The most badly cracked Amiga game

[Codetapper]

I believe it. Some games if they are not cracked correctly misbehave, and it's definitely possible that this happens. I have been reliably informed that P47 Thunderbolt gives a very difficult game (complete with some strange graphical glitches) if you do not remove the protection correctly, but a perfect crack works as the original did.

Squirminator: As for Atomino, why not try the WHDLoad version? The WHDLoad versions are generally the cleanest cracks available.

[Photon]

Exile, for one. Hanging after completing half the game made me buy the original and enter codes written on the side of the box. Didn't mind it too much tho, Exile is an excellent game and an all-time classic. I was working as an Amiga programmer at the time of the release, and there was a sad rumor that one of the coders of the game had killed himself. It made it kind of strange to play the game. It's one of those memories that stick with you.

BTW, SwordLord, Dragon's Lair III for PC has been out for a while. Cracked.

[andreas]

Awful crack, it was... the opening intro gave instructions in both English and German sayign that there was nothing they could do to circumvent the copy protection (wow, great job guys!) but after entering the wrong code three times you could press the HELP key and it would run fine. Which it did, except that the game was in German and it ignored all input of any kind so you couldn't play the game because "Press Fire To Start" was asking something of the user that wasn't possible.

BWAAAHAAHA... that was Endless Stupi...eh Piracy.
For the record, there's now a QUBE crack in TOSEC which should do the job nicely. And it's in English, not in German

Nonetheless, I've tried the EP crack for fun's sake - and hmmm .. it works!
(maybe only with the emulator? )
The password check only appears to be done in MODE B, never in MODE A (as far as I tested). The most astonishing thing is that after entering three WRONG passwords, the game continues as if nothing had happened! I did not even press HELP to "awaken the sleeping program".

All,

Accorinding to the bootblock of P47 Thunderbolt 100%, it was originally cracked by another guy (other than Rob) for Quartex. He didn't get it right and Rob cracked it.

Badly written loaders that grind the drive back were a pain. A good example of this is Super Cars 2 (if my memory serves me correctly). Just compare the Skid Row and Horizon versions. The Horizon version does not grind back to track 0 all the time.

Regards,
PSW

[squirminator2k]

The Crystal version of SuperFrog tended to make loud, annoying sounds.

[7-Zark-7]

Originally Posted by squirminator2k

The Crystal version of SuperFrog tended to make loud, annoying sounds.

Going O.T., but I still vividly recall the demo of Seek & Destroy as having the most forehead-wrinkling floppy drive mashing I've ever heard.

[fiath]

The worst griding I ever experienced was (I think!) on the original of Crazy Cars II/III. And it took *ages*. Nowadays I am wondering if there was a problem with the disk - though it always loaded eventually....

[CFou!]

In my memory some rob northen games are badlly cracked

if original good key not copied at a special mempry adress, game don't crash but have some bugs or missing faitures

example:
Lost patrol : after first scroll of the map you die very qwickly=> game unplayable
Pang: some faitures not present (little backround animations)
Rodland: Game crashed with random time it'seems

for Lost patrol and pang I have never found good version (of course whdload's patch run fine) but good version must exist

it's a good protection because you don't know you have bad cracked version !!!

[fiath]

Lost Patrol is "region locked" (NTSC/PAL), perhaps it is that? Just use the correct setting, otherwise your troop is ambushed on the first move IIRC. (very cool )

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by CFOU!

In my memory some rob northen games are badlly cracked

if original good key not copied at a special mempry adress, game don't crash but have some bugs or missing faitures

example:
Lost patrol : after first scroll of the map you die very qwickly=> game unplayable
Pang: some faitures not present (little backround animations)

Pang wasn't protected by Rob Northen - it's all Pierre Adane's code. Proj Inc cracked the game correctly and it may well be the only crack of the release version. Most groups cracked a pre-release which did not have any enemies. I don't know what you mean by background animations as I don't think there are any in Pang!

Sleepwalker by Fairlight is another example of a bad crack - the barrel doesn't appear on level 1 if the copylock isn't cracked properly so you can't finish the level. The Quartex version is OK though.

Rodland: Game crashed with random time it'seems

The protection on Rodland is nothing special, I don't know of any non-working versions of this game! I'm surprised you found out that it crashes!

for Lost patrol and pang I have never found good version (of course whdload's patch run fine) but good version must exist

There are working versions of all of these games!

[7-Zark-7]

Originally Posted by Codetapper

Pang wasn't protected by Rob Northen - it's all Pierre Adane's code. Proj Inc cracked the game correctly and it may well be the only crack of the release version. Most groups cracked a pre-release which did not have any enemies. I don't know what you mean by background animations as I don't think there are any in Pang!

