Toki (Hit Squad re-release)

[marty]

Originally Posted by MethodGit

Do you know if Parasol Stars was changed for its budget release or if it still remained encrypted like with the retail version?

If you have problems with the encryption, just wait till you reach the checksums.
The encryption can quite easily be ripped.
Perhaps go with someting a little less hard

[Galahad/FLT]

Sorry methodgit, but Parasol Stars is WAY beyond your ability to crack yourself.

You seem to be under the misunderstanding that if its Copylock then it must be easy. Copylock itself isn't a tricky protection to defeat if you understand it fully, which at the moment, you don't, its invariably the additional protection thats employed by the games programmer to ensure the Copylock hasn't been tampered with.

Parasol Stars is not a 20 minute crack, it is beyond you to be brutally honest, please don't waste anymore time on it, you shall not be successful.

[dlfrsilver]

Just the atari ST version of this game holds 50 checksums or anything similar since Mick West has requested to David Ward a big money bonus if the game was really uncrackable.

The encryption is one thing, however mick uses 2 or 3 encoding layers written in high level/object code language to get it even more harder to reach the files.

Heh if he had put some checksums or copylock routine inside the real files, it would have been really horrible to deprotect.

Because on the crack only the copylock protection is removed. The encryption and encoding layers are still here. and this was 1 full week if i remember well for crackers to deprotect it successfully.

To say it for the least, Parasol Stars is teaming up like Jurassic Park as the hardest amiga games to crack (there are others, but those are more than famous on this subject)

[MethodGit]

Galahad, don't worry, I wasn't going to even try to begin with. I just asked if the non-scene/cracktro'd version in the TOSEC was readily-decrypted or not, particularly as I could see file and header references inside it that I couldn't in the original. Yet according to dlfrsilver, even THAT has still obscured code.

I'll admit to being quite surprised to learn that one of my favourite Amiga titles, and quite possibly one of the simplest titles around in terms of arcade gameplay and disk size, and despite other one-disk Ocean titles around the same time being relatively easy to look at, is heavily up the wazzoo with OTT protection. Ocean must've really banked on this game's success so hard to determine their own future or something!

So that's what..... Parasol Stars, Double Dragon 2, Shinobi, Jurassic Park and Dragon's Lair as being the bane of the crackers' existence?

[Galahad/FLT]

I don't think Ocean banked on it being huge, just that the programmer thought he'd try and go the extra mile to delay its release, which was futile, as the nature of the protection meant it all had to be removed to get it to work.

But Mick West did try, I'm struggling to recall but i'm sure that he made a valiant effort on Darkman as well.

[dlfrsilver]

i sent an email to Mick some years ago, and he told me this :

"The protection system was made in two parts. Main part was a copylock track impossible to copy. It didn't hold any data, but you could call a routine that was telling if it was present or not. I didn't wrote this part.

It would have been easy to do the routine return "it's correct" in a permanent way, so i have added another protection layer made of many layers of code checksums generated by the most obscure imaginable way, and in it one generated by using an interpreted language made toward this very goal. This in order to be sure that if the cracker modified the code, this would have indirectly crash the game. I spent a very long time on these protections because i requested a bonus (money-money) if i could make the game uncrackable. Unhappily for me, i underestimated the crackers talent and it was cracked in one week. I have never bothered again on copy protection after that.

regards,

Mick West"

[Don_Adan]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

No more changes? So the inclusion of the missing Ocean logo with credits escaped your notice then?

90% of budget versions are NOT based on the cracked versions.

Many budget games were unaltered from the original version that was released as full price.

Really? Tell me five or more Amiga games (budget versions) with MFM protection.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Don_Adan

Really? Tell me five or more Amiga games (budget versions) with MFM protection.

Anything by Gremlin Graphics.

Anything by Team 17

Lots of Hit Squad releases were released as the originals with MFM. Lure of the Temptress for one, plus most of the Special FX Conversions.

Thats probably about 30+, do we need to continue this charade?

[MethodGit]

When Flashtro released their crack of Parasol Stars, did they too have to radically warp the entire disk from scratch (I know they usually prefer bootblock patches) or did they just take the aforementioned TOSEC copy and apply their trainer to that?

[dlfrsilver]

They did the crack for the original release.

[marty]

MethodGit;
I've put a trainer exanmple in the zone for Toki, if you also are interested in training.

[Aezeroony]

Hi all,

Any chance anybody could re-upload the Hit Squad cracked version to the zone please as i can't find it elsewhere ?, thanks,

Aaron.

[Amiga1992]

I was playing this game last night and I really like it, but can anyone tell me why the hell the screen is so insultingly small? I am sure this game can run on a bigger screen!

[butfluffy]

i second the request for the hit squad version of toki to be uploaded to the zone. no one confirmed if the Misc/The Zone!/T/toki.rar file was the hit squad version or not when the question was asked earlier in this thread.

[Superman]

It could well be the hit squad version as it has the Ocean loading screen.

[Retro1234]

Ive put it back in the Zone its an offical budget release but has no copy protection

[butfluffy]

thanks boo boo.
@ Superman - i have never tried this game on the amiga until now, i would have thought the ocean version would have the ocean loading screen.
the game seems fairly good on the amiga i was always fond of the arcade game which is a lot of fun running on mame, always fun to try home console/computer ports though.

[dlfrsilver]

the hitsquad version is indeed not copy protected at all.

[Superman]

This latest upload has the same CRC checksum as Misc/The Zone!/T/toki.rar so it is the Hit Squad version already on the server.

[Retro1234]

Toki is a good game and this is a good conversation

Originally Posted by Superman

This latest upload has the same CRC checksum as Misc/The Zone!/T/toki.rar so it is the Hit Squad version already on the server.

Thanks for confirming that.