Me and my dad were masters at copying those 'protection' methods. I typed or coloured everything in by hand, including Jet Set Willy and Monkey Island's wheel. My dad made a mould of the lenslok and cast his own with epoxy resin so we could use The Artist.
I still remember buying worms for the Amiga and the disks did not have copy protection but had a code manual in all black pages and embossed black print. Took me 8 hours to copy all the codes on the rows and columns onto a dot matrix printer. Paid off and it worked.
I taught myself assembler in 1984 and I’ve tried many times (and succeeded quite a few times) to crack the copy protection. It was a matter of going through the code step by step until you found the subroutine that handled it, or you found some data block with a bunch of hardcoded codes. Very time consuming, but great fun.
I definitely recall having to look up things like "page 9, line 23, word 4" in the instruction manuals of old pc games. There were also some games that had a piece of transparent red film that you would have to hold up to a red garbled page in the manual so that you could see the codes. They got pretty creative back in ye olden days.
Sierra games used to reference the manual pages. Imagine kids today getting a paper copy of a manual with a game. Or having to use a code wheel or whatever that lens thing was she was using. 😂 100% chance my son would be forced into a new hobby.
Not copy protection but when I was 18 or 19 I found an old copy of Leisure Suit Larry, which is an 18+ rated game. It had a series of questions to prove you're an adult. Many of which were about "recent" history and politics. The thing is, since I was an adult in the 90s, not the 80s, I didn't know the answers. I had to look them up in the encyclopedia.
I was just about to comment about Railroad Tycoon! My brother and I still take the piss out of each other for knowing how to distinguish a 4-4-0 Hamilton from a 4-6-2 Gresley! SImple copy protection broken by a random book on trains received as a Christmas present 😂😂
I remember cracking the colour code sheet for Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum whilst in college long after the game was released. I was teaching myself Z80 assembler at the time. You search memory for the text ‘Invalid code entered’ or whatever it was when wrong colour code entered and make a note of the memory location for the first letter. You then looked for the instruction that referenced that memory location and the preceding logic. e.g. the logic might be jump if result is zero, you then flipped the logic to jump if not zero by poking that revised instruction into the memory location. When you then ran the code with RANDOMIZE USR it would accept any colour code as valid.
I remember being perhaps the first to rip out TFMX music format from memory in 1991-92 using Action Replay III on Amiga. Unlike modules, TFMX were harder to rip since one song were in 2 files. 1 for Note sheet and 1 with all samples merged. It were easy to fix the sample length in Audiomaster III on AMIGA. I used Cygnus Text Editor on Amiga to find the start of note sheets. If i don't remember wrong, they all started with @@@@. When note sheets ended didn't matter. You just cut the file somewhere after 5K or something to be sure. lol. Eagleplayer on Amiga could still play them correctly.
That was the first thing I thought of when seeing this: "what about colourblind people?" Also, the some of these protections will have been difficult to understand or operate for some people. The Jet Set Willy one for example.
I still remember “Leaderboard Golf” on the ATARI 800 XL. There was a dongle included that had to be plugged into the joystick port 2. We then “cracked” the “security dongle” within seconds. A simple BASIC command helped: PRINT STICK (1) And then the value of the dongle was displayed. Then we noted the value and dismantled an old joystick. Thanks to the sometimes poor quality of the Quickshot joysticks, there were quite a few of them lying around. A short BASIC program: 10 PRINT STICK (1) 20 GOTO 10 Then we connected the cable from the defective joystick. GND and the cables for left/right/up and down combined until we got the numerical value that we had previously read out of the dongle. The matching bare wire ends simply twisted together, the cable in joystick port 2, the “game joystick” in port 1. Leaderboard Golf loaded and played happily without a dongle. Maybe we even made a copy of the disk for everyone... Oh no. That was forbidden. Of course we didn't do that!😂
Love your channel. At first I was like, cool to see that someone young is interested in this stuff. Then I thought, hey the content is actually pretty good. I want more of this. And now it came to my mind that if RUclips had existed in the 80s this is how a gaming channel would have been like. Keep it up.
@@YesiPleb that was the first and only game i ever 'cracked' using a hex editor.. i just searched for the codes in the .exe (can't even remember what the executables were called on the amiga..i don't even think there was an extension?!) and changed them all to zeros.. i was really surprised it worked haha
Appreciate the dedication of putting what must be a reasonably heavy photocopier onto your desk just for all of us to see. Another great video. Thanks Kari :) Also, not 80's, but Star Control for MS-DOS (1991) requested a special pass phrase that players found by using a three-ply code wheel, called "Professor Zorq's Instant Etiquette Analyzer". Was a really cool idea for copy protection.
I had it on a music program. I think it may have been called "Music Studio" or "Music Creator Deluxe" from... Electronic Arts, possibly? I never got it right at first attempt, and often had to suffer the reload-routine due to too many wrong attempts. Utterly infuriating and thankfully I never encountered that system anywhere else.
@@teebodk3917 yes! I had this music program and elite mentioned by Kari. Both lenslocks were so bad I ended up rarely using them which was sad as both game and application were so good!
The coolest copy protection from the 80s that I remember used a laser to burn a hole through the disk at a certain track and sector. When the game started up, it tried to read that track and sector. If it succeeded, then it knew the disk was a copy, and the game didn't load. If it failed, then it knew it was the original disk, and the game loaded.
