower the number of calls to tech support as well.
But with USB there's absolutely no way I can tell the difference between a dongle, and a bit of software that attaches to the USB chain. Or a single uber-dongle that emulates an number of other dongles after cloning from the original/loading a saved config. With parallel/ADB/serial dongles it was at least moderately hard, but with USB it's trivial.
At the very least the USB dongle would have to do something sort of calculations to provide authentication using a cryptographic authentication system. Certainly you could build dongles with appropriate computing power, they quickly become expensive. And you still have to deal with the possibility of simply cracking the game to bypass the check and skip to the "yep, authenticated" portion -- the USB device would have to provide some bit of data that was necessary to execute the machine code but different from use-to-use, which is a non-trivial problem all on its own.
Not to mention that no one would just use the USB block device driver -- they would all require that you install slightly different, conflicting drivers to read their USB dongles.
I'd say the ultimate copy protection would be an awful, expensive product. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be working for the music industry...
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
I remember copy protection from the days of 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, back when I'd have to boot off the game disk to play. The drive would start grinding like crazy before the game finally started. I never experienced problems but I recall hearing that the copy protection was taxing on the drive and could damage it.
This prevented someone from just copying the files on the disk directly. But there was an application that just copied the image and got around that nonsense.
Things haven't really changed. I don't understand why they just don't give up. This has been repeated many times, but it's true. All they're doing is inconveniencing consumers who actually paid for the product.
I think we're pretty reasonable.
The software can be downloaded and trialed for 30 days. After that time, it locks out. Could you set your system clock back 30 days? Sure. Do we really care too much? No. If you want to keep your system out of sync by a month just to avoid paying us, you are a doofus.
If you want a license, there are many types available. Our software views documents. You can license an entire web server to serve documents to our viewer, and it will view them. You can get a LAN license which locks to a hostname which allows you to install the software on a file server, and anybody running the software off that server is licensed. If you change hostnames, You can even buy a utility that allows you to embed a license inside a document, so that anybody with a free copy of the viewer can view that particular document.
The license is protected with some simple ciphering. Could it be broken? Sure. Could the host locking be broken? Sure. We don't really care too much. The license is there to keep people from accidentally installing the software on more than one file server. If you want to do it deliberately, you need to set both hosts to the same hostname. Or figure out how to hack the encryption. We don't delude ourselves into thinking this is impossible. To our knowledge, nobody has bothered. If somebody came up with a keygen and put it out on the Internet, we'd be pissed. But our response would probably be to switch to another cipher. If our software was suddenly so popular as to inspire some cracker to write a keygen, my first response would probably be "Cool beans."
None of the licensing mechanisms are onerous. It doesn't "phone home." It doesn't expire silently. If you want to extend your eval, we are happy to work with you.
We prefer to sell our software by providing quality. If it's not worth the $XXX to you, then either you don't have a legitimate use, or our price is too high. But we're not going to treat our legit customers like criminals just to get that extra 1% in licensing.
...is that the people who are described as the good guys in this article are the ones who want to control your computer, and even more they refer to those wanting to choose what to do with their own computers as 'crackers'
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I remember in the 1980s when game vendors started burning bad sectors into Atari 400/800 floppies on which they distributed their products. Their game's loader SW would try to read those sectors and abort if they weren't unreadable, thinking that pirates couldn't replicate them with just diskdup SW.
;) one bit (gotcha again >:P), but lots of honest people couldn't back up their games (which were sensitive to all kinds of transient EM, like paperclip collector magnets on desktops), and the vendors spent valuable time and money on worthless copy protection.
The Atari 810 floppy drive (the highest density storage available, like a 1TB HD is now, and the only game in town other than ridiculous tape drives, except for the extremely rare and stratospherically expensive 5MB Corvus HD) had a little potentiometer in its circuitboard controlling timing of the eletromagnetic signal waveform sent to the write head, that could be turned out of calibration to deliberately write a bad sector. So pirates would map the original's bad sector list, then copy the good sectors, then detune the pot, then write to the list of bad sectors - ruining them, then retune the pot and boot the copy.
Sure, that's pretty complex, voids the floppy warranty, and intimidates a lot of potential pirates. So instead, some people just stuck a disklabel to the edge of the target floppy, left the label sticking out of the drive, and grabbed that tab to jiggle the floppy while writing to each of the bad sectors - ruining them. Presto!
