The most badly cracked Amiga game
 

Ordinarily, I wouldn't have anything but respect for these people who work for free, so that other people could enjoy or re-enjoy their favourite games. Kudos and many thanks to them.

But once in a while, very rarely, you stumble upon a game cracked/dumped so poorly that you feel like breaking the CD you put it on and smack yourself over the head for wasting 2 hours with it. Right? Or has this only happened to me?

I just come from playing 'Dragon's Lair'. The first one. (Sorry to bring this again into discussion, I know there are people who hate it, but I really like it.) The original version had 6 disks. The cracked version has 8 .adf files. But the scenes are all over the place. 'Whirlpools/Rapids' are on both disks 1 and 4, stuff that was normally on disk 6 is now on 8, 5 on 6, 5 on 4... It's really mayhem.

The first time I went through tonight, I got to the dragon. Just when Dirk was ready to throw the sword into Singe's gut, it froze. I didn't know what to do. Later, I found out that there's that message at the beginning telling you to switch to disk 6, 'cause the game doesn't tell you. Okay, it's mostly my fault, having to re-start, but it's still bad cracking, ain't it? I mean, putting 5 of the moves in the last scene in one file and 1 move in another? It's not like there just wasn't any more space on the 3.5 floppy disk, is it?

So, I went through again, and this time switched the files. It didn't do anything at first. And then, out of the blue, I see some lines flickering and the screen turned to crap. Like an incompatible PC game. I had to reset, but I'm not going to play this game again because it loads so badly... (And it's just like the PC game, only one room extra.) So, basically, it's not possible to get past the dragon's tail. [But, if anyone did, please let me know how.]

PLEASE, WRITE HERE ABOUT OTHER GAMES YOU'VE PLAYED THAT YOU FEEL ARE BADLY CRACKED. I'm very curious which other .adf files can frustrate the Amiga gamer. Thanks.

Does it not have an HD install or WHDLoad???

Which crew cracked it.... as an ex-QTX dude I hope it wasn't us!! I forget!

The list is endless. There are *tons*. Unfortunately, other than those that are known, there are guranteed to be many others that are presumed good purely because they have not been played very much, or not to the end. Even if you play to the end, you can still never be really sure that one is good.

What is so bad about cracked games?
http://www.caps-project.org/articles.php?id=cracks

I hear your Swordlord, I love playing Dragon's Lair on the Amiga also. I bought it but the original does not work from the harddrive passed OS 1.3. My new solution will be to buy the Arcade version, kind of big I know.

I can understand you in complaining that the scenes are all over the place, but taking it from 6 disks to 8 is NORMAL. When the crackers expand all the data in teh copyprotected tracks they usually end up with data that fills more than the disks the original came in. This is very normal, VERY. Now putting shit all over the place is a shoddy crack :D

Use WHDLoad man, and try to play a real game, not Dragons lair ;)

Now for other shoddy cracks I can remember:

Jetstrike. Never been cracked properly AFAIK, not the ECS version (they bypassed teh first copyprotection but forgot to check for others, suckers :P)

Genesia. Same as above, the idiots forgot to check for more protection, and you can't enter the barricades with the crack (ie the game is useless)

i remember the first cracked editions of GODS not being cracked properly... and its not easy to tell....

i played the cracked edition and thought it was bastard hard, i then found a cheap original version and the original was way easier...

apparently, if you copy the original you get a much harder version of the game...

true / false ?

Before we jump on the bandwagon...
 

Firstly you are being a little unfair on whoever cracked Dragon's Lair. A standard Amiga disk has $1600 bytes/track and Dragon's Lair has $1900 bytes/track. Your drive simply cannot write that much so the crack is always going to take more disks than the original unless the cracker repacks the entire game. If the game is already compressed, there is little you can do as crunching a packed file usually gives no difference in filesize and sometimes makes the file bigger! The ReadySoft games in particular are very tough to crack!