This was a popular method of copy protection in the 80s in Australia, not only did they use lasers to burn holes in the floppy disk they could also intentionally write bad sectors to the disk that would have a similar effect. It was a challenge to defeat the protection back in the day.
@@damien_J1793 > I actually learned how to mark floppy disk sectors/track as "defective", in order to bypass those things. In France, we had a book called "la bible PC" that explained a LOT of low-level shenanigans, and that was actually really useful in the DOS era.
Another sneaky one is the floating “half written” sector check. One where theres sorta half flux so that you wont consistently get either a 1 or a 0. The game would check that sector a few times and if it gets a too consistent a 1 or 0 it breaks the game.
Intentionally bad sectors, different numbers of sectors per track, 1/4 & 1/2 tracks, self modifying code, copy checks over an hour unti the game... ahh, fond memories.
Quite a lot of business software on 5.25" floppies had copy protection. The hole in the disk was common, but after many uses of the disk, the oxide layer would produce a 'trail' at the hole and cause problems. Many disks had tracks that were out of normal range or a weird format and e.g. diskcopy would not make a valid copy. We had commercial software (Zerodisk, Copyright) that would copy these out of spec disks and make working copies. At home on my C64 I remember spending much of a week working out how the copy protection worked on the Superscript word-processor! It was quite clever and needed a reset button wired up to halt the load at a critical time so the memory could be examined. Happy days...
This is a great topic...I remember many of these methods, especially the ones you couldn't get around easily. Rocket Ranger and Star Trek 25th Anniversary come to mind as some of the most memorable.
Back in the day when my friends and I bought Wing Commander for the PC it came with a booklet like the one for TMNT that you showed. My friends and I each took a 4th of the book and hand copied the codes to share the game with each other.
Back in the old fun days I, had a similar problem, simple fix, I did a scan on the flatbed scanner and adjusted the color settings, lower or remove the offending color. It worked perfect.
1:00 great i finally now have the code's for my pirated copy of hero turtles lol 😃 Another great video, being in my 40's i never knew these were a thing as i never encountered them, i even owned a spectrum and my friends had other computers.
I remember a C64 game called Beach Head. It was somehow copy protected on the cassette itself. If you listened to the cassette in audio there was a short section of code, then a pause, then the main long code. If you copied the entire cassette then the copy wouldn't load. For some reason I decided to try copying just the main long code, leaving off the short section at the beginning, and that worked fine.
I had a b&w photocopy of the JSW codes, even created a pencil key to know which colours were which. There was only a few I couldn't work out. It's also how I found out some colours couldn't photocopy, can't remember which one came out white, probably cyan. And lenslok, jesus, I'm glad you're showing people what we had to do.
If memeory is rihht it had a resistor and a diode in it that would short two pins out but same could be done if you kept joystick held in the up position.
I remember for Jet Set Willy, there were bugs in it so they printed "pokes" in magazines of the time to fix the issues which required them to explain how to bypass the DRM. Also for Lens Lock there was a way, again via a poke to reset the timer as the loading started so it always picked only one of two codes. Since you had 3 attempts you always got in.... Fun days and we learned a lot
My brother sat and by hand copied the entire full sized code sheet for Jet Set Willy. We even had the April Showers add on room that was published in one of the mags (maybe bits and bytes) back in the day, where you could code in a whole new room. We also had Elite with the lens lock and NEVER got it to work on the 26 inch TV. I think that was back when we used to rent games for a week at a time.
I like this video, I was around 3 in 1990 when I started using a CPC 464. Now in a career in tech, but old tech is just so much more eccentric with such interesting nuances between systems. Shout out to one of the best games (Without silly DRM). Head over Heels!
Growing up my Dad would occasionally take me into the local computer game store, and they'd have loads of games on racks, and the cheap ones would be on the metal wire spinners. I remember going into pickup a new game with him, and I'd spend my pocket money on the cheapest games from the wire spinning racks. I was a huge fan of turtles at the time, so I was super surprised and happy to come out of the store with my cheap ass games, and only to be presented with the boxed copy of turtles as well. I remember being taken back by the size of the box, it was smaller than most of the other boxes we had at the time for games, it just felt like it was made for me. Turns out my dyslexic brain was fooled by the copy protection. For some reason I couldn't do the row and column look up while trying to see the numbers. My dad (bless him) ended up spending gosh knows how long re-writing it on 4 sheets of paper, hand drawn and stuck together in a big poster like sheet so I could easily read the copy protection numbers, but at that point I was already so mad at the game just for that that, I had fallen out of love with Turtles because of it. Not just the game either, I begrudgingly watched the tv show. Even with the new movies of recent years, I still have a bitter taste in my mouth from that game's copy protection. *raises fist*
So glad you covered JSW. I made a copy by hand which took ages to make but worked from what I can remember. I was 11 I think. My kids think I made it all up lol. Happy days.
The most memorable one for me was Dungeon Master. It had multiple checks embedded throughout the game. Those checks relied on “fuzzy” bits stored on the floppy disk. Those are bits that hover between a zero and a one. Sometimes, reading the bit will show a zero, and sometimes, it will show a one. I love your Critters Shirt, by the way ❤
The most amazing thing that happened to me in the 80s was loading a game called Freddy Hardest from the wrong tape and needing a 4-digit code to get to the second part of the game. My friend hit some random keys and... they were the code. We were both in shock.
