20 May 2024, 21:00 | #21 | ||
Going nowhere
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If memory serves me right if you find the code for the "illegal copy", you get access to the Copylock serial key in a rather obvious check |
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20 May 2024, 22:54 | #22 |
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There was talk of doing Putty as a cartridge-only game using the parallel port (discussed in Amiga Power issue 4), which presumably would have been very difficult if not impossible to pirate. The issue was that the carts would have just cost too much for a relatively small company like System 3 to have justified, making for a potential RRP for the game of as high as £60 - perhaps Commodore should have intervened and arranged for a group of publishers to jointly fund it?
One unfortunate side-effect in some cases of multi-stage copy protection is of people mistakenly thinking a game is too difficult or fatally bugged, when in fact they're playing a badly cracked copy with a second layer of protection the cracker was unaware of. It's especially awkward in the emulation era, where playing cracked versions is usually the easiest way, and its not always obvious which cracks from back-in-the-day are identical to the original release, with no new bugs (and no bug fixes). Every now and again you see comments and ratings on Lemon which are clearly inaccurate as they're not based on the real thing people shelled out for back then, which is a minor pity. |
20 May 2024, 23:21 | #23 |
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I remember making a copy of the original F16 Falcon game via XCopy. That game would make it so that short after you started a mission you got shot down by a mysterious invisible other airplane. It took me a while to realize that this was probably copy protection
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21 May 2024, 09:23 | #24 | |
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I'd say yes you could, a Z80 chip for example (or whatever 8bit chip was super cheap back in the 90s - depending on how you powered it of course...), then actually use the chip in the game. That would be tricky to code around. Obviously there would be more than just the chip in the dongle... so it might get expensive fast I guess. Some sort of floating point unit maybe? Obviously you could just replace the said code with 68k but the game might run rather badly. |
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21 May 2024, 09:37 | #25 | |
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25 May 2024, 11:58 | #26 |
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Jonathan Potter who made LZX once told me during a discussion on improving piracy protection for lzx a rather interesting aspect: he did not want to make the protection too hard with later subtle checks to alter its behavior if deemed cracked, as it might damage the software's reputation that people think your software is crap because it does not work 100% when the piracy detection is stealthy.
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25 May 2024, 12:16 | #27 | |
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Something like lzx might be used for years upgrading across multiple versions. |
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26 May 2024, 00:27 | #28 |
Ex nihilo nihil
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Not Amiga related but an interesting reading : https://www.reversinglabs.com/blog/b...security-model
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26 May 2024, 00:59 | #29 | |
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That wouldn't really work, because the parallel port is so slow that you couldn't access the data on the ROM at any reasonable speed, instead a crack would move the relevant data to a floppy disk and would be able to run at more or less the same speed, albeit with lag due to random access limitations. Moreover there would be cracks that just moved the data to RAM or hard disk and would actually perform much faster than the real commercial product. Any sort of Starfox-style cartridge for the Amiga would have to go on an expansion port with actual high bandwidth, and the wedge Amigas have no standard port, so it would basically wind up being A500 or A1200 only, and negate any expansions people already had on those ports. |
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26 May 2024, 10:48 | #30 |
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My idea is that Commodore intended to use the PCMCIA port of the A600 and A1200 as a cartridge port.
Basically it could be used as ROM or RAM or for small accelerators, and it's even pretty fast (or at least, enought fast). What makes me think so is that in the kickstart there are recognition tags to bootstrap directly from it (and I'm not talking about an HDD mode). |
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