RoboCop 3 - Dongle Anti-Piracy that Failed

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

You know what the best Anti-piracy dongle in the history of video games ever was?

It was the sound expansion cartridge bundled with B.A.T. for the ST for a measly £9.99 extra that allowed the ST to play the Amiga 4 channel DAC based audio. That is the only sort of 'dongle' that will kill piracy, it's not like Fairlight/Crystal/Melon are going to be sending you a free PCB in the post to play the game lol so if you pirate it you will only get the YM sound like some sort of plebeian

There was some sort of cartridge that plugged onto the Amiga video port and gave you a chunky 8bit mode IIRC, stuff like that as a 'dongle' would have worked because it's required. Making 512kb mapped ROM C64/64GS cartridge games is another, if the game engine is over 64kb it's not going to get cracked and put on disk images for BBS download or postal based disk swapping.

Everything else will just annoy actual paying customers AND do nothing to stop piracy. Unless every alternate line of ASM in the game engine is doing something with this 'dongle' it is going to be days not months before such games are up on the BBS servers of the sceners back then.

BAT ST refuse to run without the copy protection / Sound rerout Cartridge.

The game is full of checksum routines doing calculating by accessing the cart port.

You won't have any YM sound without it.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by redblade

I guess for a game like Robocop you could make a chunky gfx output dongle like the grafiti which might get you a few extra FPS on output. But I guess Galahad/Stingray/Phantasm would just patch a c2p routine in the release. This has the advantage of working on all Amigas.

I don't know if the hardware would have been chunky 4 bitplanes out dc.w $0123 each nibble being 1 16 bit colour, or if they would have went for the full 12 bit for each move.w being one 12 bit colour.

Would this be a unique device for each game? Can't see anyone wanting to buy multiple devices. If they weren't unique then you'd just have to buy one game to use (a bit like in the console days with dsp games). Even if they are unique for each game then it's possible the games could be patched to work for similar devices from other games