I remember doing that with Half-Life, wanted to play Counter-Strike with a friend, only had one copy, got to the key screen, punched in a completely random series of letters and... it accepted it. Bought another later on but that was our introduction to one of the best multiplayer franchises of all time.
While this sounds mindblowing for sure, keep in mind my fellow gamers that for most games there were cracked Versions around which allowed to enter any combination to get around the protection :D
I remember having code wheels for the first version of Need for Speed on the PC. You would also get a prompt in game to find a word on a certain page in the manuel. I got involved in the Early BBS days and remember sharing programs over a 2400 Bps Modem.
I vaguely remember a lot of books and such with codes but the one I really remember is from StarTropics for the NES. it came with a letter that you had to dip in water to reveal a code that you needed in the game.
"Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders" had a similar approach to the Turtles game (i.e. looking up a code on a sheet). The main difference is that you could start the game without a code, but you'd be prompted when you bought a plane ticket, i.e. you'd be stuck in one location without the code sheet. Unrelated, I'm impressed by your collection of 80s themed T-shirts!
After my cousin loaned the game to me, I copied it and figured out how to poke the visa code onto the screen when it asked for it--with symbols displayed as letters. So in the end I still needed a cheat sheet!
And there was also a funny cut-scene when you failed the copy protection. Maniac Mansion also had this in some versions with a steel security door that would trigger the nuclear explosion when the code was entered incorrectly.
That brown TMHT copy protection book brings back some annoying memories. Annoying because of the hard to read copy protection and annoying because of the game itself! The NES version is infamous due it its difficulty, but it had nothing on the C64 version. I remember Worms on the Amiga had a similar copy protection book too. Speaking of the Amiga, there was a game called Life & Death where you were a surgeon and it had an interesting copy protection method. The game box contained a phone book (plus rubber gloves & surgical mask!), and partway through the game you were told phone someone, so you had to look up their number in the phone book - the game wouldn't progress without this.
I'm so glad you covered this. In Australia we got a bit of code-wheel action with Jack Nicklaus Golf and Monkey Island, but never saw this extravagant Lens Lock stuff! I'm especially amazed you're covering this since you look like all of this came out decades before you were even born! You're educating someone like me, who was old enough to have been around when it was relevant.
The first Monkey Island game on the Amiga was protected by a wheel type deal with little holes in, worked pretty well from what I recall. Monkey Island - an absolute belter of a game. Shout out to the Critters shirt, very underated movies
Dungeons and Dragons: Pool of Radiance for the Commodore 64 had those terrible code wheels. Three of them if I remember. Had that game as a teenager in the '80's and boy were those wheels annoying. I had the original game and disassembled the code wheels in order to make photocopies and create duplicates. Those were the days!
On diskette, some copy protection was done in the boot sector, and copy protection tricked the drive into writing bad boot sector code on a copy and the copy would never run. Great video - never heard of the last method. I did see the first when SimCity first came out. I photographed it in color and inverted the image. This changed the contrast making it somewhat easier to read. It wasn't perfect, but it was better. Later, after I learned assembly language, I loaded the code and NOP the part where the query for the right response was so it fell through to start the game.
The ones i remember was the word lookup in the manual and the red screen flim. The film you put over your page and it would "reveal" the codes. The film was basically the same stuff from the cheap 70s 3-D glass.
I recall the early 90s, and all the outlaw utilities made for copying copy-protected floppy disks. Especially one called CopyIIPC. One of their tricks was to format an extra track on the disks where there wouldn't normally be one, and put critical info there. Or I think they'd sometimes write key data between the sectors somehow. Aaahhh, the days of floppy disks...
Great video, Kari. Another but similar topic is age verification used in some early games, particularly on Leisure Suit Larry. I had that on my Atari ST (or might have been PC) and the questions were all about American sport and culture, so it usually took a few goes for me as a British teenager to actually get in to it.
I was not aware of the lenss lock!!! what a little nightmare it would have been if I had it... I remember loading game while having lunch so that I can play after. But with the lenss lock.... wowowow a lottery
The most memorable copy protection for me was in a "BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception". I absolutely loved this game and played it a lot, right through to the end. And, at the end, was where there was copy protection. Your team ended up in (from memory) some kind of hall where you had to select a certain set of planets from a set in order to open a door. Of course, the set of planets to select was highlighted in the instruction manual on like the back page or something. I'd never paid much attention to it and, for whatever reason, had no idea that this was how you were meant to proceed. It was some obscure copy protection right at the end of the game. So I remember getting incredibly frustrated and giving up. Years later I discovered an abandonwear copy of the game that explained how this final puzzle worked.
I don't think I experienced the lens lock but definitely remember looking up codes in the manuals on my spectrum +2. I do vaguely remember you could load either a cracked version of the games or preload a crack before loading the game! Good memories!
LOL. We we had a double cassette deck that was used to duplicate cassettes, which was used a lot in the Vic-20 days. It seems that the copy protection in the UK was much more serious than that found in US and Canada. I had never seen the Lenslok before. That is certainly interesting. Of course we tended to use diskettes over tape, so they had different methods for copy protection.