Besides, the pro pirates had the same mass floppy duplicators with the same programmable "write bad sector" circuitry that the original game vendors had, so the large, commercial pirates weren't fazed (pun intended
In fact, beating the copy protection was often more fun than the game. So around the world people were working to beat it, even if they never played the game again, but gave copies to friends just to show how ubergeek they were.
This cat & mouse game is in fact the exact model for all SW copy protection. It's become only a worse value waste for the SW producers, especially in content. They should use their only advantage, their earlier possession of the SW/content, to make big bucks at the first release, just like Hollywood does for movie premiere big weekends. Then let the pirates do their distribution work for free, and charge for support, customization, and subscriptions to upgrades. And build brands to sell their future releases.
Because "Don't Copy That Floppy" has been a losing battle, long before people would say "what's a floppy?"
--
make install -not war
I loved being the 7834th person to figure out how to crack Psygnosis titles back in the Atari ST days. Not that I cared about being able to copy the games, they were available anywhere, but just to figure out how to get around the hurdle.
Back then every game was like buying two games, one that they wanted you to play, and one that they didn't want you to play, the "figure out how to copy it" game. I was never really any good at the cracking-the-game game, but it was interesting and fun anyway.
I like music
I think I'd enjoy playing Half-Life 2. But I won't install Steam. Same deal for Portal; looks like enormous fun. But I will not install Steam.
You seeing a trend here?
Valve is leaving at least $120 retail on the table. I am paying for entertainment. I am not paying for remote monitoring. I can look after my own machines, thank you. All Valve has to do is delete the Steam requirement, and they can have my money.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I feel less inclined to copy if I'm cheapskating over a reasonable price (when I say 'less inclined', I've never actually copied anything that wasn't abandonware, but feel more tempted to when it's something that I can't stretch to than something that I won't stretch to). If you're charging £15 I'll buy it, or I'll do without, I might even push that to £20 for something that had a good demo, but if you're charging £35 I won't buy it. *I* won't copy it either, but you still don't get a sale. The point is that with a reasonable price for the product you'll get the middle-ground people (who have some moral compunction against copying but lose it when they realise that you're trying to rip them off) to cough up. You probably get the same amount of money overall, I suppose the status quo lets you keep those pirate figures up.
Perhaps the point of a reasonable price as copy protection is that your average man on the street likes to see rip-off merchants get ripped-off themselves. If you had someone come to your door, offer to clean your windows for "two-fifty", and then ask for £250 when the work was done, not £2.50, would you have any problem with writing a cheque for £250 and immediately cancelling it, thus getting whatever work was done for free? I don't think that most people would, and it's getting those 'most people' to not see the game publisher as the rip-off merchant, and thus be willing to pay the price asked for what they're getting, that reasonable-price-as-copy-protection is aimed at.
If someone offers you a deal that is clearly a rip-off, do you just politely decline, or do you try to twist the deal so that you get to do the ripping off? Quite a lot of people would do the latter - that's the spirit behind quite a lot of piracy, and threatening people that they'd better accept your rip-off deal or else isn't going to make that spirit go away - not appearing to rip them off will. The fool and his money are easily parted - the rest of us don't like people who try to demonstrate the former of us by doing the latter.
FGD 135
rev1: fail
rev2: fail
rev3: fail
rev4: fail
rev5: fail
rev6: fail
current: seeing what happens (fingers crossed!)
One of the C&C Red Alert games...it would work out someone in a network play had the game copied (most of us were legit, but 8 people buying the same game is rare), but you wouldn't know immediately until everyone had at least a construction yard, power plant, refinery and barracks built for everyone, then without warning and for no apparent reason, everyone's buildings exploded at once like everyone had been nuked.
It would've been a good photo to take of everyone's expressions at that exact moment, because it certainly took us by surprise and convinced us to, er, try even harder to crack it. Which we did.
throw new NoSignatureException();
If you have no money when a reasonable product is offered to you and you can copy it for free, the reasonable price isn't going to prevent a copyright violation.
However such a person was never a "potential customer" in the first place. In the worst case senario the seller/publisher/etc has lost nothing. (The same actually applies even if someone had the money but would have either copied for free or done without it).
It's also possible for "pirate copies" to generate actual sales which would never have otherwise existed without any additional marketing cost.
From the article: "Perhaps the most notorious example of this method is Sierra's King's Quest III, in which lengthy passages of potion recipes and other information had to be reproduced from the manual. One typo, and you were greeted with a "Game Over" screen."
