
Old-School PC Copy Protection Schemes (2006) - mmastrac
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/174
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bentcorner
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...](http://earthboundcentral.com/2011/05/earthbounds-copy-protection/)

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)

~~~
timpark
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...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-29-game-dev-tycoon-
forces-those-who-pirate-the-game-to-unwittingly-fail-from-piracy)

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...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131439/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php)

~~~
Shivetya
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.

~~~
timpark
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System#History)

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#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Oxford_American_Dictionary#Fictitious_entry)

~~~
nosuchthing
Copy detection for maps:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street)

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artmageddon
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 :)

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Nr7
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjEbpMgiL7U)

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ryanthejuggler
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6etb0_u_hk)

Anyone else remember that game?

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pmorici
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.

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Sambdala
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.

~~~
drewcrawford
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](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.

~~~
artmageddon
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.

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drpgq
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.

~~~
PotatoEngineer
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.)

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

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

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digi_owl
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.

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

