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

[Jgames]

Have you ever cracked a game just for you to play, or maybe spread, but without beign a dedicated cracker or part of a scene?

Back in the early 90's, i started playing EOB 2 on PC, reaching, the second underground level, a copy protection screen showed up, because i couldn't let go the game, i had to find a way to continue play no matter what.
I used pc-tools to show up the game code, and after some tries, found where the protection words were, and deleted or replaced them, and it worked.
Other games i did crack was Mortal Kombat and SSF2T, the protections were very simple, same as EOB 2.

There was a game i couldn't crack, it was Flashback , couldn't play it until a friend gave me his SNES with the game.

[BrooksterMax]

Not a code crack but I managed to get my Dad to photocopy the Monkey Island code wheel by carefully taking apart the wheel of a PC version a friend had. Had to alter some settings to get the best quality copy!

[deicidal]

Quite a few PC titles, cant remember the name of the tsr monitor i used. Mainly just a case of circumventing the cd check.

Lucas arts talky adventures a piece of piss just copy the files appart from the audio file to the hdd, create an empty file with the same name and run the game with the command prompt to disable voice and put it in text mode.

Did a ripper tool for Dungeon Keeper (no actual protection in the game) as well to allow you to choose what you wanted installing to save on disk space.

[sneeker]

Amiga - Another world is the main one I remember doing.
PC - quite a few in the dos days, cant remember what they where though

[jPV]

Some games with Action Replay I think Special Forces was one of them...

[Baboon]

Originally Posted by jPV

Some games with Action Replay I think Special Forces was one of them...

Yeah I managed to do a few with action replay too.

[dlfrsilver]

i cracked BAT 2 french version and removed the dongle. My version works on A1230 cleanly

[jotd]

In the summer of 1992 a friend of mine lent me his i386 while he was at the army, and I cracked a ton of games using Turbo Debug. Some games were awfully simple to crack. Put a "nop" there and voilà. The main problem with this tool is that you needed all the memory for some games, and sometimes you could not load the game + Turbo Debug => forget it. Never got hold/tried SoftIce.

Oh I cracked Flashback too, both on PC and Amiga

'Round 1993/1994 I cracked Chaos Engine (with the help of a better hacker than me !) & I did other titles on the Amiga with AR MKIII (Assassin, Alien Breed SE, Zool, Operation Stealth, Microprose F1GP etc...) most of cracks were recycled for my JST/WHDLoad slaves BTW).

Oh and I did a few fake cracks: thought that I defeated the protection, but nooooo. Not enough testing...

I never spreaded my cracks except to a few friends. I suppose that the games were cracked by sceners before me (partly because they were better, and partly because they got the games very fast), but at the time we only got the games by disk-swapping, no internet

And I was never in the scene so that counts, right ?

[desiv]

OK, not Amiga related and I'm showing my age, but there was this BASIC game on the C64.
I'm thinking Crush, Crumble, Chomp, but that might not be it...

Anyway, I remember being so proud when I found the OPEN commands that were related to the copy protection and was able to copy it...

That's about as close as I got to deprotecting anything..

I just remember that, at the time, I felt invincible! :-)

desiv

[rockersuke]

Never actually cracked any Amiga thing, but I did a lot of ZX Spectrum hacking, most of it in order to move copy-protected games from tape to disk when I upgraded to a +3 model. Most challenging ones were Operation Wolf and spanish classic "Abadía Del Crimen", which forced me to learn a lot of machine code language in the process.

Sometimes I did it for cheating. I needed a key that I couldn't find in the Speccy version of Bloodwich, so I began to lurk into saved files... Eventually I found the byte to hack to have the key in the inventory, but I had gathered so much info in the way that I had actually made my own saved files editor. It was a rather clumsy thing with no GUI at all, but did the job.

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[Jgames]

Originally Posted by jotd

And I was never in the scene so that counts, right ?

Yes, "cracking" outside of a scene is alright.
Not related, but i feel i have to tell you JOTD: Good luck with Gods, awaiting your finished creation.

[jotd]

@JGames: I'm pretty close!! World 4-3 is almost done. Expect a release in a few (?) days

</offtopic>

[athiga]

well sort of used a few tools made by others pc thanks to www.dont-know-if-am-aloud-to-say-here.com game exe used to be the cd protection
and the cd stuff was the actual exe lol well the software worked out the key for the encripted cd protecton stuff so you could unpack it and rename it to exe or somthin like that oh an i once searched a c64 game with a cart and found the part of the screen were the 3 lives were stored and alterd it to 256

[Merlin]

A lot of people used utilities like Locksmith to remove protection from games. I remember that the first one I used Locksmith on was FA-18 Interceptor. There were others, but Locksmith was the only one that came to mind just now.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Merlin

A lot of people used utilities like Locksmith to remove protection from games. I remember that the first one I used Locksmith on was FA-18 Interceptor. There were others, but Locksmith was the only one that came to mind just now.

Locksmith or Lockpick?

[jotd]

LockPick & Maverick. On PC there was Crock 2.

But using such tools does not make you a cracker. To crack something you need to figure out how to defeat the protection by yourself.

Funny one: on a version of Nightshift, the executable was packed and a modified Powerpacker unpack segment was there. The routine performed a diskcheckand locked up the amiga if sector was not protected.
But unpacking it with XFDDecrunch cracked the executable. Well XFD did not exist back in the day (but PP unpack existed).
That's the easiest crack ever!! Did not even crack it on purpose

[Abaddon]

Cracking software for any reason is just plain wrong. I believe all media should be heavily protected to the point where it does not work will all hardware configurations.....

I cracked lots of software for friends Vic20, C64, Amiga, PC. On the Amiga the Action Replay MK II & III where my tool of choice. I started off finding cheats for games, then moved on to cracking. I never got the hang of writing games back to disk, so I ended up doing file versions. After chatting with JOTD I moved on to HD installing. I think my first JST HD install was either Megatwins, McDonald Land, or Kid Gloves. Of course I found out a bit later some of my cracks weren't 100%. I learned a lot from JOTD, Harry and other WHDLoad installers. I also hate to admit it, but I learned quite a bit from one of the crackers for Digital Corruption, his nick alludes me at this time.

Abaddon

[Zetr0]

not so much -cracked- more circumvented manual protection

UFO: Enemy Unknown
The Clue

[Merlin]

@ Galahad

Lockpick V2 was the one I used - I incorrectly called it Locksmith earlier. Thanks for the correction.

@ Abbadon

Lockpick got around the codewheel / password crap that always had you hunting around for the the damned things when all you wanted to do was play the game.

[Djay]

i did Valhalla on the Amiga... I borrowed the game from work, just entered the code word, then my girlfriend came around... later i started the game and it asked for the same code word again...

got me thinking, so i reset the game and found a total of just seven code words, then edited the code in a simple hex editor... now you just have to press return... it was also the same time i discovered it was written in amos pro, lol

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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!