Scoopex Presents: Gateway Ypsilon cracked.......

[Galahad/FLT]

Firstly, I want to say a special RIP and thanks to Jarre who was instrumental in getting this original sorted out in the first place, as well as Nujack.

This took longer than I anticipated because of two bugs, one really serious bug that caused crashes during the last level that caused the blitter to go absolutely mental, and a mouse control problem that caused two levels to be uncontrollable.

Also there was the small issue of unless I could get the mouse control issue sorted and resolved, we had a game that very few people could play.

Step forward ROSS, who managed to figure out a workable system that meant the game became a game for all and not the few!

This was quite some work, the guy who wrote it REALLY didn't want it cracked, he absolutely went to town on it and caused more than a few headaches, not least the dynamic loading system that used different sync marks to access different parts of the same track, and quite easily the smallest track buffer i've ever seen, which was neatly nestled between onscreen graphics!

Large amount of encryption on boot was pretty useless, but the extra protection he put in to try and prevent a mouse control hack was pretty comprehensive.

Ross had to sort those to get the mouse control working, and then one final sneaky one affected two of the levels making them uncontrollable.

One badly ripped piece of track data that caused me so much grief, eventually figured that out, and she no longer crashes.

Thanks to Photons extensive playtesting and bugfinding, thanks to Cebulba for letting Jarre and Nujack image the ridiculously rare original.

This was done proper oldskool style as all I had to work from was 2 MFMWarp'd images, not even an IPF, so it was like being back in the 90's again lol

The way this game has been coded, there is no guarantee it will work on A1200 and faster machines well, the way the protection was implemented, i'm pretty sure the original only works on 68000 machines, but, its been played in WinUAE and other than slower intro music, it worked on a basic A1200 setting.

If it doesn't work on your 030/040/060 or Vampire, i'm pretty sure I don't need to hear it, because the original programmer sure as hell didn't care lol

When exiting the cracktro, LEFT MOUSE BUTTON for MOUSE CONTROL, or RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON for LIGHTGUN CONTROL.

Ingame: Space Bar = Bombs, F1 = Start Game, F10 = End Game

If you find yourself on a screen such as the game over screen and want to continue playing, hitting F1 in all circumstances should take you back to the game.

The game is....... well, its OK, but the effort by the programmer to protect so heavily a light gun game was an utter waste of time as it originally would have had such a limited audience.

Protection was encrytion, checksums, MFM, different SYNC marks, combination of standard track loading and dynamic loading, mouse control protection, protection in the loader so if you skipped parts certain memory addresses wouldnt be set causing exceptions and crashes.

Please find attached Gateway Ypsilon, enjoy..... or not!

[lesta_smsc]

I find these releases very intriguing! Thank you for sharing the process of cracking this and credit to all those who made this possible.

Do you feel the encryption implemented would have been better received on titles that were more sought after? The latter having quite a few Rob Northern encryption.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by lesta_smsc

I find these releases very intriguing! Thank you for sharing the process of cracking this and credit to all those who made this possible.

Do you feel the encryption implemented would have been better received on titles that were more sought after? The latter having quite a few Rob Northern encryption.

The encryption really was a waste of time, easily bypassed as it was right at the start.

It was the rest of the efforts made in the copy protection that was overkill for a game with such a small audience, had the effort in this protection been put to work on an Ocean title or Psygnosis title, it would have been effort well spent, because the guy who wrote the protection knew pretty much everything that would fuck a cracker up and slow them down.

But it beats doing another Copylock

[lesta_smsc]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

The encryption really was a waste of time, easily bypassed as it was right at the start.



It was the rest of the efforts made in the copy protection that was overkill for a game with such a small audience, had the effort in this protection been put to work on an Ocean title or Psygnosis title, it would have been effort well spent, because the guy who wrote the protection knew pretty much everything that would fuck a cracker up and slow them down.



But it beats doing another Copylock

Lol... I wonder if the programmer used similar methods in other games?

It is quite clever to put multiple safeguards to prevent cracking.

Cat and mouse game... and just as fun as Tom & Jerry lol

[stevsurv]

Thank you for this!

[BarryB]

Why someone would put so much effort into a protection for a niche game is quite baffling!

Thanks to all involved for the release

[Viceroy]

Well done to all keeping the Amiga scene alive ;-)

[Radertified]

Thanks Galahad, Ross, Photon, Cebulba, Jarre and Nujack!

I've never heard of the game but a 100% version is always a big deal. The story that goes with it is a nice bonus

[damon_sisk]

Thank you very much for your work on this game!! I am a fan of lightgun games and am very grateful for this rare item!

[outsiderz]

big thx for the zip.

[ross]

Yeah, nice release Sir Galahad! \O/


Even this crap is now available to everyone
And I well know how many headaches it managed to give, the coder has certainly achieved his goal..

Thanks to everyone involved (even those who are no longer there )
But obviously Phill in the first place for the great work.

[acd2001]

Only a small bug....

When you make an high score, winuae tell you that program
use a non standard format.

[Asman]

Great release! Nice cracktro!

[haps]

G.G everyone. As Asman said, nice cracktro.

[Galahad/FLT]

YouTube video of cracktro: [ Show youtube player ]

[Photon]

And another nice crack from Galahad, it's Xmas at New Year! (Well, almost... we had to make sure it got tested all the way to the end.)

Cheers for the comments on the intro. I uploaded the standalone executable to Pouet and it should work on PAL/NTSC Amigas with 512K and up.

[malko]

Thanks a lot for your work that brings us this release guys ! Big kudos

[StingRay]

The coder of this game was part of the early Amiga scene (he was member of T.S.K. Crew, World of Wonders and some other groups) and worked together with J.O.E. on certain releases. For this reason I'm not surprised that the protection wasn't easy to remove. It might also have been part of the contract that he has to make sure the game can't be easily cracked.

Anyway, I remember the coder most for his articles about hardware coding in the German Amiga magazines ("Amiga Magazin" and "Amiga Special" for example) which were quite informative. He had a horrible coding style (these articles were published in the early '90s) but a lot of knowledge of the Amiga hardware.

Good job removing the protection and making the game available to the public.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by StingRay

The coder of this game was part of the early Amiga scene (he was member of T.S.K. Crew, World of Wonders and some other groups) and worked together with J.O.E. on certain releases. For this reason I'm not surprised that the protection wasn't easy to remove. It might also have been part of the contract that he has to make sure the game can't be easily cracked.

Anyway, I remember the coder most for his articles about hardware coding in the German Amiga magazines ("Amiga Magazin" and "Amiga Special" for example) which were quite informative. He had a horrible coding style (these articles were published in the early '90s) but a lot of knowledge of the Amiga hardware.

Good job removing the protection and making the game available to the public.

I guessed he must have been someone on the scene, but until you mentioned the group he was in, I couldnt find anything about him, now I see he was an early Amiga adopter and no wonder he knew what he was doing.

Surprised it was his only game unless he worked on others anonymously.

Whilst the protection was overkill for a light gun game, how he implemented it showed real thought behind it, Jarre admitted sometime ago that when Switch got the original, they couldnt crack it.

Just pissed off that the bad track data delayed the release so long, I assumed it was some deadly stealthy checksum lol

[Solo Kazuki]

So when WHDLoad version appears?