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'.
It had a different protection scheme for each level of the game, and all schemes relied on undocumented opcode behavior and/or self-modifying code. Most pirates were unwilling to crack it, play to the next level, crack THAT, play to the next level, etc. It was indeed one of the best, and because it was a *good* game it sold many many copies.
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.
Agreed. I have read several times (including a few times in Halcyon Days) where a developer has lamented spending so much time on the copy-protection.
From the article: "From the very beginning we recognized that nothing is uncrackable." As a former pirate who cracked games, I couldn't agree more. Developers *must* realize this if they are to stop pirates for the first two months of a game's shelf life.
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Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
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