The most badly cracked Amiga game

[IFW]

Her is my thought:
CAPS is the result of pure development hours in the 10,000s.
If an emulator developer had to take care of that amount of work in order to make disks playable in his emulator, he wouldn't have bothered in the first place.
So actually I agree that cracks kept the interest and being the disks in standard well documented and generally easy to support formats helped people to concentrate on writing an emulator instead of working on a disk preservation scenario for the sake of being able to write an emulator once that is ready.
The scope is just way too big for both to happen at the same time.
As an example from a distant but related territory think of mame: most protected systems were not supported for years - apart from bootlegs aka warez - simply because the lack of knowledge, experience, dumping equipment and development effort needed.
You just can't specialize in everything in emulation it won't work out and eventually such a project will just die, since the more they work on it, the more the problems surface.

As for games problems: as long as an original game works on the target platform, that is a stock a500 and a stock a1200 from early 90s, it is not buggy. It does not matter for the system if some errors exist, the program just works on an amiga, or atari st, or c64 anyway. This is only a problem once you want to run the game for a target system it was never tested against as it was not in the focus of the original retail release.
So practically those bugs that must be fixed for running on setups they were never intended to be running on do exist of course, but they - normally - do not affect gameplay whatsoever on the original intended platform. They surface as soon as you change the cpu, the memory configuration the timing of the system and so on, ie you upgrade to a better amiga setup.
So they do affect the platforms that are the norm now, but remember it is 13 years later on now.
You don't whinge at pc programmers that their pcdos shite does not work on winxp, do you?
Same thing here, amiga is different only because people think stuff should work on any systems, not just the target platform - again for most games it was strictly a500, or 1mb a500, they did not even try the game on anything better - especially not stuff developed that took over the system that is most EU games - while pc users crying over pcdos games not working anymore are publically humiliated and laughed upon
Also people who want to run old pc games try them to run on real contemporary setups or emulators only, hence a whdload project for pc does not exist.
You will find that most ps1, n64 etc games just barely work on their original hardware, but once you start to emulate them you'll notice the mistakes the authors did.
Since they work on the intented target systems this is don't care however.

I don't know how strict ps2 evaluation these days is - probably somewhat relaxed for 1st and 2nd party developpers, and others just got nitpicked as a compensation - but in a few years time once real ps2 emulation will be feasible I am dead sure you'll find tons of memory violations, hacks that work only on the real hardware by some voodoo magic involved and so on.

Piracy did help amiga sales in its raising time period, but it did help to comercially kill it as well once it became less and less competitive and profitable compared to other systems.
Survival of the fittest, more predators then prey: the prey vanishes predators die or move onto new preys.
This is exactly what happened.

[Galahad/FLT]

As you well know Istvan, Commodore set out specific guidelines with regards to programming for the Amiga, and they also helped with the hardware reference manual.

Had most programmers heeded these guidelines, then most games would work no matter what CPU was used.

To say a game isn't buggy when it relies on DBRA timing loops is nuts! So many 'accepted' programming practices were and are absolutely pathetic. Is it good programming practice to not have suitable blitwaits in the code? Ok, in some cases you free up extra CPU time, but in the majority of cases when a game has been fixed for WHDLoad and blitwaits put in, it hasn't affected the performance of the game. In fact you would expect being a faster processor, some of the games would start to drop a frame and and be slower. In most cases this isn't the case.

I don't think ignoring good programming guidelines excuses poor programming. I do wonder sometimes how some of those games of the past did work on their 'target' machine!


I agree about the piracy aspect, you put it across quite well

[fiath]

Firstly, let me say that I think we are opposite sides of a coin in our beliefs. Perhaps the real truth is in the middle somewhere. Of course, I don't believe that, but from an independant perspective that is where people reading this should probably look.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I already acknowleged the part of AmigaDOS disks being viable.

Looking at your post, we may be talking a little cross purposes here, when I said "AmigaDOS", I was talking about the disk format, not the file system. Sorry I didn't make that more clear.

My point is though, and its not just applicable to the Amiga, is without piracy, there would be no emulator scene.

I do not agree with that at all. This may be more true for a console, but for a computer system like the Amiga, where there was a whole *wealth* of legally obtainable software you can't say there would be no emu scene.