One of the best copy protections I know of is in Starflight. It is a space exploration game where when you leave the stardock for the first time, it asks you to look on the map and use a tool to count how many stars are in that sector. The interesting part is that if you got it wrong, it wouldnt say so, and continue to let you play the game. But as soon as you ventured too far, the "space police" would arrive, and blow your ship into scrap with a message about not pirating!
I lived in the 80's....and I had no idea there were games on cassettes and records. Never even heard of them until now lol. I was 12 in 1987 so you'd think I would've heard of it.
The key to getting lenslok to work is making sure your have the calibration spot on, a fraction out and the codes will be mangled. I had OCP Art Studio with lenslok and never had an issue, in fact after so many uses you get to recognise the patterns to the point where I could tell what the code was without the lenslok as it was never truly random.
One of my first experiences of copy protection back then was when I bought a collection of games for the c64 (well, I guess it was probably actually my older siblings who bought it, don't really remember that well, but since I would've just been 8-9 years old at the time, I did not have much funds for buying games :) ). One of the games in the collection was Leaderboard Golf which required a dongle to play, there was just one problem, the box the games came in did not include any dongle. With what I know now, I'd probably look a bit closer at the box and the cassettes to see how "legit" it looked, but from my vague memory of it, it really did feel like an official collection, rather than something pirated. Considering how long ago it was, I don't even remember if we ever tried disputing it with where it was bought or not, I do know that in the end we never got it working, but since we had.. other options... for playing that specific game, it never felt like that big of a deal.
We had the copy protection bypassed nearly day one on just about every piece of software out there. A programmable drive and a little snooping and you could make it think it always had the right code. Yes, I'm even older than that.
Had Lenslok on Tomahawk and Elite on ZX Spectrum and personally don't remember it being a problem. Elite always felt like the longest tape load I ever experienced.
Love the game play. Jet Set Willy. A game I never could complete, and I couldn't complete Manic Miner either without unlimited lives. That goddam power generator screen where the yellow beam took your air ... it was just too hard😠😠🤣🤣
JSW was actually bugged and could not be completed without a cheat, so don't feel bad. I still have great memories of MM though. I know exactly the level you're talking about - it was a complete PITA. The level that I remember more than any other though (apart from the first level because I saw it SO often), was Eugene's Lair. The timer once once you got the last crystal before Eugene descended to block off the exit was very stressfull...
@@jipster2020 JSW was one of people's most favourite games, even though it was unwinnable in it's original state. Also didn't really matter that you had so many lives, if you ended up in a falling loop.
Laser Basic and Laser Compiler for the ZX Spectrum had manuals with green and blue pages respectively. I found the green one very difficult to read, because it was so dark, so I experimented with various settings on the photocopier. The first copy had an annoying grey background, but the copy of the copy resulted in almost perfect black on white. I was so annoyed at having to to jump though hoops to be able to use a product that I had paid for that I gave the first (grey) copy to a colleague and he paid for my photocopying costs. A good example of copy-protection backfiring on the publisher. I didn’t have a ZX Spectrum when I was at school, but I recall someone making a copy of the Jet Set Willy colour codes by writing out the colours as the respective digits. The resulting sheet was easily photocopied. I suspect the multi page version for the Amstrad would have similarly been overcome by a group of school boys who would rather spend an hour copying a page each, than forgo several week’s pocket money for a legitimate copy.
The Attic bug and some unreachable items meant you couldn't complete it. The Attic bug was where the arrow in the room was moved in memory but went a bit too far, overwriting some code.
I remember the flight sim game ACE having a lenslok, it was a nightmare!!! Also Carrier Command on the Atari ST had protection in the form of you having to type a word from the game manual.., but that was easy to get round if you had access to a photocopier..
I remember a game called Targis on the Amiga. You needed to save the box. (So if you buy it used make sure it has the box). It would as questions about the image on it but after a couple of fails I think it finally asked "Do you like Targis?" A simple yes got it started.
One of the things that the Apple 2 would do is the publisher would modify the format of the disk so that you could not copy it with a normal utility. What we found was that the normal DOS RWTS routines (Read Write Track Sector) would be modified and loaded into the top of system memory and the game would use that to read the modified format. So once the game was loaded into memory, we would break into the monitor and load the copy utility Muffin into memory at $1000. Then we would locate the protected RWTS in RAM and update the hooks for reading in Muffin to point to that RWTS and muffin had a copy of the normal RWTS built in so once the hooks pointed to the game's version or RWTS we could tell Muffin to just copy and it would read the protected format using the game's RWTS and then write it in normal disk format stripping out any oddball format data they used for a protection scheme. Easy :)
ahh, the good old days. Problem is, we had far too much time on our hands back then. I remember copying the entire Jet Set Willy colour sheet back in the day.
I remember Lucas Arts Xwing in the early 90's made you look up and enter a planet name that was indexed by a three character code written in the Star Wars fictional language at the bottom of each page in the manual. It could have easily been defeated by a photocopy, but at least it was kinda fun for a anti-copy device.
Great video. Made me think of how these copy protection methods eventually lead to the Warez scene. In NZ I used to buy tonnes of cracked pirated games mail order for the Amiga and PC. May be a good topic for a video!