I never viewed this as "copy protection", as such. If it was, I thought it brilliantly played into the actual game.
The spot in the game is where you're creating a potion or magical item. You needed to follow the directions PRECISELY, or the spell would backfire. I remember typing VERY slowly and carefully, doublechecking everything. It really enhanced the experience of the game, for me.
If it was meant purely as copy protection, I thought it actually ADDED something to the game.
Adman
E-Books *should* have been the first victims of internet piracy, simply because they were the smallest, and all the content was just good ol' plain text. Ever wonder why it's a hell of a lot easier to get a pirate copy of a whole DVD than it is to get one of a non-Guttenberged E-Book?
.pdb e-book format, and I just haven't run across it despite having found dozens of ways of cracking movies and software.
One reason may be the incredibly elegant system of copy protection they used. You unlock the book with 2 pieces of information - the name and credit card number you used to buy the book. Now... someone might not think twice about throwing up a bunch of serialz out to the general public; but publishing their name and credit card number to a site that caters to thieves? Kinda loses it's appeal.
Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe people don't mind that e-books cost just the same as their paper counterparts. Maybe computer geeks would rather lug around paper versions of Cryptonomicon than read it off their PDA's, or iPhones. Maybe someone's already cracked the
If so - let me know. I'd love to transfer my existing e-book collection into plain text, or possibly loan copies of some titles to people I wouldn't necessarily trust my credit card number with. I can give copies to my mum, and she could give the same copy to someone else - but she'd have to give them all my credit card info for them to read it which makes her much more discerning.
There are other little aspects to it as well - take a look at how e-books are sold to see why they aren't pirated and see if you think it could be applied to larger software offerings.
If your competitors have higher prices, wouldn't that suggest that customers would gravitate towards you, who charge a reasonable price?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
there is much more than just the development cost to consider...marketing/advertising, support, distribution, duplication, packaging, paying the rent and utilities, R&D for enhancements, return on equity for the investors, etc.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Thank god for soldering irons. As long as we got soldering irons we will still have a weapon to wield against consoles.
:P). On top of that the 360 is known to break every couple months.
But either way the most effective copy protection by any standards are consoles. PC copy protections will always be broken easily even some multi player games (namely steam games, quake, etc) have cracked servers that people with pirated copies of games can use.
Consoles on the other hand must be chipped. Right now the only console that can be effectively chipped is the Wii. Even still that is a pretty large barrier and at the most 1% of wii users are going to chip their wii because it takes some skill and has a lot of cost.
Personally I chip other people's Wiis and now with the wii-clip its pretty darn easy. But it isn't chepa and my cheapest chip costs 40 dollars just in parts (D2CKey and Wii Clip V1). And of course isn't easy to solder and sometimes you screw things up.
I have almost 150 bucks invested in soldering mats etc. It is just a rather hard pitch to mess with someone's wii. But anyways I digress.
The xbox 360 is near impossible and you can't play on the internet (kinda essential to 360 gameplay
Unlike the wii the PS3's and Xbox's warranty gets voided simply for opening it.
Basically I think in the Game Publishers are trying to make a shift to consoles which are pretty solid. Mod chips are not a very popular thing. 1 out of 5 kids will talk to you about a game they pirated but maybe 1 out of 80 kids you talk to will have chipped console (and 1 out of 1 thousand if its not a wii).
What? An article called "history of copy protection" without any word about protections used on C64, Atari and Amiga?
Nothing about interrupts-based and sync-based protections, encryption, memory fillers, etc?
Nothing about the Rob Northern jokes, that were funny toys for Atari crackers?
Fortunately, protections were not limited to PCs.
People who use to spend nights playing with MonST and ADebug would love to have at least one word about that in an article called "history of copy protection".
Yes, I'm getting old, but the Atari ST/Amiga days are still my best memories, the best time I ever had in my life as a computer geek.
{{.sig}}
FlexLM is a license manager that's been around for 20 years. You'll typically see it in corporate environments. It's horrible. It was twitchy and horrible back when it was introduced, and it's maintained that legacy of horribleness to this day. I have a full-license OrCAD installation on my laptop, and FlexLM regularly shoots itself in the head. This is an example where the DRM crap obstructs me from using the purchased product. It'll take me a couple of days to sort out which application scrogged the license file (several apps use FlexLM, and none play nice.) This is a regular occurrence, and it's one of the reasons I despise copy protection methods. I'm not using a bootleg copy of the product, yet I'm treated like I am.