Probably what they were referring to,(lack of birds etc.). It wasn't until I joined here that I was even aware there was a "final" version complete with other baddies-I thought it was tough enough until I discovered about the additional baddies!

[andreas]

Indeed ... not to mention that the game is EASY AS PIE without those baddies and that it's not difficult to get to level 40 in no time!

[fiath]

I completed the arcade version (which I own, but unfortunately is now a dead board - those damn Kabuki's!) and remember the baddies. But I seem to remember there wasn't much else to do in those levels, so it must have seemed a very empty (and crap) game without them... ?

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by CFOU!

I don't believe it

I had played with same version and in first time game seems very hard and after i retry some month ago and I finished it very qwickly

in fact game adapted difficulty to you, if you play good game has hard

perhaps in second time you play badly or without try to take all items and looking for all secrets

Gods WAS harder if you simply copied the original or had the pointless Endless Piracy 'crack'.

Enemies took more hits to destroy and you couldn't pick up certain objects like extra lives.

[andreas]

Well, I found both the Defjam and CRYSTAL versions bastard hard nonetheless.
BUT ... yes, I could pick up extra lives!

And Galahad ... Endless Piracy "cracked" this game, too? Well, so it's maybe good fate that the version is *not* in TOSEC

Try Operation Wolf.... the H.Syl crack and train works perfectly allowing you to complete the game successfully. The H.Syl crack and Lightforce train resets the hostage count on level five and there are no hostages on level 6, so there is no way to complete successfully.



For every crack that was bad there are 100's that are perfect. Without cracks the Amiga emulation scene might not have taken off like it has.

[Galahad/FLT]

The Amiga emulation scene would NEVER have taken off at all!

People readily slag off cracks/piracy, yet every single emulator would have been stillborn had they not happened. It's convenient now to despise something that most people on here readily embraced before.

CAPS whilst a worthy project, might well have not happened, because lets face it, without WinUAE and the like, the maintained interest in Amiga might never have continued. And what use an emulator that can only play AmigaDOS games and Workbench?

Of the many many thousands of games cracked, the failure rate of them is very very small. Crap programming is a more probable cause for a game failing than the protection.

[fiath]

Just for the record, my opinion is:

1) Many original games stored in normal AmigaDOS format would be able to be played. There are lots without protection, expecially in the vast amount of budget versions. These would have been the ones passed about the Internet and (at least initially) used for emulator development.

2) Something "like" CAPS would have come around earlier(!) The greater the need, the more people that would have been interested in doing it. Same for supporting such images in emulators.

3) CAPS would have happened without WinUAE or any other Amiga emulator available though it might have been very slightly different. In fact, AFAIK, very few of us were big Amiga emulator users before CAPS anyway. I certainly wasn't, but then I used the "real thing" as my main computer up until 1998/9 so didn't have any real need to.

Of course, you could argue that piracy helped the Amiga gain such a huge following... Hence more games, etc. etc. I am not sure I entirely agree with it either, but that is another argument entirely.

Oh, and I do agree with you about crap programming in games probably caused cracks to fail. The point is that the (vast majority of) originals worked! Also, I think the "failure rate of cracks" is not really the issue. The real issue is that they are never going to be as reliable as the originals. The fact you do not know if they work or not for *sure*, is why they are so bad. Weeks of testing by professional people is always going to be better than a few late nights for some cracker.

[Codetapper]

Originally Posted by fiath

Oh, and I do agree with you about crap programming in games probably caused cracks to fail. The point is that the (vast majority of) originals worked! Also, I think the "failure rate of cracks" is not really the issue. The real issue is that they are never going to be as reliable as the originals. The fact you do not know if they work or not for *sure*, is why they are so bad. Weeks of testing by professional people is always going to be better than a few late nights for some cracker.

If you look at how many games which were designed to run in the base 512k of chip memory and then see how many illegally read/write data outside those areas then you know that the majority of games ARE in fact buggy!

WHDLoad with it's support for MMU's shows up just how buggy the majority of games are. Admitedly in the Amiga's heyday MMU's were not common so there was no decent quality testing tools for these kind of things.

Also don't forget how many cracking groups did fix bugs in the original games aswell - especially games which had useless memory detection routines. I remember some guy writing into C+VG saying he'd returned Xenon 2 to the shops 2 or 3 times due to it not working on his config and in the end just used a crack because that one worked perfectly.