There would be NO SNES/Megadrive/NeoGeo/GB/GBA/N64 emulators without the files generated from the cracking scene.

As above, these are consoles where there was little else other than commerical games, so it is a little different. It is almost certainly true that on these systems, had it not been for the cracking scene (producing the hardware to backup/play games on them) it is likely true that there would have been no other software than commercial games (no demos, etc.).

However, I still think there would be emulators without the cracking scene active on each of those consoles. Because there is the *need*, people will have backed up the games, and people would have written emulators. Whether they more be as mature... probably not, since the ROMs would have have been later.

There are few systems that were so obsure that no cracking scene was active on them. Do these systems have emulators? Of course they do. So you really cannot infer one from the other.

Because of the work put into other emulators gives someone else the bug to do it for Amiga.

I'm not sure you can infer one from another on this either, since there are many emulators that are not for consoles. But maybe your right. Perhaps somebody should ask Bernd.

WinUAE would not in any way be as polished today had it only been able to use AmigaDOS disks and budget re-releases,

It could be. But I wasn't arguing that.

of which you over estimate how many were subsequently changed from MFM disks to AmigaDOS.

This terminology is confusing. By "MFM" I assume you mean using custom format, i.e. not the AmigaDOS track format. So I only say this for others (because as you obviously know, AmigaDOS formatted disks *are* MFM): MFM is the encoding and has nothing to do with the disk format. Even Workbench disks are MFM. We have only ever (IIRC) found one game that does not exclusively use MFM - and that was using GCR encoding on a few tracks, that is an astonishing rarity, though it was possible, we didn't expect to see one. All games in the CAPS database are MFM, though the CAPS technology was purposefully not tied to it.

Anyway... Of course, there were still many budget games that still used custom formats / protection. But often it seems they were changed, or the protection "not as strong". This obviously still helps your argument not mine. But I don't think I am over-estimating using plain copyable AmigaDOS format on budget games. There were tons. There are probably reasons for this. By the time budget games came out, the original Trace scripts or the master could have been lost, or perhaps it was that the equipment to duplicate the original formats/protections were more expensive, or maybe it was just more hassle. This is also probably why publishers sometimes had to crack their own games when they went to budget - I'm sure they would not have done that if it was easy to use the original formats.

My point is without piracy, WinUAE would be a shadow of its former being.

I wasn't arguing against that. However, it can certainly be said that emulators develop against what is available to test with, and if as I believe, something like CAPS would have come about earlier, then I could also argue that WinUAE might in fact be *better* than it is now.

If course, neither I nor you can prove either is true, so it is perhaps not worth arguing about.

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

I completely agree CAPS is late. I have said this quite a few times before, it may have even been on the front page for a while. But there are problems with your reasoning. 30 years ago magnetic disks were only used by business/government/academia who would have had very little reason to start a preservation campaign without some financial/lawful/research (respectively) benefit. Not only that, there would have been very little people involved, and even less people who had any nostalgia for the business applications they used.

20 years ago is more likely if we assume this is where disk-based systems started to go more mainstream. C64, Amstrad CPC and the like. But then there *was* a cracking scene. If there wasn't, I again believe something like CAPS would have come about earlier - because there would have been more of a *need*. The need is far less with cracks floating about, since many people are happy with those.

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.

That might be true. As I said, CAPS would have been a little different. Perhaps we would have had more of a focus on writing them back if this was the case, that was certainly more of a focus at the beginning - and that even with the existance of WinUAE, because of the flaws it had at the time. So maybe it would have been more popular.

I agree popularity is important though, because that would mean far less games have been preserved.

Continued...

[fiath]

...continued.

Piracy helped the Amiga from the off.

I think this has been debated enough on this forum, and it wasn't my argument anyway. Perhaps you are right, perhaps you are not. We will never know, because there is no comparison. You need the same type of system, with the same market, and no cracking scene on it to compare that. It just is not going to happen.

A pretty bad (but still indicative) comparison would be GameCube,PS2,XBox, but I will use here anyway. The piracy scene is far smaller (because it is less readily available to the consumer). Are these systems popular?

It will be even more interesting on the next bunch on consoles, where the piracy scene might possibly become smaller again (assuming they are more difficult to mod, hardware DRM and all that).

