RoboCop 3 - Dongle Anti-Piracy that Failed

[StingRay]

Originally Posted by jotd

@Stingray I knew you were going to criticize my crack

My comment wasn't meant that way. The early EA encryption is quite good so I can understand anyone trying shortcuts to bypass it. But it's not a clean crack. =)

[jotd]

@Stingray no worries I perfectly understood that. And I admit I don't want to spend hours to crack something that I can bypass some other way.

Yes, I agree, it's more satisfactory to change 3 instructions and have the game running. And seeing exactly how it works is cool too. I used Mr Larmer copylock decoder to crack Cadaver and it was excellent seeing what the copylock did.

I'm personally more interested into bringing a whdload slave to the public, working without any disk in drive or SNOOP issues. Once it's done, I usually lose interest. It's also fun to bypass super-good encryption without too much effort.

Of course there are cases where dirty hacks fail. Kudos for LOTRS fix & sinbad too.

[PatmanQC]

I bought Robocop three and yes it included the dongle from hell :-)

Anyone else remember using alligator clips for the Pirated copy of Commodore 64 version of the 10th frame bowling? True story, my friend Hooked the clips up to the wrong port And fried his Commodore. After much ranting and raving he boxed it up and returned it to target which they happily exchanged for a new one.

[-=ARA=-]

Originally Posted by T_hairy_bootson

I remember Leaderboard golf having a dongle well before robocop 3.

Great video, All your videos go into so much detail, its good stuff.

Fun fact: Orion the studio was going through bankruptcy so the movie sat on the shelf and the games came out first.

I remember this dongle that came with Leaderboard Golf as well.
But I dont think it was very sophisticated because my neighbour had a
"pirated" version or homebuilt version of this dongle that seemed to work.

[NorthWay]

IIRC some of the C= 64 dongles could be bypassed by pressing play(?) on the tapedeck. I guess the Americans didn't have those...

[Predseda]

B.A.T. also came with protection dongle.

[jotd]

not all dongles were the same, and the protection code could be just very easy to crack. There isn't any standard dongle or dongle read code (as opposed to RobNorthen copylock protected track and encrpyted read code)

[Sona]

Ocean software even posted in magazines that the copy protection was so sophisticated that it will take a good programmer month and month to crack

I played a Cracked copy of RoboCop3 Amiga game when i was young and did not know about the "Dongle"! thanks to the Crackers, most of them from West Germany!

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Sona

I played a Cracked copy of RoboCop3 Amiga game when i was young and did not know about the "Dongle"! thanks to the Crackers, most of them from West Germany!

I was born in West Germany

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

In all cases, developers needed to be subtle about their protections, but they rarely were.

The constant relying on trying to crash the Amiga, is just so ridiculous, it just screams "protection!!!", it should always be subtle.

Hook was an excellent example, Gods was not.

F-29 Retaliator was a good idea, but poorly implemented, same with Battle Command.

Was the problem with GODS that it became too hard and you didn't know if it was the Game or the protection?

What would you recommend as protection for a game like Rygar, Bubble bobble on the Amiga?

More enemies? No power ups?

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by redblade

Was the problem with GODS that it became too hard and you didn't know if it was the Game or the protection?

What would you recommend as protection for a game like Rygar, Bubble bobble on the Amiga?

More enemies? No power ups?

Well to be honest with Gods, I think it was only Endless Piracy that actually got caught out by the Copylock and how it worked in the game.

If you crack the Copylock properly, there is literally no way to screw it up, and its still makes me laugh they got caught out, its the same style as Speedball 2, its stupidly easy to crack.

I think in the case of Gods, they shouldn't have allowed it to progress beyond Level 1, World 1, just made it so you couldn't get a key to exit the level.

the problem with Gods is its quite possible to get far enough into the game where you're simply not sure if its protection or simply a hard game. Bitmaps Brothers were known for hard games, so with that in mind, its a stupid copy protection.

A cracker might conceivably skip levels just to ensure the Copylock isn't called again, but even if it was, it'll only modify the same addresses in any case, so impossible to get caught out by that.

Make it hard, and make it so you can't progress beyond Level 1, World 1, that way a cracker will simply think they've missed a game related thing that will help them complete the level.

If no-one ever beats the level, then its protection related, but by that time, a spread copy is out in the wild and people are getting pissed off with it.

Unfortunately something like Puzzle Bobble there isn't much scope to sneak in extra protection because its basically going to be a single disk/single load affair.

Rygar could have implemented lots of neat stuff, it being a multiloader, lots of things you could do.

