3 ms·

How do you copy-protect a tape? Isn't it just audio? Can't you just duplicate it?

xfz 4y ago
I seem to remember some tapes were designed to load faster or otherwise decrease the margin of error when reading the tones, such that it wouldn't easily survive the degradation of tape to tape copying. Probably at the expense of the original not being as reliable. I was a kid at the time so could be wrong about this.
darrenf 4y ago
Copy protection of tape games took a different form. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a copy, but there were extra barriers to making it playable. Eg Jet Set Willy came with a card on which was printed a coloured grid, and upon loading the game prompted you to enter the colours found at random coordinates before it would start. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-Code-Card/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-C... Copying that card was high effort, since no one had camera phones or scanners or photocopiers etc.
- becurious 4y ago
  LensLok! http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Software-Protection-Device/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Softwar... Trying to play Elite on Christmas Day and repeatedly failing to enter the correct two letters!
  - vmilner 4y ago
    Thankfully I won a Multiface memory snapshot device in a magazine competition and could bypass all this stuff...
    - becurious 4y ago
      If I remember correctly when the 128K Spectrum came out they changed some bytes in the top end of the 16K ROM that had been used frequently by games as an Interrupt Mode 2 vector table (point I register to be the high byte of the address) so that they could page in and out between the old and new ROM. Elite was affected so Firebird (subsidiary of British Telecom) would let you get a new tape that fixed this bug but it also removed the LensLok protection code.
  - antod 4y ago
    I hated those things. Tomahawk on the Spectrum had a Lenslok - and our little 14" CRT TV had an external flat bit of glass that required you to unfold the lenslok and hold steady at just the right place. Even worse than it was on a normal curved screen. Most of my Elite experience was later on the Amiga version (no lenslok). It was a little anemic on the Spectrum.

xfz 4y ago

I seem to remember some tapes were designed to load faster or otherwise decrease the margin of error when reading the tones, such that it wouldn't easily survive the degradation of tape to tape copying. Probably at the expense of the original not being as reliable. I was a kid at the time so could be wrong about this.

darrenf 4y ago

Copy protection of tape games took a different form. It wasn’t that you couldn’t make a copy, but there were extra barriers to making it playable. Eg Jet Set Willy came with a card on which was printed a coloured grid, and upon loading the game prompted you to enter the colours found at random coordinates before it would start. http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-Code-Card/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/57256/Jet-Set-Willy-C... Copying that card was high effort, since no one had camera phones or scanners or photocopiers etc.

becurious 4y ago
LensLok! http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Software-Protection-Device/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/56946/Lenslok-Softwar... Trying to play Elite on Christmas Day and repeatedly failing to enter the correct two letters!
- vmilner 4y ago
  Thankfully I won a Multiface memory snapshot device in a magazine competition and could bypass all this stuff...
  - becurious 4y ago
    If I remember correctly when the 128K Spectrum came out they changed some bytes in the top end of the 16K ROM that had been used frequently by games as an Interrupt Mode 2 vector table (point I register to be the high byte of the address) so that they could page in and out between the old and new ROM. Elite was affected so Firebird (subsidiary of British Telecom) would let you get a new tape that fixed this bug but it also removed the LensLok protection code.
- antod 4y ago
  I hated those things. Tomahawk on the Spectrum had a Lenslok - and our little 14" CRT TV had an external flat bit of glass that required you to unfold the lenslok and hold steady at just the right place. Even worse than it was on a normal curved screen. Most of my Elite experience was later on the Amiga version (no lenslok). It was a little anemic on the Spectrum.