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Codetapper · 19 March 2004, 21:03

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.

19 March 2004, 21:03	#7
Codetapper 2 contact me: email only! Join Date: May 2001 Location: Auckland / New Zealand Posts: 3,182	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.