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That is funny! One lame scheme I ran into was a basic try to load deliberately bad sector check. If bad, run game. If good, fail. But, they did not check fo
by ddingus 3y ago
That is funny!
One lame scheme I ran into was a basic try to load deliberately bad sector check.
If bad, run game.
If good, fail.
But, they did not check for any specific error! Any error would do to start the game, which was ULTIMA 2.
Because of that, anyone could copy the game disk and cause a disk read error to happen at the right time to play the game.
The easiest thing to do was open the drive door, wait a bit, then close it to see the game load normally.
- OnlyMortal 3y agoIt sounds similar to the Ocean protection which did a disk check. It was, essentially a: bool IsGenuineDisk() { return DiskHasSecretStuff(); }
- ddingus 3y agoLol, yeah. That was my first "crack." I happened to run the game on an Atari computer, which makes sounds during disk I/O. I could hear the sectors, hear the fail, retry, then remaining sectors load. So, count em up, open the door, listen for fail, close, go! Didn't even need a single hex value to accomplish. After that, I got into it on an Apple. Reading this brings back memories. That particular machine is a lot of fun, and it is fun because almost everything is software. Totally open.