Worst copy protection?
 

Ok, so from memory...

Worms code sheet - faint silverish lettering on a shiny black card thing.
F19 Stealth Fighter - Identify this plane from 20 - 30 blinking drawings!
JetStrike - page 1, paragraph 78, 3rd sentence, word 3 :shocked

Argh, so what was the most annoying form of copy protection you came across for those of us who bought the genuine article of course ;)

All of them :laughing:laughing:laughing

I hated the ship recognition in Silent Service

And the bike specifications in one of the motor bike games - Honda RF I think

Dave G :cool

I remember that Powermonger had this 'identify the island' copy protection. You had to flip through all the pages of the manual to find the correct one. Really annoying!
The best part of it was I didn't like that game very much back then and sold it to a friend of mine :p

Edit : Just looked it up and it wasn't that bad. You were given a range of pages to look at, but still it was annoying ;)

Don't remember which game it was... hmm... could have been Ween, No Exit, Turtles for c64..... anyway, a game I had had this copy protection where the codes where pitch black, and the paper they were on were pitch black too, only way I could read the codes was if I held them up towards the light so the reflection would shine on the numbers making them almost visible... lame ass code sheet... guess they made it like this so people couldn't copy them with copy machines.... but hey... it worked anyway for some reason....

Oh yes, code wheels. Monkey Island had one iirc. :D

If the paper was dark red with black letters (very hard to read!), it's Turtles for Amiga (and possibly C64 if it's the same there).

Hands down the most annoying copy protection I ever experienced was the one of Elite II - Frontier. Countless times it asked you to "Enter word xxx, page yyy". Bloody annoying and for me a classic example of copy protection overdone.

Code wheels were cool :D

Was long ago, I mostly remember the back being pitch black, no red... but could remember wrong.... didn't have turtles for Amiga, well I did, but not original... so guess this copy protection thingy was for my c64 version.

Still have my original games..... will never part...

The subliminal copy protection in Lotus Turbo Challenge II by Barry Leech.

Hehe that very sample was pretty cool actually. :D

What was the protection like? I never owned an original copy of that game.

Well, as alexh wrote, it was subliminal. :) If you rip the (IMHO pretty cool) title track you'll find a sample that goes like "you won't copy this game" (or smth. similar, too long ago ;D). :)

It's sample 1F in the title track and it's pretty hard to hear what he sais ;) Really a nice one. A really funny one was in Pinball Dreams. There was a track where a sample was named 'Thanks for ripping this crappy tune' or something alike :D

Haha nice one, didn't know about that sample in Pinball Dreams. :D

Just had a look. It's called 'looseronlaugh' (played when you choose the table) and sample 06 and 07 together read 'thanx again for ripping this shitty tune' :D

The code sheets for Alien Breed 3D II were well annoying. Black letters on black paper. Grr. Not a good idea for a game best played in the dark!

Elvira I recipes (a scribbled card in different colours that you need to exclude with a coloured plastic, i seem to recall)
and Ishar spells: you found that the game had that kind of copy protection only after you were well in the middle of the game. :/

Bard's Tale 3 springs immediately to mind, annoying multi-codewheel.

The Ultima games, by Ultima 7 I'd memorized the number of mandrake roots, runes and other stuff in enough games to get by the copy protection without using the manual.


Still, all of these copy protections don't even come close to todays crap:

Mass effect
Install game, enter license key, game crashes
Reinstall poke back and forth , just to make sure, some crashes.
Change PC, to new PC, game won't install: to many installs

(Grab cracked copy: Installs, no problem)