Did you ever crack the protection for a game? (not for scene crackers)

[musashi5150]

Originally Posted by Djay

i found that photocopying the protection manual didnt work (glossy black on matt black)... so i actually wrote every single code , something like 8 pages!

Jeez... you must've really wanted to play that one huh?

[Djay]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

Jeez... you must've really wanted to play that one huh?

yeah... i borrowed it on a saturday after we closed, played it all saturday night (drunken) and sunday (hungover) with some friends.. had to take it back on monday..

i ended buying it 2 weeks later on payday!!!! i also played it too much on the PSX

[Jgames]

Originally Posted by Djay

worms on the amiga, i found that photocopying the protection manual didnt work (glossy black on matt black)... so i actually wrote every single code , something like 8 pages!

Most pc games had protection on the manual, so we ended having disks + black&white photocopied papers.

[NeroAngelo]

Well, I cracked some stuff on PC. Basically, I copied from existing cracks. My short list of successes:

Unreal Shareware Demo build 205 - CD check removed. Based on pre-existing Unreal cracks.
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation & Chronicles "XP patch" - CD checks removed. Also based on pre-existing TR cracks.
Rainbow Six: Take Down: Missions in Korea v1.03 - CD & Key checks removed. Based on pre-existing crack for Take Down and Black Thorn.

[Muzkat]

Knights of the Sky wouldn't let me save my game. I examined the game's file structure, found a file with a really obvious name (like "protection,") and deleted it.

And then I could save my game! I was very proud of myself.

[Djay]

Originally Posted by NeroAngelo

Well, I cracked some stuff on PC. Basically, I copied from existing cracks. My short list of successes:

Unreal Shareware Demo build 205 - CD check removed. Based on pre-existing Unreal cracks.
Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation & Chronicles "XP patch" - CD checks removed. Also based on pre-existing TR cracks.
Rainbow Six: Take Down: Missions in Korea v1.03 - CD & Key checks removed. Based on pre-existing crack for Take Down and Black Thorn.

if we are talking pre-made cracks... loads of PSX games

[BrooksterMax]

I now remember apart from copying the Monkey Island codewheel - this very easy crack for Championship Manager Italia on the Amiga (even when I owned the original!!). The game was protected by "enter the score on page X of the manual"

Simply just enter 2-1 as the score - you got three goes and I think this worked over 50% of the time. I could not be bothered digging out the manual so used this logic. I think it worked for CM93 as well on the PC!

[Jonathan Drain]

Last year I was hacking away at the executable for K240 when I noticed all the manual protection codes are stored in plaintext. The game only stores 100 codes for each of English, German and French.

Really useful if you lost your manual.

[kamelito]

Did Fernandez must die, changed the call to an Amiga function iirc, then put a msg on the title screen using an Atari ST paint program.
Kml
Ps Locksmith was a copy program for Apple II

[adolescent]

"Cracked" Bruce Lee and Pooyan for the C64 using a hex editor. On Bruce Lee I found the spot where it looked for a disk error result and changed it to 0. Pooyan had a tape check which had to be removed (or changed to disk device).

Did a lot more with an Isepic but that was just flipping a switch.

[BippyM]

Back in the day I somehow removed the protection from F29 retaliator by using the diskdoctor on it

I was able to make copies and play them after.. Very strange!

[deicidal]

Originally Posted by bippym

Back in the day I somehow removed the protection from F29 retaliator by using the diskdoctor on it

Yes but it would have been called lazarus and that would have just ruined the game play for me :P

[formater]

Targham, the protection was in some screens who only ask for a password, I modified the map óf the game to jump this screens, and ¡Voila!

[ajack]

I cracked a lot of Apple // copy protections. I did not do and crack intros or distribute the games, just a bad habit of copying the original games into backup floppies and playing off them. I do admit a few titles were copied by my friends.

Apple // had the worst copy protections, their RWTS (Read, Write, Track/Sector) routines were custom as everything was done in software so developers had a field day changing the RWTS.

RWTS is like Amiga's KickStart, but is floppy based and with a bare minimum of hardware assistance. Everything had to be done in software so many parameters could be changed.

I also did some hacks for the MS-DOS based games on PC... Basically trapping int 0x13 and writing a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) to replicate the expected output so you just run the TSR and then run the game. I never did a routine to remove the TSR as I used something called PopDrop to manage memory resident programs.

Ok, enough said... This is an Amiga board after all...

[dlfrsilver]

I cracked BAT II from UBISOFT in french. This one never went into the TOSEC, because i'm not able to code and place an introduction. I have removed the dongle check, and now the game is working on A1200&4000. I've never been a scener.

Did also Murders in Space from Infogrames (password removal).

[alexh]

Used to use softICE on the PC. Effectively a soft Action Replay.

For the most basic of protections you could halt execution. Find the branch where the password test was and work out where to jump to.

Quite lame as the game/app wasn't cracked and you had to do it again if you wanted to run the app again.

But most PC games/apps of the time (circa 1995) were compressed (usually with a custom compression routine) some were encrypted AND compressed. Hacking the decompression routines and the encryption routines to save out the RAW data to be able to take out the password check in the executable was beyond my capability.

But I was only really a user. Not a programmer.

[Tiago]

I cracked 2 or 3 shareware games simple by looking into parts of code. i used to open the files and search for obvious words like protection, password. I remember i used some hexadecimal editor that you could search in ascii and he converted to hex, something like this. But it was simple games.

I also remember to me stuck in some level of x-wing for PC, and i find the file of the that mission and replaced it by the file of level 1, so i loaded level, lets say level 40 and he loaded level 1... :-)

[Chips]

softICE was THE tools on PC at some times. For compressed/encrypted executable, there even was some addon which helps you to save it in a decrypted/uncompressed form: your part of the job was to stop just before you jump into original code.

I did remove quite some protection on PC using it just for the fun...

[zyonee]

Did it with "Eye of the beholder". The words it asks for was somewhere on the disk, separated by null bytes. I simply changed all words to "a" and left a lot of null bytes after the last word. Worked like a charm. Can't remember what the name of the disk editing tool was. was it perhaps DiskX?

Edit: Just saw that Jgames did the same thing. It was probably EOB2 in my case. Hard to remember after 20+ years.

[Nobby_UK]

Just a couple of games via Hex Editor.