Uncrackable protection, was it possible???

[SuperFuryAnimal]

With the benefit of hindsight and a considerable number of years passing, was it possible to have and amiga game with uncrackable protection?? Something I'm curious about, I'm assuming its prob a no, but I have no real coding knowledge.

Prob a question for some of the amiga legends on the board.

[Phantasm]

This has been asked before and the short answer is no. If it can be played it can be cracked

[ross]

Short answer: no.

Elaborate answer: you can definitely make life complicated for the cracker
Even if emulators help a lot in the 'task' there are several techniques to break the emulator with undocumented* things and at that point only on a real machine could the code be run.
And there are various techniques to block or confuse even the various state freezers on real, so you have to break the code 'by hand'.

But it's only a matter of time, sooner or later you'll be able to crack anything (after giving the geek on duty a big headache).

* there are fewer and fewer undocumented things and sooner or later there won't be any more..

[phx]

Let's say: if you own all parts to run the game, it can be cracked.

Even on the Amiga you could think about creating a game which must be played online against other players. Then you need a unique server login for every copy and cracks become worthless.

No wonder there are so many online games these days…

[Estrayk]

And with a hardware dongle too?

[phx]

Depends whether the hardware dongle implements some required game function, or if it is just checked to be present. In the latter case the check can simply be removed (cracked).

[paraj]

Originally Posted by phx

Depends whether the hardware dongle implements some required game function, or if it is just checked to be present. In the latter case the check can simply be removed (cracked).

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

[Don_Adan]

For me only one game Damonen Burg has uncrackedable protection.
Because it uses self destruction of disk method.
Maybe if cracker has 2 copy, then can crack this game.
But for only one copy this is perhaps impossible.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150930...il=damonenburg

Dongle protection can be cracked, even if it needs time.
From my memory Real 3D dongle protection need some times to crack.

[Megalomaniac]

I think there are games where no 100% perfect cracks exist, which suggest that its possible, although it comes down to how much time and effect pirates would put into cracking a game, which will have also depended on its quality?

Dongles could theoretically produce unpirateable games, but I don't think any existing attempts did. Robocop 3's dongle (the most famous usage, though not the first) got cracked fairly quickly, but do the very first cracked copies play perfectly all the way to the end? https://amr.abime.net/issue_10_pages (page 11) sees Ocean claiming that piracy of the game was lower than they'd expect for most games, though there clearly was some. They also say that the method used to break the piracy was beyond what ordinary pirates could do. It sounds like something that could have been prevented in future dongles, without necessarily having to build extra processing power into the dongle. Still, the fact that they never did another dongled game suggests that it didn't prevent piracy by enough to justify the cost.

A Steam-style online system would be possible nowadays, but obviously not in the Amiga era where the only online play was direct modem link rather than over a central server.

[AestheticDebris]

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.

Depends what "prohibitively expensive" is. You could probably have put some expensive chip inside a dongle (ala a SNES enhancement chip) that performs necessary operations faster than native Amiga hardware does. Then every cracked version would've needed to either replicate the hardware or significantly upgrade the required base spec machine.

The risk with doing that would be the investment cost of any such chip, since you'd need to sell enough copies to turn a profit on it. I suspect the Amiga market, unlike the SNES, wasn't large enough to amortize the costs (and owners were too used to cheap software).

[TCD]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

The risk with doing that would be the investment cost of any such chip, since you'd need to sell enough copies to turn a profit on it. I suspect the Amiga market, unlike the SNES, wasn't large enough to amortize the costs (and owners were too used to cheap software).

It's not only about the size of the market. You have to actually get people who would pirate the software to buy it. A sufficiently elaborate dongle would prevent a good amount of pirated copies, but that doesn't translate to more sales. So you'd invest a lot of money into most likely not that many more sales.

[jotd]

sell a 030 accelerator "dongle" with your software

More seriously, even a c2p or some moderate complex algorithm or even a part of ROM data could take some time to emulate, specially if the RAM is already full, so pirates wouldn't have the luxury to use more RAM to relocate it.

Atari arcade machines had chips (called 'slapstic') that performed some operations. The more advanced ones were hard to bruteforce (some also performed memory bank switches). They ended up emulating them perfectly in MAME but that took years (all that fuss for ... Pit Fighter )

[Megalomaniac]

I suppose the question is whether feasible extreme copy-protection methods of used custom chips in a dongle, to do things an ordinary A500 couldn't, would be worth the cost to publishers. I suppose the question is - if a hypothetical greatest Amiga game ever, cost £50 but completely unpirateable, would people used to pirating £25-35 games have bought it? Would they have just gone without that game? Or would they have put the £50 towards a SNES (Robocop 3's release roughly tying in with the European launch of the SNES, perhaps coincidentally), where £50 was an average cost? Perhaps this game would have been converted to the SNES before long anyway? Another issue is that a game designed around additional custom hardware would be even harder to convert to the ST, or perhaps to the PCs of the time, which beat Amigas on brute processor force and by having hard drives, but not on 2D arcade games?

What if the hardware was then reused by the same publisher for a shoot 'em up and a racing game as well? Would players have got bored of the improvements over time, or would they have come to expect every game to be that impressive - thus causing ever game to cost £50 instead of £25-35, when you could argue that the games being cheaper was a big lingering advantage of the Amiga against the SNES and Megadrive (and PC to an extent).

[TCD]

Originally Posted by jotd

Atari arcade machines had chips (called 'slapstic') that performed some operations. The more advanced ones were hard to bruteforce (some also performed memory bank switches). They ended up emulating them perfectly in MAME but that took years (all that fuss for ... Pit Fighter )

Recently on PC the copy protection Denuvo was considered pretty hard to beat. It took years for the first cracks to appear. It still takes between 6 to 12 months before a cracked version is released. So it protects the initial sales window, but it is not 'uncrackable' (I don't think anything ever will be).

[Don_Adan]

Not cracked correctly is not equal "uncrackable".
Many games has extra checks (manual or disk) later in game.
And most cracks at begining was fast cracks for BBS.
Of course good crackers tested own cracks.
But it was possible only for easy games, platform mostly.
For RPG, strategy or adventure, it needs much more hours, if game has extra checks.
From my memory first crack has extra profits for cracker and crack group, then it was race.
Now is easy enough to crack Amiga games, but not over 30 years ago.
Dongle protection can only delay cracks, if was hard enough.
The hardest needs to create software dongle emulator.

[Retro1234]

[ Show youtube player ]

Fun little video

[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...

[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...

F-29 Retaliator

[paraj]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

F-29 Retaliator

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.

[TEG]

If I'm correct, there was a game with the code encrypted and which was decrypted in real time just before use. The only solution they find to crack it had been to plug some pliers directly on the 68000 and look at the signals. The trick was perhaps to use the halt signal. There was a tutorial on the net.

Just to say that at the time it was possible to use extreme tricks against extreme protections.