Games that were tough to crack... - Page 3

Methanoid · 20 January 2006, 12:20

Its not teasing there.. this is serious "handbags at dawn" between Galahad and Codetapper!!!!

7-Zark-7 · 21 January 2006, 17:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Er... I think thats the beauty of rumours and time!

Give it long enough and people will be telling everyone how good Tiertex were at programming as well!!!!

Barring some Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy type earth-wipeout disaster (wherein tiertex's members were the only survivors) we'll surely be spared that myth surely!

In terms of "tougher" titles to crack I'd notice the mention of larger data-sized games (eg:laser-coin op conversions by readysoft & graphic adventure titles by delphine), how did later disk hungry titles like Sierra/Lucasarts adventure games fare with their manual-based protections? And I'm surprised Rocket Ranger's infamous codes to make a successful launch didn't get a mention also.

Galahad/FLT · 21 January 2006, 18:29

Some Sierra titles were a little tricky only because the protection was so deep in the game with it stored in big files.

Delphine's interpreter protection on Operation Stealth/James Bond, Future Wars is well documented as being tricky as it wasn't written in 680x0 code, it was written in the games own interpreter language.

Most Readysoft games were tricky by virtue of their size squeezing them onto lesser capacity disks.

Critter · 22 January 2006, 11:42

from memory i recall 'escape from alcatraz' was a very tricky one to break

oops maybe i meant 'colditz'

Joe Maroni · 22 January 2006, 19:53

you always talk about those that are tough to crack...

what about those that are easy to do...

just for us novice users....

jrom · 22 January 2006, 22:54

...but indeed. A tutorial in the coding section (or somewhere else on a nice website) on how to crack game <X> would be most interesting indeed.

Galahad/FLT · 22 January 2006, 23:35

I did one in Grapevine Magazine for LSD years ago, but afraid to say its a bit juvenile to read (i.e. embarassing!), but the key elements of cracking a basic novella protection (Carrier Command) are all still sound today.

dlfrsilver · 22 January 2006, 23:41

Please Galahad, empty your incoming PM, i can't send you any PM .

DJ Mike · 23 January 2006, 00:17

x_to: There are plenty of easy games to crack :-) Usually the ones where the coders take a decent protection and do something completely stupid with it.

Quite a few games which use Rob Northen Copylock are like that. For every decent game which uses it effectively and makes an "interesting" crack, you have several others which fall flat on their faces.

When I did the WHDL install for "Sooty & Sweep" I found minimal use of the copylock key: just called the code, then did cmp.l #$12345678,d0 to see if the key was correct. Nothing more.

Kid Chaos was even worse - called the copylock and that was it. No key checks, no checksums, no modifying memory. Nothing whatsoever.

When I see coders using copylock that lightly I check around to see if any code is picking up on it later. Hell, I make a point of checking through the post-disk-read copylock code to see if it is doing anything unusual. In Kid Chaos' case it simply moved the key to a low address in memory - nothing unusual there.

To be safe, you always crack cleanly - whatever the game would expect to be somewhere, you mimic. Sometimes it turns out to be just a big ruse though :-)

In fairness, Kid Chaos was HD installable anyway - I get the feeling Shaun Southern wasn't all that bothered about protecting it to any degree by the time of its release because anyone seriously wanting to copy it would just copy the HD files.

M;.

Galahad/FLT · 23 January 2006, 00:24

My advice would firstly know what happens when the game detects its not genuine.

So, if you have a Copylock protected disk, copy it, and then try and playtest your copy and note the side effects, that way, you know if you've cracked it or are in the right direction when you start removing those side effects.

As Mike said, some implementations of Copylock are downright dumb!

The following are easy Copylock Cracks:

Battle Command, Sleepwalker, Back to the Future 2, Batman, F29 Retaliator, Xenon 2.

These are good games to get you going. Sleepwalker is a good example because the Copylock causes a glaring removal from the game.

Battle Command is good because it causes the game to crash after one attempt of the game. Batman is another good one for the same reason. F29 Retaliator displays a message which is only displayed if it detects a copy. Would make sense to track down the code that displays that message.

DJ Mike · 23 January 2006, 00:48

Another thing to remember is to always follow the protection through, rather than trying to counter the damage failing the protection can do.

Dogs of War, for instance, modifies a single flag to tell the game whether to put your character in drunken maniac mode :-) Now I spotted that flag as part of the game's code cycle, but just removing the in-game check alone doesn't guarantee that it's the ONLY side-effect of failing the protection.

So I went to where the game actually scans the long track on the disk. Lo and behold, there staring me in the face was the flag the game sets if you fail the protection.

In that example I didn't have to do any more. Outlands is less forgiving - I had to remove 5 seperate instances of the game checking the long track protection on disk! Each one buggers up a different part of the game if the protection check fails, so you have to be careful to emulate whatever the protection is doing (one check, for instance, shifts some data around once the protection is confirmed OK - miss that and you're screwed).

