Worst copy protection?

[jotd]

"affined" means "honed" in french

[Firestone]

Hired Guns!
All those pages with 3-digit codes with a small font.
And even some of them were wrong! gaaahh.
Later I cracked my own originals using Amiga Patch List from Aminet for those who remember that one

[dabba]

Originally Posted by rsn8887

Oxyd/Per.Oxyd, a whole BOOK of codes written in e.g. lightish pink on darkish pink and other horrible shades.

Yes. This Oxyd book has 120 pages in total. The first 32 pages contain the instructions. The remaining pages from 33 to 120 are full with copy protection codes. So there are nearly 90 pages with code tables, each page with 360 codes. Resulting in more than 30.000 codes in total.
Each page has a footnote in one of three languages that the book must not be copied. The printing was in shady colors, so you could not photocopy it easily.

Maybe the largest "code sheets" ever made.

[xc8]

> lightish pink

At least it's not *red* like the darn manual of the 'White Lightning' for C64..

[Megalomaniac]

Anything which caused a game to fail to load on later models is worst in my book, especially if the technology it failed on was already available - Core Design's standard copy protection only working on 68000s long after the A3000 really looked bad when the A1200 launched.

Anything you had to correctly enter more than once in a single load was a joke as well - Brian the Lion I gather asked after every single level.

Of games I had originals of, aside from A1200 issues Striker's was the most annoying, because it took over the machine to the extent that a soft reset didn't clear it - you had to do a hard reset to be able to load anything else. It didn't help that I hated the game too.

Anything which had two-stage protection, where a cracked copy would initially appear to work perfectly but would show strange behaviour later, was a great idea at the time but infuriating in the emulation era - GODS comes to mind there/

To turn the question around, I guess 'good' copy protection is anything which prevents the game being easily copiable without ever inconveniencing the paying customers - so nothing that puts excessive wear through the disk drives, or requires 20-20 vision to get though (especially if the game isn't an action title).