The ninja turtles one was used again on the Worms original game released on PC. My mate spent a weekend manually copying out all the codes. They were discovered that if you held down a key for something like 20 characters it would overflow and bypass the copy protection
Did Worms for PC come out on Floppy and CD-Rom, because I'm sure I had the CD-Rom version, and didn't need to use any copy protection. Also got Reinforcements later on, which required copying MOST of the Worms CD to Hard Drive.
@@lmcgregoruk I honestly can't remember, I just remember this black book with gloss letter on a matt background. That and sneaking it onto one of the schools computers for lunchtime educational purposes
In the U.S. we just had to look up Page x, paragraph y, word z from the manual and type it in. I did not realize how good we had it, manuals were easy to copy at the school library.
I have no recollection of the Jet Set Willy CP, played it loads though. Thankfully, I never encountered lens lok, my god that would have been binned in my childhood 😂 I'm sure it's incorrect recall, but I've got memories of certain games that just copying the tape meant the copies always failed to load. Love the videos!
Back in the BBS days (pre Internet)... We had some lovely guys, who would manually copy all the passwords, codes or whatever the protection information was, and put them into text files 🤣🤣... We all just logged onto the BBS, downloaded this - it was dial up connecting direct to a phone + computer, so wasn't quick!
The most common protection I remember was when the game asked you to find a word in the game manual by giving you the page number, line number and position in line. Obvious problem was photocopies of manuals. I do remember copying a game on the BBC micro. The game loaded into a non standard memory location and then loader code would shift it around to the correct location. You just had to copy the game from memory when it had finished moving to the correct memory location.
I remember the Sim City red sheet that me and my friend could not copy. So we went downtown to a printing company that had color laser printers and they actually sold us a color copy. It was printed on a glossy paper that resembled a comic book cover.
Some photocopiers back then could definitely copy those dark red pages. I remember having readable photocopies of these. There was very dark gray noise all over the image but the text was readable enough.
I remember those red paper blue ink "copy" protections. They greatly underestimated the tenacity of a teenager with a ream of tracing paper and too much time.
Only Lenslock I ever encountered was for Elite on the C64 platform over here in Canada. Worked like a charm and felt kind of quaint. Way less annoying than looking up words in the manual for Elite Plus.
I had a flashback when I saw that red TNMHT password book. My neighbour owned a legal copy (most of our games were pirates back then) of that game for C64 with the same copy protection.
Me and my dad were masters at copying those 'protection' methods. I typed or coloured everything in by hand, including Jet Set Willy and Monkey Island's wheel. My dad made a mould of the lenslok and cast his own with epoxy resin so we could use The Artist.
I still remember buying worms for the Amiga and the disks did not have copy protection but had a code manual in all black pages and embossed black print. Took me 8 hours to copy all the codes on the rows and columns onto a dot matrix printer. Paid off and it worked.
I taught myself assembler in 1984 and I’ve tried many times (and succeeded quite a few times) to crack the copy protection. It was a matter of going through the code step by step until you found the subroutine that handled it, or you found some data block with a bunch of hardcoded codes. Very time consuming, but great fun.
Same here. I found rude messages left by programmers aimed at work mate etc in the code of some games
Jet Set Willy! Yay! My favourite pre-2000 game. I have an unopened copy of it on ZX Spectrum which I'm very proud of. 🙂
It's worth a nice penny as well.
POKE 34499,201 still remember the code bypass poke.
I definitely recall having to look up things like "page 9, line 23, word 4" in the instruction manuals of old pc games. There were also some games that had a piece of transparent red film that you would have to hold up to a red garbled page in the manual so that you could see the codes. They got pretty creative back in ye olden days.
"The Legend of Kyrandia" for example. If I remeber correctly :)
Sierra games used to reference the manual pages. Imagine kids today getting a paper copy of a manual with a game. Or having to use a code wheel or whatever that lens thing was she was using. 😂 100% chance my son would be forced into a new hobby.
Not copy protection but when I was 18 or 19 I found an old copy of Leisure Suit Larry, which is an 18+ rated game. It had a series of questions to prove you're an adult. Many of which were about "recent" history and politics. The thing is, since I was an adult in the 90s, not the 80s, I didn't know the answers. I had to look them up in the encyclopedia.
A classic!
And after all that research, it was a disappointment wasn't it 😂
Couldn't you skip the questions by pressing ctrl-x or something like that?
@@ro63rto I had fun with it but unfortunately I only had disk 1 of the game so once he leaves the bar at the beginning the game ended for me.
@@Null_Point3r if so it would have been easier but I don't remember seeing anything about that. I didn't have the box or manual, just a 5.25 floppy.
After 30+ years of playing Sid Meyer’s Railroad tycoon, I’ve NEARLY memorised all of the train images you need to identify on copy protection! 😊
I was just about to comment about Railroad Tycoon! My brother and I still take the piss out of each other for knowing how to distinguish a 4-4-0 Hamilton from a 4-6-2 Gresley! SImple copy protection broken by a random book on trains received as a Christmas present 😂😂
i STILL play that game
I had memorized all the questions for the original civilization back in the day. Willing to bet I have forgotten them in the last few decades though.
Same!
I remember cracking the colour code sheet for Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum whilst in college long after the game was released. I was teaching myself Z80 assembler at the time.