As soon as the whole OS, including the hypervisor, is ran inside an outer virtual box, the whole point is moot, and the hyper visor can't trust the anti-modding hardware (is it real genuine functioning hardware ? Or is the hyper visor communicating with an anti-modding hardware simulated by the emulator, communicating with it using bogus crypto keys injected by the emulator, and that simulated hardware will OK whatever pirated software goes in ?)
The only thing that could stimulate some player to buy the game is packed in goodies. Making big game boxes filled with lots of useful items (maps) fan-service items (scale model of some ingame object) etc.
That won't prevent dork who'll never pay for the game anyway to try hard to find a way.
But that will make you sure that the fans will happily rush to bux the "collectors' edition" of the box. Specially if the goodies are somewhat useful.
The only problems are :
- This raises the costs of the distribution : Bigger boxes, more expensive to produce content (as opposed to simply 1 disc + 1 small leaflet telling that the manual can be printed from a PDF file + tons of ads). As if the creation of the game wasn't expensive enough.
- Difficulty to use : if some goodies plays a critical role in the game (as in maps, scrolls with spell formulas, etc.) it might be inconvenient for players on the road. Some gamers like to play games while on the move (in the plane) and they might have to lug around the goodies for each game. Or, worse, suddenly come to realisation that this critical puzzle can only be solved if they use that goodie that they have left at home / lost long ago / etc.
Games bundled with high-end gaming hardware are another solution, as gamer are likely to buy the hardware anyway, and the licensing cost for the game are small compared to the hardware it self. ATI bundling Valve products with some high-end radeon comes as an example. Even in the old DOS days this has been seen (there was a game that came with its own sound card which acted as a dongle. I think it was B.A.T.)
Disclaimer : I tend to like "Collectors' edition" and prefering buying those. Nevertheless I systematically download cracks for any game I legally buy - simply to avoid the inconvenience of the copy protection system (be it to avoid damaging the game media - this had already happened to me - or avoiding to install some StarFuck root-kit).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This really sucks for me as I travel to and from Thailand all the time. What do they expect? I buy the orange box in every damn country?!
Reasonable copy protection is fine, too. Ambrosia Software games require a license key to be unlocked. License keys are validated online and time-limited so they invalidate quickly in case they are leaked - but if your key expires you can simply enter your data in their registration program and they give you a new one. As long as you have purchased the game from them you can always request a new key.
The result is that I feel good about buying from them. Their copy protection scheme is reasonable, it's not much of a hassle (once games are registered they get a machine-specific file saying that they are - no further online checks neccessary) and if I should lose all my data I can just download the game again and request a new license key. That last part makes the scheme almost look like a service.
Very acceptable, very reasonable and not insulting like StarForce et al. Of course it might not work for high-profile companies as people would release cracks, but for small-to-medium sized companies I think this scheme is much superior compared to the nonsense other companies come up with.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Kind of OT, but does anyone remember how id software distributed a Quake demo disc that had most of their catalog on it? In order to actually play the games you had to call a number and purchase the key for the game you wanted, but a program called qcrack was floating around unlocked them all. Of course, I was only 12 or 13 at the time, and hunting down qcrack on my friends AOL account to get free games was almost as cool as hacking the Pentagon :)
Ahh.. copy protection. Cracking TRS-80 Microchess on cassette as a teen, where the game instructions loaded directly into screen RAM via a custom cassette loader. Nirvana.. Later on, one Mits Hadeshi (SP?) posted a letter to Kilobaud magazine that his backup method of choice for computer cassettes was ... a Sony.
The BBC micro had a number of variants of this, mostly to stop people converting the tape versions of game to run from floppy disc.
For the most part they were trivial, but the best one used the 1MHz timer. The decryptor code was positioned immediately below the encrypted game code and ran in a (nested) loop. It XORed itself (including addresses it used for indirect loads and so on), the timer and to-be-decrypted data along with a few constants. When things magically came right the loop terminated and the very next thing in memory was the first instruction of the now-decrypted game code.
Because the 6502 CPU only ran at 2MHz you had to figure out where in the (usually 2-6 cycles) fetch-execute cycle the, say, LDA instruction would read the hardware timer if you wanted to hand decode this. And of course the length of that instruction varied based on whether it was crossing a 256 byte page boundary or not (doing an indirect load) and so on. You couldn't move the target data because that would change the addresses being used for loads and stores and thus the progress of the decryption, you couldn't copy the code elsewhere and change it to update both copies because that would change the length of the loop and throw the timings off and you couldn't mess with the timer speed because it was fixed in hardware and, well, you get the idea.