[quote]Again, you overestimate the complexity of some of the copy protections out there. The majority were RNC protected, not MFM protected.[quote]

See above, this is confusing terminology. RNC protection is MFM.

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 wasn't talking about different system configurations. Games were probably almost exclusively tested on the most popular machines (i.e. A500 and later A1200). But with the advent of emulators, the system becomes irrelevent. The point is, that if you change a game in any way, even something as simple to crack as Copylock - you are playing with fire. As I said before, I trust professionals testing a game for weeks far more than I do a cracker a couple of nights in his bedroom, no matter how simple it might be.

WHDLoad is different, because if a problem is found, it is fixed and uploading to the site. Easy. Today, the hundreds of people playing games on WHDLoad probably far outweigh the testing done by a company, and there is no time limit. A great combination btw . This cannot be compared to "0-day" cracks.

Sure, cracking may have helped some few people play the game they otherwise could not, but ultimately if a doesn't work - you send it back. Apart from being annoying, it doesn't really hurt anyone. Would the publishers have got more returns from people who otherwise got hold of a crack to satisfy them? Probably. Would publishers have then paid more attention to testing on other systems? Possibly. We will never know.

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.

I'm sorry, but you cannot match effort that goes into testing a game unless you wanted to release it *way* after every other group - and no cracker wants that! . The companies involved have too much to loose if something goes wrong. Sure, it happened, but there are *far* less unplayable originals out there than there are unplayable cracks. If in the unlikely case an original game was really broken, you would have been able to return it for a fixed one.

Market forces dictate when a game gets released, hence why so many bug fixes for games.

Now, with the Internet. Yes. Then, it was far more difficult. They had to get it right first time, or pay a heavy price.

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

So have I, and I still work at one of them. So you should also know most software companies have a procedure for rolling out bug fixes. This is far easier and less expensive to do now than it was then. In many respects this is a bad thing from the POV of the consumer, but that is just how it is.

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.

I completely disagree. If there was a complete emulation of the Amiga A500, of how the real hardware worked, then everything that worked on a real A500 would work on it. How can anything else be true?

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.

I completely agree. But this doesn't mean they don't work on the target system.

Anyway, as I said, we have completely different views since we come from completely different sides of the spectrum, so we are never going to agree on this stuff. It is a shame it can never be proven either way.

Perhaps the real truth of things is hovering between us somewhere. But again, I personally don't think that is true.

[IFW]

Yes I agree, it is very bad practice, but even though those guidelines exist, afair they were only put into the Nth edition of HRM after shockingly incompatible code was found in high profile 2nd party products like all early EA games
Anyway those cpu loops etc are still in use in any platform you can name for various reasons, despite being very bad practice regardless of platform.
As long as they work nobody cares.
You'd find "amazing" routines in many games easily
Actually the blitter wait omitted is the net result of code designed to ever run from chipram where if you set the blithog the cpu does not get any cycles, hence not waiting for the blitter to finish equals to waiting it, there is no difference. Of course such code does not work if it ever gets relocated to real fastram (slow ram at Cx works because it is on the same bus with chipram) or rom.
Needless to say games developed on SnAsm were hardly ever tested with machines that had real fastram, they'd have failed miserably.
However those awful things perfectly worked on a500, a500 1mb slowram, a600 chipram only etc that is consumer grade machines for the people who actually buy and play those games, so bad practices were never really that much exposed as they are nowadays.

[Galahad/FLT]

Fiath, stop trying to educate me!

You know as well as I do that when I say "MFM", I mean a custom disk format that cannot be duplicated by normal methods on the host machine! Yes I know AmigaDOS in itself is an MFM format. Before CAPS using the term MFM was and is an acceptable generic description of that type of copy protection.

Another thought from a pedant!

[fiath]

I wasn't, honest!

Yeah, fair enough though. It wasn't mean to be directly at you. I guess I just like the more precise terminology.

[7-Zark-7]

Originally Posted by 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!

@Andreas & Fiath.
Note, I did say "was" as in at the time! Usually had a nasty habit of hitting ice intertia/or dynamite or both at the wrong time-though I did I think manage to complete it eventually!
Didn't find it boring even without the birds,crabs etc,it still had that addictive quality to it that made it such a great game!