From memory Mok cracked Elfmania very well, he depacked and repacked all the files with a better cruncher (ProPack perhaps?) on the highest setting so the game would still only take up 2 disks. Other cracks would surely have taken 3 disks.

And before everyone says how bad crackers were, consider all the great ones out there that made games work better than the originals - all the disk cracks I have done are AGA fixed so they run on all Amigas, lots of Fairlight ones redid the memory allocation routines (eg. Mortal Kombat) so they work on more Amigas than the originals etc etc...

As for bad cracks, I think that Chronicles of Omega is up there with the worst of them - someone froze the game with an Action Replay cart which means it doesn't work on the majority of Amigas.

Yeah its true. Those sneaky Bitmaps punished pirates by letting them play their game in super hard mode. IIRC it always crashed in the same place too.

i seem to remember playing a cracked version for a while, then when i got the original i completed pretty quickly

Not totally dissimilar to Karateka cracks on the C64-& even the working version is still a pain-someone should've included a machine gun to get rid of that damm hawk/bird towards the end of the game!:D

I wonder why more games didn't feature that sort of protection though?

from what i recall Escape from Colditz was a bitch of a crack :) if you wanted to make copies - you had to copy the disk a certain way. BCOPY? XCOPY? heh been awhile since Ive used the tools.

I remember trying to... erm... 'backup' ;) MegaLoMania...
It would let you get as far as the first island, then all your men would suddenly die & you'd get a 'Pirate = Loser' screen, with the 'It's all over' speech looped.

You know you can get it on DVD... will work on a standard DVD player (& I guess on a computer with software DVD player).

I did a real naff "crack" of 5th Gear once.

Yep, one of those Action Replay load's :lol

Other than that I did manage to crack one game "properly" in my years and that was one of the early Championship Manager games.

You can also get it on DVD-rom for windows. That one will include the DVD-rom version of Space ace as well as Dragon's lair. All you need is a code (purchase it cheaper than purchasing another DVD)

Wow, I didn't expect to see so many replies! I guess it's a delicate issue, isn't it? Yes, I think I was a bit harsh, indeed, but I posted this right after I had gone right to the last move of the game, and then twice had to reset.

Methanoid: I think it was Quartex, yes. I'll have to check to be sure. There's a message at the beginning saying that after throwing the sword at the dragon, I should replace the current disk with disk 6 by myself, 'cause the program won't tell me. So, I did that, but it didn't work.

Pyromania: See the thread about DL games, maybe you'll make it work. And download the PC game(s), they're quite similar to the Amiga games (but very different from the arcade or DVD versions).
Oh, and listen, I wouldn't advise you to buy an arcade. As you probably know, it uses a laserdisc, and those laserdiscs are very fragile. Buy at your own risk. I would stick to the DVD version. It's perfect (if you don't hate the yellow pointers), and it's cheap.

Akira: I'll try to use WHDLoad and see what happens. (But is there a guide somewhere?)
I like this game, because I like all games with knights, monsters and other stuff, I like cartoons and I don't mind simple control at all. What games do you like?

Adeptus: I know about the DVD versions. I recently bought DL1, DL2 and 'Space Ace' on DVD. And I have the Sega CD version, too, and about all others also (except the Jaguar CD and the CD-I versions), which are the same as the 3DO version. (I even downloaded the Coleco Adam game and the emulator. Yup, I'm a fan, alright! :D)

Drake1009: But I didn't know about that! DVD-ROM for Windows? And it's not the DVD version that can be played also on PS2 and PCs with DVD-ROM drives? Or is it the new game 'Dragon's Lair 3D'?

Yes my friend, at the FAQs section of this very same board! Check it out.

Thank you very much. I'll check it out right now.

Swordlord, how BIG are those DVDs... under 4.37GB ? ;)

How would I know, man? I just bought them, put them in the DVD Player and played. :)

Can they really fit that much on a DVD? :confused