Clever fellow who came up with that one!
Graham
It makes perfect sense. One day Bill is a guy that believes he is perfectly honest and would never, ever stoop to pirating a game, music or a movie. Then there is a product that is way beyond his disposable income that he simply must have. The advertising has worked it charm and Bill wants this product, whatever it takes. He finds a place to download it for free or someone tells him where to get it for free.
Yes, the dam is now broken. Bill suddenly realizes he has been living as a pauper in a world of plenty. Everything he has ever dreamed of possessing is available for free. The one web site he found leads to another and another. Bill spends days downloading everything he can find that he ever dream of owning.
Bill is now a convert to the pirate way of life. It happens every day.
Seriously. They are a company that seems to think that copy protection isn't necessary to make money. Their Impulse program is like Steam without the suck. No DRM, no encryption, etc. Mostly older titles and indy stuff they sell, but there are some real gems in there. Sins of a Solar Empire is a current retail game and is just great. Think Homeworld crossed with Master of Orion. Well worth the money. Heck, you can even buy it retail and then register the serial, and Impulse will happily install it if you lose your disk. Depths of Peril is also great. Graphics are a bit dated but the game is top notch.
At any rate if you want games without the bullshit, and what to support a publisher who believes in that, well then these are your people. I've been real happy so far (I own 8 games from their library). If you see a game you like, I encourage you to buy it through them. The more people that support the model, the more developers that'll realise it's a good idea and release games on it.
http://totalgaming.stardock.com/
That could be the worst article on copy protection I have ever read. Nothing like doing a "history of..." article and starting roughly 10 years late. If I were a betting man I'd guess that copy protection started back on the Commodore 64 by cleverly placing errors on the media itself. The executable would force the drive head to go directly to the sector on the disk where the error was located for verification, and if it was there, the loading process continued. What was neat about this was that there were different [i]types[/i] of errors - I don't remember all of them, but the wrong kind of error would result in the program to halt loading. Of course, C= owners hated this. The sound that the 1541 drive would make as it was forced to read the error was an awful grinding sound. Some people believed that this could physically harm the drive, however I myself never experienced that and I played a hell of a lot of games. This was first circumvented by a Canadian - a man I have never met but was legendary in his home town. He's now a project manager at Microsoft I believe. His software - Super Hacker - was the first disk duplication software for the C= 64 that could copy the errors. Ha, I still get a laugh that it would take approximately 90 MINUTES to copy one 170K 5.25" disk using Super Hacker. Believe me, being a pirate in those days was a lesson in patience. As technology evolved, so too did copy protection. Half tracks, extra sectors, etc. became common place. They were easily reproduced with a bit for bit disk copy programs that started to hit the market. Copy protection has a fascinating history. From a pragmatic point of view, however, it has never made sense to me why vendors spend so much money on copy protection when it INEVITABLY will be broken. I would love to know the actual success rate of hackers vs. copy protection schemes.
I did a quick ctrl-f at the level I browse at and didn't see anyone mention Monkey Island and only one person mention King's Quest (didn't RTFA). Those are the first games I had experience with copy protection.
:P
I remember my cousin had the Secret of Monkey Island and I loved playing it at her house. The stupid wheel though was a hindrance from taking it home. I think my dad ended up photocopying every combination but that seems like there would have been a lot of permutations. Either way, a family friend eventually gave me Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and I was able to experience the monkeyness at home until I bought the collection on CD-ROM a few years later. Curse of Monkey Island is still one of my favorite games of all time.
The other game was King's Quest IV: Perils of Rosella. You had to type out certain words straight from the instruction booklet. We didn't own this game so we had a photocopy of the book. Eventually we lost that but I was able to remember a specific word or two from the book and just tried those over and over again until I got into the game. That game pissed me off though, I am not a fan of King's Quest these days.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
In the UK, there was a software company who employed no copy protection at all. The games released by this company were sold for just 9,95 euro. This company sold many games until it sold itself to a big software company. That was also the end of no-copy protected games by that company. The new games released were again sold at the price between 49,95 and 59,95 euro (these are the average starting prices of games sold in the Netherlands). If these companies would just stop investing so much money is protection and try to lessen the price of games (and other software products) then he sales would go up, and the "il"legal downloads would go down.
Dark Lord Azagthoth