On Dec 2, 2003, at 4:30 PM, Jim Leonard wrote: [Snip]
I have only run across three games in my life that were HARD to crack:
- King's Quest 2, PC, booter (NOT the DOS re-release in 1987). This was some extremely clever use of self-modifying code, encryption, and other fun.
- Dunzhin Warriors of RAS, PC, booter (used extremely unconventional means to access the disk drives)
- Turrican, Amiga (had several different protections that it checked at random -- you'd crack it, and three weeks later it would complain. So you'd crack THAT protection, and three weeks later it would complain about something else. Etc.
How did the original Dungeon Master (Amiga) compare to these? It is the game I see people using as the gold standard of 'tough nut to crack'.
If you want more information, let me know. It's pretty fascinating sometimes.
I picked up a number of the old Computist magazines for the Apple II just so I could have some sort of reference to breaking copy protections for my legal backups. I'd hate to have to try to puzzle all that out now by myself. At least DMCA is in accordance with Copyright Law for the old (obsolete hardware) games.
Gamasutra had an interesting article <http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01.htm> -- you may need to register on Gamasutra to read it -- on the developer's attempts to simply slowdown the cracking of Spyro: Year of the Dragon. Their goal was simply to try to keep pirates from cracking the game for the first few months of the game's sale life (when up to half the sales of the game occur). The idea that came across was that they realized that the crackers would eventually win, so all the developers could do is try to slow them down. It included allowing partial cracks to work for a while, so that if you didn't play the game for 10 to 12 hours you might think your crack worked. It is a bizarre world when developers spend so much time trying to make a game work correctly and then turn around and break their own game.
--
Edward Franks
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