You search memory for the text ‘Invalid code entered’ or whatever it was when wrong colour code entered and make a note of the memory location for the first letter.
You then looked for the instruction that referenced that memory location and the preceding logic. e.g. the logic might be jump if result is zero, you then flipped the logic to jump if not zero by poking that revised instruction into the memory location. When you then ran the code with RANDOMIZE USR it would accept any colour code as valid.
...EXCEPT the correct one!
@@JCCyC - Good point ;-)
I remember being perhaps the first to rip out TFMX music format from memory in 1991-92 using Action Replay III on Amiga.
Unlike modules, TFMX were harder to rip since one song were in 2 files. 1 for Note sheet and 1 with all samples merged.
It were easy to fix the sample length in Audiomaster III on AMIGA.
I used Cygnus Text Editor on Amiga to find the start of note sheets. If i don't remember wrong, they all started with @@@@.
When note sheets ended didn't matter. You just cut the file somewhere after 5K or something to be sure. lol.
Eagleplayer on Amiga could still play them correctly.
Just casually has a photocopier lying around for the first copy protection method. Love it 😂
Its a multi function printer. Most people have them if they work from home.
These days, who doesn't? (I've thrown several away!)
@@jfbeam You threw away laser printers?
What made you think she wouldn't have an all in one printer?
The color grid is interesting. I don’t recall seeing that in the U.S.
I’m fairly colorblind so that would have been a show stopper for me.
That was the first thing I thought of when seeing this: "what about colourblind people?"
Also, the some of these protections will have been difficult to understand or operate for some people. The Jet Set Willy one for example.
I still remember “Leaderboard Golf” on the ATARI 800 XL.
There was a dongle included that had to be plugged into the joystick port 2.
We then “cracked” the “security dongle” within seconds.
A simple BASIC command helped:
PRINT STICK (1)
And then the value of the dongle was displayed.
Then we noted the value and dismantled an old joystick.
Thanks to the sometimes poor quality of the Quickshot joysticks, there were quite a few of them lying around.
A short BASIC program:
10 PRINT STICK (1)
20 GOTO 10
Then we connected the cable from the defective joystick. GND and the cables for left/right/up and down combined until we got the numerical value that we had previously read out of the dongle.
The matching bare wire ends simply twisted together, the cable in joystick port 2, the “game joystick” in port 1.
Leaderboard Golf loaded and played happily without a dongle.
Maybe we even made a copy of the disk for everyone...
Oh no. That was forbidden. Of course we didn't do that!😂
I'm an old man. I actually played some computer games on DOS in the late 80's. They were a pain to get running and butt-ugly as well.
I'm pretty sure majority of players never saw Duke Nukem 1 or 2 :-).
I'm not sure which other still existing nowadays game've started in 80s.
Love your channel. At first I was like, cool to see that someone young is interested in this stuff.
Then I thought, hey the content is actually pretty good. I want more of this.
And now it came to my mind that if RUclips had existed in the 80s this is how a gaming channel would have been like.
Keep it up.
Ahh those were the days. lenslok was to be honest a complete nightmare.
Keep this nostalgia come Kari, great job!
Thanks for a trip down memory lane. I have fond memories of all the crazy anti-piracy methods from the 80's and 90's.
Most memorable for me was The Secret of Monkey Island on the Amiga, a rotating code wheel from what I remember.
I had a copy, the copy worked
Starflight had a code wheel as well. A few of the Infocom text games had some clues in various extras in the boxes.
F/A-18 Interceptor was like that as well.
@@YesiPleb that was the first and only game i ever 'cracked' using a hex editor.. i just searched for the codes in the .exe (can't even remember what the executables were called on the amiga..i don't even think there was an extension?!) and changed them all to zeros.. i was really surprised it worked haha
Oh, yes I remember that :)
Appreciate the dedication of putting what must be a reasonably heavy photocopier onto your desk just for all of us to see. Another great video. Thanks Kari :)
Also, not 80's, but Star Control for MS-DOS (1991) requested a special pass phrase that players found by using a three-ply code wheel, called "Professor Zorq's Instant Etiquette Analyzer". Was a really cool idea for copy protection.
I remember lenslock on the sinclair 48k. As a 7 year old I had hell getting those damn things to work.
Watching Kari fuss with lenslock made me thankful I never had to deal with it!
I had it on a music program. I think it may have been called "Music Studio" or "Music Creator Deluxe" from... Electronic Arts, possibly? I never got it right at first attempt, and often had to suffer the reload-routine due to too many wrong attempts. Utterly infuriating and thankfully I never encountered that system anywhere else.
@@teebodk3917 yes! I had this music program and elite mentioned by Kari. Both lenslocks were so bad I ended up rarely using them which was sad as both game and application were so good!
The coolest copy protection from the 80s that I remember used a laser to burn a hole through the disk at a certain track and sector. When the game started up, it tried to read that track and sector. If it succeeded, then it knew the disk was a copy, and the game didn't load. If it failed, then it knew it was the original disk, and the game loaded.
that actually sounds pretty good
This was a popular method of copy protection in the 80s in Australia, not only did they use lasers to burn holes in the floppy disk they could also intentionally write bad sectors to the disk that would have a similar effect. It was a challenge to defeat the protection back in the day.
