
Games with creative copy protection (2013) - aaronbrethorst
http://gameological.com/2013/05/inventory-9-games-with-creative-drm-copy-protection/
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michaelcampbell
Perhaps not creative, but wayyyyy back in the 80's, Atari games on floppy
could be protected by a sector on the floppy that couldn't be read. If you
tried to copy the disk, it'd fail at that one.

The Atari "dual density" disk drives (1050's) had a dial (maybe a
potentiometer) to adjust the speed. A friend of mine sawed a door on the top
of the case so he could get to it. With that and some custom software these
could be copied.

The software would detect the bad sector, alert the user, the user could slow
down the drive to "ridiculous (slow) speed", the software would write a "good"
sector at later unreadable speeds, then alert the user again to speed the
drive back up to normal speed. If memory serves, the software had a disk speed
check with it, just for this purpose.

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kbenson
How does being unreadable work. Isn't it unreadable to the game as well? Or is
the problem. That the copy fails?

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dietrichepp
Typically, floppy disks and other magnetic media use some kind of encoding
system, rather than write 1s and 0s directly to the physical media. This
encoding system serves multiple purposes, but mostly clock synchronization and
error detection. If you put garbage data on the actual track, you'll get an
error when you try to read it because it has an invalid encoding.

Imagine that I handed you a piece of paper and asked you to tell me which
letters were written on it, but the paper just had a bunch of squiggles on it.
You'd tell me that there aren't any letters written on it, just squiggles.
That's what it's like.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_code_recording](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_code_recording)

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cmdrfred
I got hit by the batman one back in the day. I still don't know how they
figured it out. I have a modified xbox with a k3y (hardware dvd drive emulator
that is fixed inline behind the real dvd drive) and while I've never been
banned from xbox live I was never able to complete that level.

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ryan-c
Timing, maybe?

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detaro
Settlers III sort of worked when the copy protection check failed, but messed
with production of some buildings and stuff like that. So you could start a
game, just to be confused why your iron smelters suddenly produced pigs
instead of iron bars.

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hidroto
pig iron perhaps
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron)

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fyirt
I guess it would've been too big to put it in that post, but my favourite DRM
approach has gotta be for Spyro 3 YOTD on PS1. The anti-reversing tricks the
developers used had hackers stumped for over two months trying to crack it.
There's a great writeup on Gamasutra:

www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131439/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php

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stevekemp
This brings back happy memories of reading +fravia's reverse engineering
pages, and cracking protection on PC-games myself, for educational purposes.

Some of my earliest programming was z80 disassembly and patching of games to
get infinite lives on the ZX Spectrum, so it's a topic I've a reasonable
history with.

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RIMR
If I pirated these games just to see their copy protection, could I
successfully argue fair use in court?

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mc808
If you're sued, I believe it would have to be for unauthorized distribution
(as with BitTorrent), not just downloading a pirated copy. So you would have
to somehow argue that your distribution was fair use, which probably won't
fly.

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sohkamyung
See also this article by Jimmy Maher [1] that gives an in-depth look at the
copy protection used in three games:

1\. Microsoft Adventure

2\. Ultima III

3\. Dungeon Master

[1] [http://www.filfre.net/2016/01/a-pirates-life-for-me-
part-3-c...](http://www.filfre.net/2016/01/a-pirates-life-for-me-part-3-case-
studies-in-copy-protection/)

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yassim
Spyro: Year of the Dragon also tried the game glitch copy protection route.
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131439/keeping_the_pir...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131439/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php)

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pluma
The original physical release of the indie game Uplink came with old school
copy protection codes printed in black on black paper (the text was glossy,
the background matte). I think the hex matrix containing the codes doubled as
a clue in a clever "hacker challenge" style easter egg.

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batiudrami
The 1999 strategy game The Settlers 3 would appear to work fine, but the iron
smelters would produce pigs rather than iron bars, so you couldn't make any
new tools or weapons.

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deathanatos
Pig iron[1] is a real thing. I'm wondering if the devs weren't also making a
bad pun at the same time as doing copy protection…

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_iron)

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ikeboy
(2013)

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dang
Got it. Thanks!

