Uncrackable protection, was it possible???

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by paraj

Yes, with "prohibitively expensive" I was exactly thinking about something like a SuperFX chip/"030 dongle". At that point it's obviously not a copy protection dongle, and even if we consider a very scaled down version, you're going to be limited by the parallel/joystick port or wherever you image it being attached. If it's a "sidecar"/expansion card we're again leaving dongle territory.

Hard to find checks late-ish in the game don't make it uncrackable (obviously) just really time consuming, and I seriously doubt they resulted in any extra sales. They're just a FU to pirates (which isn't unfair), but very often it isn't obvious that the game isn't just broken (see this for an example I remember: https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=50081)

I do remember one flight sim from back in the day that flashed something "this is a pirated version" or like that after playing for X minutes if you just copied the disk - at least I knew what I could do to fix it in that case.. Didn't purchase that one either though...

Originally Posted by paraj

Ahh yes, that seems plausible. Just re-created part of the experience with x-copy and ipfs in WinUAE (except I'm no longer 10, and didn't use the cheapest noname DD disks where 1-2/10 would be bad). It does indeed flash "Illegal copy" even though there are no complaints from xcopy though it does so immediately and not after playing for a bit like I remember. No idea if it impacts the game play or it leaves any "time bombs" for later if you just remove the message, though both things seem likely.

Yes that was a special format Copylock track, only used on a couple of games.

If memory serves me right if you find the code for the "illegal copy", you get access to the Copylock serial key in a rather obvious check

[Megalomaniac]

There was talk of doing Putty as a cartridge-only game using the parallel port (discussed in Amiga Power issue 4), which presumably would have been very difficult if not impossible to pirate. The issue was that the carts would have just cost too much for a relatively small company like System 3 to have justified, making for a potential RRP for the game of as high as £60 - perhaps Commodore should have intervened and arranged for a group of publishers to jointly fund it?

One unfortunate side-effect in some cases of multi-stage copy protection is of people mistakenly thinking a game is too difficult or fatally bugged, when in fact they're playing a badly cracked copy with a second layer of protection the cracker was unaware of. It's especially awkward in the emulation era, where playing cracked versions is usually the easiest way, and its not always obvious which cracks from back-in-the-day are identical to the original release, with no new bugs (and no bug fixes). Every now and again you see comments and ratings on Lemon which are clearly inaccurate as they're not based on the real thing people shelled out for back then, which is a minor pity.

[pipper]

I remember making a copy of the original F16 Falcon game via XCopy. That game would make it so that short after you started a mission you got shot down by a mysterious invisible other airplane. It took me a while to realize that this was probably copy protection

[rothers]

Originally Posted by paraj

Could you really put something in a time appropriate dongle that wouldn't be prohibitively expensive, and couldn't circumvented relatively easily? Genuinely curious.

I'd say yes you could, a Z80 chip for example (or whatever 8bit chip was super cheap back in the 90s - depending on how you powered it of course...), then actually use the chip in the game.


That would be tricky to code around.

Obviously there would be more than just the chip in the dongle... so it might get expensive fast I guess.

Some sort of floating point unit maybe?

Obviously you could just replace the said code with 68k but the game might run rather badly.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by rothers

I'd say yes you could, a Z80 chip for example (or whatever 8bit chip was super cheap back in the 90s - depending on how you powered it of course...), then actually use the chip in the game.


That would be tricky to code around.

Obviously there would be more than just the chip in the dongle... so it might get expensive fast I guess.

Some sort of floating point unit maybe?

Obviously you could just replace the said code with 68k but the game might run rather badly.

The problem would be making it expensive enough that pirates couldn't just knock up fake ones. And it'd need to be bespoke enough that you couldn't just use one from a different game (assuming the scheme was successful enough to be used on a large variety of titles).

[dirkies]

Jonathan Potter who made LZX once told me during a discussion on improving piracy protection for lzx a rather interesting aspect: he did not want to make the protection too hard with later subtle checks to alter its behavior if deemed cracked, as it might damage the software's reputation that people think your software is crap because it does not work 100% when the piracy detection is stealthy.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by dirkies

Jonathan Potter who made LZX once told me during a discussion on improving piracy protection for lzx a rather interesting aspect: he did not want to make the protection too hard with later subtle checks to alter its behavior if deemed cracked, as it might damage the software's reputation that people think your software is crap because it does not work 100% when the piracy detection is stealthy.

I can definitely understand that logic. Particularly for a tool that might have a longer shelf life than the average game. Most pirates would swap games and probably only load up a copied game once or twice. They would probably never even notice if it wasn't cracked properly.

Something like lzx might be used for years upgrading across multiple versions.

[malko]

Not Amiga related but an interesting reading : https://www.reversinglabs.com/blog/b...security-model

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

There was talk of doing Putty as a cartridge-only game using the parallel port (discussed in Amiga Power issue 4), which presumably would have been very difficult if not impossible to pirate. The issue was that the carts would have just cost too much for a relatively small company like System 3 to have justified, making for a potential RRP for the game of as high as £60 - perhaps Commodore should have intervened and arranged for a group of publishers to jointly fund it?

That wouldn't really work, because the parallel port is so slow that you couldn't access the data on the ROM at any reasonable speed, instead a crack would move the relevant data to a floppy disk and would be able to run at more or less the same speed, albeit with lag due to random access limitations. Moreover there would be cracks that just moved the data to RAM or hard disk and would actually perform much faster than the real commercial product.

Any sort of Starfox-style cartridge for the Amiga would have to go on an expansion port with actual high bandwidth, and the wedge Amigas have no standard port, so it would basically wind up being A500 or A1200 only, and negate any expansions people already had on those ports.

[ross]

My idea is that Commodore intended to use the PCMCIA port of the A600 and A1200 as a cartridge port.
Basically it could be used as ROM or RAM or for small accelerators, and it's even pretty fast (or at least, enought fast).
What makes me think so is that in the kickstart there are recognition tags to bootstrap directly from it (and I'm not talking about an HDD mode).