Also those "lamer" crackers that used to tag all their releases with "100% cracked" didn't help because invariably a bug would be found and they'd have to release the 101% version then a 102% version etc. TOSEC is full of these "100%" versions, hence so many alt's! I guess they were just too damn "elite" to use version numbering like developers did.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by fiath

Just for the record, my opinion is:

1) Many original games stored in normal AmigaDOS format would be able to be played. There are lots without protection, expecially in the vast amount of budget versions. These would have been the ones passed about the Internet and (at least initially) used for emulator development.

I already acknowleged the part of AmigaDOS disks being viable. My point is though, and its not just applicable to the Amiga, is without piracy, there would be no emulator scene. There would be NO SNES/Megadrive/NeoGeo/GB/GBA/N64 emulators without the files generated from the cracking scene. Because of the work put into other emulators gives someone else the bug to do it for Amiga. WinUAE would not in any way be as polished today had it only been able to use AmigaDOS disks and budget re-releases, of which you over estimate how many were subsequently changed from MFM disks to AmigaDOS. Hit Squad/Ocean were one of the few to do it, but only on the smaller games, towards the end of Hit Squad, most of the games were re-released in the same format unless to remove a dongle protection like Robocop 3. Gremlin certainly rarely changed their format. My point is without piracy, WinUAE would be a shadow of its former being.

Originally Posted by fiath

2) Something "like" CAPS would have come around earlier(!) The greater the need, the more people that would have been interested in doing it. Same for supporting such images in emulators.

Again, I doubt this very much. The loss of valuable game disks has gone on since the dawn of disks, in that respect, CAPS is precisely 30years too late if we want to get picky

Originally Posted by fiath

3) CAPS would have happened without WinUAE or any other Amiga emulator available though it might have been very slightly different. In fact, AFAIK, very few of us were big Amiga emulator users before CAPS anyway. I certainly wasn't, but then I used the "real thing" as my main computer up until 1998/9 so didn't have any real need to.

Because of your tie-in with WinUAE, you have made not only WinUAE more popular, you have made CAPS more popular. I don't think CAPS would have quite been the hit it is, had you not helped Toni to support your format. Because of the tie-in, people can immediately feel the benefits of doing it, otherwise for the moment, they can store a load of disk images they can't use.

Originally Posted by fiath

Of course, you could argue that piracy helped the Amiga gain such a huge following... Hence more games, etc. etc. I am not sure I entirely agree with it either, but that is another argument entirely.

Piracy helped the Amiga from the off. Around 1992 is when piracy was starting to hurt the Amiga, but then so was the consoles. The Amiga was already 7 years old by this state, most formats don't enjoy a life half that time. The Amiga was doing well in that regard. I bought my first Amiga precisely because I could get games for free, and I also bought some games for it as well, and that is where the piracy cycle worked. So long as Amigas were being bought, and the new users were buying some games, then the games companies were doing fine. When it started going the other way and piracy was becoming too effective (i.e. we were too successful at the distributing of it) then it started to have a detrimental effect. But then again, there were lots of factors at the same time that also didn't help. Commodore, consoles and the same old same old games being released, and the fact that the Amiga wasn't the coolest machine anymore.

Originally Posted by fiath

Oh, and I do agree with you about crap programming in games probably caused cracks to fail. The point is that the (vast majority of) originals worked! Also, I think the "failure rate of cracks" is not really the issue. The real issue is that they are never going to be as reliable as the originals. The fact you do not know if they work or not for *sure*, is why they are so bad. Weeks of testing by professional people is always going to be better than a few late nights for some cracker.

Again, you overestimate the complexity of some of the copy protections out there. The majority were RNC protected, not MFM protected. RNC's Copylock was and is rather formulaic in its operation and how its implemented. I can assure you for instance that my crack of Pinball Prelude was WAY more reliable than the original at loading, because the MFM format of the game was such a pain in the arse for some disk drives. It wouldn't ever properly load on my A4ooo o3o EVER!

I can be 99% sure of anything I release is going to work. As for a software company being that confident, I can tell you for a fact that they are less confident of that. Market forces dictate when a game gets released, hence why so many bug fixes for games. They may well have had weeks of playtesting, but sometimes they just bodge a bug and fix it properly later, I know this because I've had to do it. You forget I've worked for two software companies

If Toni made WinUAE a PROPER emulation of an Amiga A5oo, a hell of a lot of stuff just wouldn't work properly, because some of the coding of some of the games out there is just absolutely fucking shocking. You only have to look at the brief description on the notes for each WHDLoad install to see just how many programming problems there are with games.

Cracking errors? Thats the least of most games problems!

Just a thought from a pedant!