[gimbal]

I had that cracked copy, it was ridiculous. It took like 20 attacks to kill one enemy. I knew from the first moment that it was wrong, having played the demo that came with Amiga Format which was way, waaaaay easier. If anyone got to the point(s) where it would crash without a trainer, they must like excruciating pain.

[-=ARA=-]

With my copy of Gods, the last boss had unlimited energy, so it was impossible to complete the game. But I got to the last boss many times, frustrating times =)

[RichL]

I think it’s in the Bitmap Brothers book where it mentions the code in Gods knows it’s a copy and makes all the enemies take more hits to kill and that the bosses all have ridiculous amounts of health but you wouldn’t know this was any different from retail as you were playing the copy.

[roondar]

The Robocop 3 dongle to me seems to show a fundamental problem with physical protection like this. Basically, the only way to make this work would be to have the dongle be an integral part of the game (so that it's impossible to run the game without the dongle as parts of it are missing). Instead of going that route, Ocean chose to make the dongle just part of the protection - which can certainly be hacked.

Not saying a dongle that actually contains parts of the game is uncrackable, but it certainly would be a good deal harder to crack in such a case, more so if the part(s) included on the dongle can't be easily done on the host system (for instance by requiring too much processor time or memory to duplicate).

[jotd]

yeah, plug a A1200 to the A500 to make the game work

more seriously, selling a dedicated controller would have helped too. Playing Paperboy on MAME without the bike handlebars is just not the same.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by jotd

yeah, plug a A1200 to the A500 to make the game work

Maybe if they released a Grafiti type Screen out dongle for the game would of been the best idea? I read 19,200bps was max speed for a 68000 processor, I don't know how fast data Amiga can be read from the Parallel port besides the A1000 was different any way. Maybe ROMS in a Floppy drive dongle?

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Well to be honest with Gods, I think it was only Endless Piracy that actually got caught out by the Copylock and how it worked in the game.

I think in the case of Gods, they shouldn't have allowed it to progress beyond Level 1, World 1, just made it so you couldn't get a key to exit the level.

Make it hard, and make it so you can't progress beyond Level 1, World 1, that way a cracker will simply think they've missed a game related thing that will help them complete the level.

If no-one ever beats the level, then its protection related, but by that time, a spread copy is out in the wild and people are getting pissed off with it.

Unfortunately something like Puzzle Bobble there isn't much scope to sneak in extra protection because its basically going to be a single disk/single load affair.

Rygar could have implemented lots of neat stuff, it being a multiloader, lots of things you could do.

Thanks for that. I see that Janeway doesn't have the Endless Piracy release on their site.

I'm guessing Rainbow Islands or bubble bobble would be hard to add protection or missing items so that people would know it was a dodgy crack and not the game. Maybe the added platforms would result in the player having to do impossible jumps or leaps of faith.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by redblade

Maybe if they released a Grafiti type Screen out dongle for the game would of been the best idea? I read 19,200bps was max speed for a 68000 processor, I don't know how fast data Amiga can be read from the Parallel port besides the A1000 was different any way. Maybe ROMS in a Floppy drive dongle?


Thanks for that. I see that Janeway doesn't have the Endless Piracy release on their site.

I'm guessing Rainbow Islands or bubble bobble would be hard to add protection or missing items so that people would know it was a dodgy crack and not the game. Maybe the added platforms would result in the player having to do impossible jumps or leaps of faith.

Once a crack is known as bad back in the day, it would have been nuked from the boards.

I think Crystal cracked it properly, I can't remember because I actually bought the original as I was looking forward to it so much so it was one of the few games I didn't bother getting a cracked copy of.

EDIT: The Endless Piracy version is on the EAB File server, just do a search for "Gods EP" and its the first file. Its literally no different to you copying disk one of the original and playing from that.

Other than editing the text for the intro to say they "cracked" it, they didn't do ANYTHING at all in the game!!!!

Copylock not cracked, Copylock not decoded, there are 6 modifications the Copylock makes to the game to fix it, and they've not put ANYTHING in. I always suspected EP couldn't do it, but checking it out now, I see they literally didn't do anything other than edit text!

[RichL]

I remember it clearly it was 'CRYSTAL CRACKED... A BITMAP BROTHERS GAME'

[jotd]

Gods Crystal crack works properly indeed. If you copy original disk 1 without further changes, it SEEMS to work, but it begins to behave strangely at world 2 of level 1, as soon as "smart" monsters are introduced. It ends up locking at world 1 level 2, maybe because the monsters were so crazy they overwrote some code somewhere?

Once it locked up, I understood that the copy was bad and looked out for a proper crack (the crystal one)