@@damien_J1793 > I actually learned how to mark floppy disk sectors/track as "defective", in order to bypass those things. In France, we had a book called "la bible PC" that explained a LOT of low-level shenanigans, and that was actually really useful in the DOS era.
Another sneaky one is the floating “half written” sector check. One where theres sorta half flux so that you wont consistently get either a 1 or a 0. The game would check that sector a few times and if it gets a too consistent a 1 or 0 it breaks the game.
Intentionally bad sectors, different numbers of sectors per track, 1/4 & 1/2 tracks, self modifying code, copy checks over an hour unti the game... ahh, fond memories.
Quite a lot of business software on 5.25" floppies had copy protection. The hole in the disk was common, but after many uses of the disk, the oxide layer would produce a 'trail' at the hole and cause problems. Many disks had tracks that were out of normal range or a weird format and e.g. diskcopy would not make a valid copy. We had commercial software (Zerodisk, Copyright) that would copy these out of spec disks and make working copies. At home on my C64 I remember spending much of a week working out how the copy protection worked on the Superscript word-processor! It was quite clever and needed a reset button wired up to halt the load at a critical time so the memory could be examined. Happy days...
Love the Critters shirt. That movie is such a fun, silly watch.
Yeah, still don't know where she finds this shirts all the time?😂
As soon as I saw the episode title, I thought of the turtles for amstrad and low and behold, you have it!!!
I had that exact game!
This is a great topic...I remember many of these methods, especially the ones you couldn't get around easily. Rocket Ranger and Star Trek 25th Anniversary come to mind as some of the most memorable.
Back in the day when my friends and I bought Wing Commander for the PC it came with a booklet like the one for TMNT that you showed. My friends and I each took a 4th of the book and hand copied the codes to share the game with each other.
Back in the old fun days I, had a similar problem, simple fix, I did a scan on the flatbed scanner and adjusted the color settings, lower or remove the offending color. It worked perfect.
1:00 great i finally now have the code's for my pirated copy of hero turtles lol 😃 Another great video, being in my 40's i never knew these were a thing as i never encountered them, i even owned a spectrum and my friends had other computers.
I remember a C64 game called Beach Head. It was somehow copy protected on the cassette itself. If you listened to the cassette in audio there was a short section of code, then a pause, then the main long code. If you copied the entire cassette then the copy wouldn't load. For some reason I decided to try copying just the main long code, leaving off the short section at the beginning, and that worked fine.
I had a b&w photocopy of the JSW codes, even created a pencil key to know which colours were which. There was only a few I couldn't work out. It's also how I found out some colours couldn't photocopy, can't remember which one came out white, probably cyan. And lenslok, jesus, I'm glad you're showing people what we had to do.
The game Buzzard Bait for my Dragon 32 came with a dongle which had to be plugged into one of the joystick ports when the game was started.
If memeory is rihht it had a resistor and a diode in it that would short two pins out but same could be done if you kept joystick held in the up position.
I remember for Jet Set Willy, there were bugs in it so they printed "pokes" in magazines of the time to fix the issues which required them to explain how to bypass the DRM. Also for Lens Lock there was a way, again via a poke to reset the timer as the loading started so it always picked only one of two codes. Since you had 3 attempts you always got in.... Fun days and we learned a lot
My brother sat and by hand copied the entire full sized code sheet for Jet Set Willy. We even had the April Showers add on room that was published in one of the mags (maybe bits and bytes) back in the day, where you could code in a whole new room. We also had Elite with the lens lock and NEVER got it to work on the 26 inch TV. I think that was back when we used to rent games for a week at a time.
I like this video, I was around 3 in 1990 when I started using a CPC 464.
Now in a career in tech, but old tech is just so much more eccentric with such interesting nuances between systems.
Shout out to one of the best games (Without silly DRM). Head over Heels!
Growing up my Dad would occasionally take me into the local computer game store, and they'd have loads of games on racks, and the cheap ones would be on the metal wire spinners. I remember going into pickup a new game with him, and I'd spend my pocket money on the cheapest games from the wire spinning racks. I was a huge fan of turtles at the time, so I was super surprised and happy to come out of the store with my cheap ass games, and only to be presented with the boxed copy of turtles as well. I remember being taken back by the size of the box, it was smaller than most of the other boxes we had at the time for games, it just felt like it was made for me.
Turns out my dyslexic brain was fooled by the copy protection. For some reason I couldn't do the row and column look up while trying to see the numbers. My dad (bless him) ended up spending gosh knows how long re-writing it on 4 sheets of paper, hand drawn and stuck together in a big poster like sheet so I could easily read the copy protection numbers, but at that point I was already so mad at the game just for that that, I had fallen out of love with Turtles because of it. Not just the game either, I begrudgingly watched the tv show.
Even with the new movies of recent years, I still have a bitter taste in my mouth from that game's copy protection. *raises fist*
So glad you covered JSW. I made a copy by hand which took ages to make but worked from what I can remember. I was 11 I think. My kids think I made it all up lol. Happy days.
OMG, I've never heard about this Lenslok but it's absolutely insane...
So, thanks for this insight. It was very educational :D
The most memorable one for me was Dungeon Master. It had multiple checks embedded throughout the game. Those checks relied on “fuzzy” bits stored on the floppy disk. Those are bits that hover between a zero and a one. Sometimes, reading the bit will show a zero, and sometimes, it will show a one.