Checks like Outlands aren't difficult - they're just time-consuming. Which is actually what any protection ultimately is on the Amiga. We aren't talking RCA encryption or something hideously mathematical to crack. Any Amiga game ultimately has to decrypt/deprotect itself in order to play - you just have to have patience to follow through what it's doing along the way and try not to get lost :-)

M;.

mcbpete · 23 January 2006, 23:26

Am I right in thinking that Exile for the C64 hasn't been done yet ? I mean like proper 100% cracked done ?

Galahad/FLT · 28 January 2006, 11:33

I have no idea about C64 releases. Certainly the Amiga version was only recently done 100%

01 February 2006, 04:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by girv

Early EA games eg: Arctic Fox used a compiled decrypting loader that is very tough to crack. In fact, anything not written directly in assembly language is tricky as a rule.

The Zeewolf 1 & 2 manual protection was hard to remove properly. The menu and mission brief sequence is run by a scripting system so I had to understand that to remove the part of the script that went to the manual protection.

MegaTwins kept re-loading the code so I had to keep re-patching the trackloader and trainers every time something was loaded. More annoying than difficult I suppose

Manic Miner had something like 12 loadable sections that all had to be individually cracked and patched. Very annoying!

GOOD!

spoUP · 02 February 2006, 02:09

coolest thread ever! i want mooooore! galahad i bow to you!

kamelito · 24 May 2006, 23:25

Hi
Albedo from Myriad was hard to crack on the Amiga, on the Atari ST it was not cracked but a copy program was build specifically for it.
Don't know about Dungeon Master but I knew people who played it a lot and the game always crashed, I assume then that the crack was not 100% and so that the protection was good.

kamelito

Galahad/FLT · 24 May 2006, 23:58

Why was Albedo hard to crack?

Loriciels are not noted for their ability when it comes to competant Copy protection

andreas · 25 May 2006, 01:40

Hmm, nice thread, never noticed this....

Quote:

Hook to look at wasn't difficult. It used the same old RNC Copylock (Yawn!) as every other game, but with the added stuff hidden in the Copylock, the game remained not cracked properly since 1992. The only problem with the protection though, was that it was so subtle, that many people simply didn't notice it. So in the end, was it actually an effective copy protection?

Reading the posts on this forum about Hook problems, it WAS! (Jolly Roger's...)
The save games made with the FLT crack version were absolutely unusable on the original (WHD) version, and would not let the player complete the game. Yes I would call that "effective"!

These posts are years old. Back to present: SPS exists, Number #887 is available on the "common places", so why not do a 100% crack of this thing usable on real Amigas with no HD?

DamienD · 25 May 2006, 13:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by andreas

These posts are years old. Back to present: SPS exists, Number #887 is available on the "common places", so why not do a 100% crack of this thing usable on real Amigas with no HD?

Good idea andreas

I wonder if anybody's up for doing this

Galahad/FLT · 25 May 2006, 13:27

Its only effective if people know its because the game has been copied. with and adventure game you might be fooled into thinking its because you simply haven't looked around the game properly.

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20 January 2006, 12:20	#41
Methanoid Retired Quartex Sysop Join Date: Sep 2001 Location: Roman Verulamium Age: 58 Posts: 1,873	Its not teasing there.. this is serious "handbags at dawn" between Galahad and Codetapper!!!!

21 January 2006, 18:29	#43
Galahad/FLT Going nowhere Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: United Kingdom Age: 50 Posts: 8,986	Some Sierra titles were a little tricky only because the protection was so deep in the game with it stored in big files. Delphine's interpreter protection on Operation Stealth/James Bond, Future Wars is well documented as being tricky as it wasn't written in 680x0 code, it was written in the games own interpreter language. Most Readysoft games were tricky by virtue of their size squeezing them onto lesser capacity disks.

22 January 2006, 11:42	#44
Critter Registered User Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Nth^Dimension Posts: 188	from memory i recall 'escape from alcatraz' was a very tricky one to break oops maybe i meant 'colditz'

22 January 2006, 19:53	#45
Joe Maroni Moderator Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: Germany Age: 44 Posts: 1,303	you always talk about those that are tough to crack... what about those that are easy to do... just for us novice users....

22 January 2006, 22:54	#46
jrom Wannabe asm coder ;) Join Date: May 2002 Location: The Netherlands Age: 47 Posts: 459	...but indeed. A tutorial in the coding section (or somewhere else on a nice website) on how to crack game <X> would be most interesting indeed.

22 January 2006, 23:35	#47
Galahad/FLT Going nowhere Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: United Kingdom Age: 50 Posts: 8,986	I did one in Grapevine Magazine for LSD years ago, but afraid to say its a bit juvenile to read (i.e. embarassing!), but the key elements of cracking a basic novella protection (Carrier Command) are all still sound today.

22 January 2006, 23:41	#48
dlfrsilver CaptainM68K-SPS France Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: Melun nearby Paris/France Age: 46 Posts: 10,412	Please Galahad, empty your incoming PM, i can't send you any PM .