[7-Zark-7]

Btw-although I wouldn't even try to pretend to understand all the technical jargon that was just said,I do have a layman's question? Wouldn't another factor in "flaky coding", have been the regular cross development of ST/Amiga games at the same time?
Whilst later Amiga games might've been blessed with separate coders, a lot of early ones seem to even have the same coder for both. I certainly would've found it hard to believe some of the shamble tiertex & co. crappy U.S. Gold coin op conversion efforts ever made use of the Amiga's blitter/custom chips!

[fiath]

I'm not really sure I understand your question...

OT: If you liked Pang, try Super Pang (MAME). It is a nice progression, a slightly different game, and IMO much better than the original. You'll see why when you play it. It's also much harder. I didn't like Pang 3 much though.

[IFW]

7-Zark-7
Yes of course multi-platform games running on similar hardware are normally designed around the lowest common denominator. It was like that then, it is like that nowadays, though what is changing now is the polygon count, particle count, popup etc - or not even these
But there are things that "just work" on the real/target hardware but once you change even a tiny bit of that hardware (like the execution speed of any of the components) or in fact try to emulate it you may wonder how did it ever worked in the first place
Any program that exhibits such behaviours is badly programmed, but normally these issues are not exposed until the programs are tested on the new version of the hardware.
In some cases broken code actually meant squeezing the last cpu cycles though, and the authors were very well aware that what they do won't work on anything else, just an identical target platform.

The following is the text from the P47 100% Bootblock
________________________________________
P47 100% was Cracked by QUARTEX [ROB] !!!!!
Hey Hoan, why didn't you call me for help , when you didnt understand the protection routine !!!
It was really simple, I did it in 5 minutes !!!
And also next time put in the CHECKSUM routine I wrote !!!!
Look at this and LEARN !!
----------------------------------------
Guess the original crack didn't work.

[JohnnyWalker]

I recall:

First Samurai (second disk didn't work when you got to level 5 or something)
Assassin (always always crashed at the same place, just before the ending)
Metal Mutant - never worked!

Why is it that, for example, my original copy of Exile will not work with WinUAE so I'm forced to use Galahad's hacked version? It's a shame... surely (without wanting to downplay the excellent work of crackers) it'd be better to catalogue the original software, like www.worldofspectrum.com -- or is that just not possible for Amiga?

I'd love to know, thanks!

[Galahad/FLT]

The original Exile has Copylock protection which means you cannot use it 'as is' with WinUAE. You could use a CAPS image which should replicate the copyprotection, but alas, it won't deprotect the teleport protection as this is dependant on you owning the manual for the game to progress.

There is still a use for us 'lame' crackers it would seem!

[7-Zark-7]

@IFW. Thanks for that! I suppose an example was the revised SID chip changes in the classic C64 "breadbin" vs. the later C64c-although I was aware of the differences with some games, I was stunned at just how good C64 Turbo Outrun & Ghouls'n'Ghosts were sonically 'til I heard their aural delights under emulation vs. my C64C.
In that instance,Martin Galway/Sensible Software were one of the few teams to cater for owners of both offering sound options to tinker/filter to your own preference.

[IFW]

Originally Posted by JohnnyWalker

I recall:

First Samurai (second disk didn't work when you got to level 5 or something)
Assassin (always always crashed at the same place, just before the ending)
Metal Mutant - never worked!

Why is it that, for example, my original copy of Exile will not work with WinUAE so I'm forced to use Galahad's hacked version? It's a shame... surely (without wanting to downplay the excellent work of crackers) it'd be better to catalogue the original software, like www.worldofspectrum.com -- or is that just not possible for Amiga?

I'd love to know, thanks!

Well, I am positive what you are looking for is this:
www.caps-project.org

[fiath]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

There is still a use for us 'lame' crackers it would seem!

Absolutely, and I do agree. You have helped many people with your new Exile crack. It gets even better in conjunction with WHDLoad etc. Please know, I never meant to downplay your current efforts - especially for WHDLoad - I just have serious concerns about people relying on cracks made "in the day" for long term use...

[JohnnyWalker]

So aside from Manual-related copy protection, all original games should now work fine with WinUAE?

[IFW]

Yes, plus a few cpu fixes every full moon

[andreas]

btw thanks to save state feature in WinUAE, I could even bypass some manual protection with CAPS originals
(it merely was a matter of time )