Ooh got all giddy seeing Rob Northen's name again -- memory lane! DRM's bad sides not withstanding. But I have to say, back when I was a young one, a new relea

Ooh got all giddy seeing Rob Northen's name again -- memory lane! DRM's bad sides not withstanding. But I have to say, back when I was a young one, a new release of Rob Northen's copy protection had me (and a lot of others) all excited; rushing to get a copy of the original to crack it. On the Amiga the protection (of the loader) itself was a tracing (encrypting instructions around current instruction), self-modifying mess that probably broke on any CPU upgrade (68k -> 68010+). In all honesty, I had quite the respect for Rob Northen as an inventor despite the authors grudge. The actual copy protection was primarily just long tracks that was pretty difficult to duplicate without custom made hardware. But once you had unwrapped the loader it was a matter of memory dumping and saving. As for what broke the author's disk, I don't know but I always considered the "long track"-trick a bit of a fragile beast, but that can very well just be in my head. I never did touch any of Rob Northen's code on the x86, but a quick Google confirms that it was pretty much the same. I guess there's some take-away from this, but I'll be damned if I know. Perhaps that copy protections are entertainment too? For some.