23 January 2006, 00:17	#49
DJ Mike Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: United Kingdom Age: 40 Posts: 100	x_to: There are plenty of easy games to crack :-) Usually the ones where the coders take a decent protection and do something completely stupid with it. Quite a few games which use Rob Northen Copylock are like that. For every decent game which uses it effectively and makes an "interesting" crack, you have several others which fall flat on their faces. When I did the WHDL install for "Sooty & Sweep" I found minimal use of the copylock key: just called the code, then did cmp.l #$12345678,d0 to see if the key was correct. Nothing more. Kid Chaos was even worse - called the copylock and that was it. No key checks, no checksums, no modifying memory. Nothing whatsoever. When I see coders using copylock that lightly I check around to see if any code is picking up on it later. Hell, I make a point of checking through the post-disk-read copylock code to see if it is doing anything unusual. In Kid Chaos' case it simply moved the key to a low address in memory - nothing unusual there. To be safe, you always crack cleanly - whatever the game would expect to be somewhere, you mimic. Sometimes it turns out to be just a big ruse though :-) In fairness, Kid Chaos was HD installable anyway - I get the feeling Shaun Southern wasn't all that bothered about protecting it to any degree by the time of its release because anyone seriously wanting to copy it would just copy the HD files. M;.

23 January 2006, 00:24	#50
Galahad/FLT Going nowhere Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: United Kingdom Age: 50 Posts: 8,986	My advice would firstly know what happens when the game detects its not genuine. So, if you have a Copylock protected disk, copy it, and then try and playtest your copy and note the side effects, that way, you know if you've cracked it or are in the right direction when you start removing those side effects. As Mike said, some implementations of Copylock are downright dumb! The following are easy Copylock Cracks: Battle Command, Sleepwalker, Back to the Future 2, Batman, F29 Retaliator, Xenon 2. These are good games to get you going. Sleepwalker is a good example because the Copylock causes a glaring removal from the game. Battle Command is good because it causes the game to crash after one attempt of the game. Batman is another good one for the same reason. F29 Retaliator displays a message which is only displayed if it detects a copy. Would make sense to track down the code that displays that message.

23 January 2006, 00:48	#51
DJ Mike Registered User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: United Kingdom Age: 40 Posts: 100	Another thing to remember is to always follow the protection through, rather than trying to counter the damage failing the protection can do. Dogs of War, for instance, modifies a single flag to tell the game whether to put your character in drunken maniac mode :-) Now I spotted that flag as part of the game's code cycle, but just removing the in-game check alone doesn't guarantee that it's the ONLY side-effect of failing the protection. So I went to where the game actually scans the long track on the disk. Lo and behold, there staring me in the face was the flag the game sets if you fail the protection. In that example I didn't have to do any more. Outlands is less forgiving - I had to remove 5 seperate instances of the game checking the long track protection on disk! Each one buggers up a different part of the game if the protection check fails, so you have to be careful to emulate whatever the protection is doing (one check, for instance, shifts some data around once the protection is confirmed OK - miss that and you're screwed). Checks like Outlands aren't difficult - they're just time-consuming. Which is actually what any protection ultimately is on the Amiga. We aren't talking RCA encryption or something hideously mathematical to crack. Any Amiga game ultimately has to decrypt/deprotect itself in order to play - you just have to have patience to follow through what it's doing along the way and try not to get lost :-) M;.

23 January 2006, 23:26	#52
mcbpete Zone Friend Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: London, England Age: 41 Posts: 239	Am I right in thinking that Exile for the C64 hasn't been done yet ? I mean like proper 100% cracked done ?

28 January 2006, 11:33	#53
Galahad/FLT Going nowhere Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: United Kingdom Age: 50 Posts: 8,986	I have no idea about C64 releases. Certainly the Amiga version was only recently done 100%

02 February 2006, 02:09	#55
spoUP Registered User Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: sweden Age: 46 Posts: 430	coolest thread ever! i want mooooore! galahad i bow to you!

24 May 2006, 23:25	#56
kamelito Zone Friend Join Date: May 2006 Location: France Posts: 1,801	Hi Albedo from Myriad was hard to crack on the Amiga, on the Atari ST it was not cracked but a copy program was build specifically for it. Don't know about Dungeon Master but I knew people who played it a lot and the game always crashed, I assume then that the crack was not 100% and so that the protection was good. kamelito

24 May 2006, 23:58	#57
Galahad/FLT Going nowhere Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: United Kingdom Age: 50 Posts: 8,986	Why was Albedo hard to crack? Loriciels are not noted for their ability when it comes to competant Copy protection

25 May 2006, 13:27	#60
Galahad/FLT Going nowhere Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: United Kingdom Age: 50 Posts: 8,986	Its only effective if people know its because the game has been copied. with and adventure game you might be fooled into thinking its because you simply haven't looked around the game properly.

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