I love your Critters Shirt, by the way ❤
The most amazing thing that happened to me in the 80s was loading a game called Freddy Hardest from the wrong tape and needing a 4-digit code to get to the second part of the game. My friend hit some random keys and... they were the code. We were both in shock.
Wow Oo рfff) without malice)
I remember doing that with Half-Life, wanted to play Counter-Strike with a friend, only had one copy, got to the key screen, punched in a completely random series of letters and... it accepted it.
Bought another later on but that was our introduction to one of the best multiplayer franchises of all time.
While this sounds mindblowing for sure, keep in mind my fellow gamers that for most games there were cracked Versions around which allowed to enter any combination to get around the protection :D
I remember having code wheels for the first version of Need for Speed on the PC. You would also get a prompt in game to find a word on a certain page in the manuel. I got involved in the Early BBS days and remember sharing programs over a 2400 Bps Modem.
I vaguely remember a lot of books and such with codes but the one I really remember is from StarTropics for the NES. it came with a letter that you had to dip in water to reveal a code that you needed in the game.
Phew, the LensLok part actually had me on the edge of my seat. 😅
"Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders" had a similar approach to the Turtles game (i.e. looking up a code on a sheet). The main difference is that you could start the game without a code, but you'd be prompted when you bought a plane ticket, i.e. you'd be stuck in one location without the code sheet.
Unrelated, I'm impressed by your collection of 80s themed T-shirts!
After my cousin loaned the game to me, I copied it and figured out how to poke the visa code onto the screen when it asked for it--with symbols displayed as letters. So in the end I still needed a cheat sheet!
And there was also a funny cut-scene when you failed the copy protection. Maniac Mansion also had this in some versions with a steel security door that would trigger the nuclear explosion when the code was entered incorrectly.
That brown TMHT copy protection book brings back some annoying memories. Annoying because of the hard to read copy protection and annoying because of the game itself! The NES version is infamous due it its difficulty, but it had nothing on the C64 version.
I remember Worms on the Amiga had a similar copy protection book too. Speaking of the Amiga, there was a game called Life & Death where you were a surgeon and it had an interesting copy protection method. The game box contained a phone book (plus rubber gloves & surgical mask!), and partway through the game you were told phone someone, so you had to look up their number in the phone book - the game wouldn't progress without this.
Love your selection of t-shirts! Haven’t seen critters for years 😂
I'm so glad you covered this. In Australia we got a bit of code-wheel action with Jack Nicklaus Golf and Monkey Island, but never saw this extravagant Lens Lock stuff! I'm especially amazed you're covering this since you look like all of this came out decades before you were even born! You're educating someone like me, who was old enough to have been around when it was relevant.
The first Monkey Island game on the Amiga was protected by a wheel type deal with little holes in, worked pretty well from what I recall. Monkey Island - an absolute belter of a game. Shout out to the Critters shirt, very underated movies
Dungeons and Dragons: Pool of Radiance for the Commodore 64 had those terrible code wheels. Three of them if I remember. Had that game as a teenager in the '80's and boy were those wheels annoying. I had the original game and disassembled the code wheels in order to make photocopies and create duplicates. Those were the days!
That Lenslok is a bit like a CAPTCHA challenge where you have to figure out the characters 😬
I've got a game with one myself. It soon died a death, 8-10 games I think. My game with it on is The Price of Magik by Level 9.
Oh no !!
You are so wrong !!
The difference is, that the lenslok always worked prop. 😂
Please choose the tiles with the cross walks.
On diskette, some copy protection was done in the boot sector, and copy protection tricked the drive into writing bad boot sector code on a copy and the copy would never run. Great video - never heard of the last method. I did see the first when SimCity first came out. I photographed it in color and inverted the image. This changed the contrast making it somewhat easier to read. It wasn't perfect, but it was better. Later, after I learned assembly language, I loaded the code and NOP the part where the query for the right response was so it fell through to start the game.
OMG! That clear phone ya have hanging on the wall is same one I had! Thanks for one of the few good memories I have! Rock on my Dear!!!🫂🙏🐍🇺🇸
Another great video. Really highlights the hoops we had to just through just to run a game back in the 80s and 90s.
Critters! I loved that movie when I was a kid. It was so cheesy and funny.
Love the shirt, i fiund your videos last week and these are real cool. Its crazy they attempted to send that lil key thing with the disk. 😂
Being a fan of vintage games, I've seen a lot of copy protection methods over the years. The lens lock thing is definitely new to me.
Times ago,some releases were with hand writed codes doc.
Nice to discover such unknown method!
The ones i remember was the word lookup in the manual and the red screen flim.
The film you put over your page and it would "reveal" the codes. The film was basically the same stuff from the cheap 70s 3-D glass.
Kari you teach me more about 80’s computers than I ever knew was possible….and I was a teenage computer nerd back then! 🤓
I recall the early 90s, and all the outlaw utilities made for copying copy-protected floppy disks. Especially one called CopyIIPC. One of their tricks was to format an extra track on the disks where there wouldn't normally be one, and put critical info there. Or I think they'd sometimes write key data between the sectors somehow. Aaahhh, the days of floppy disks...
Never heard or seen a lenslok. Very interesting. Also nice shirt. Loved the movie as a kid.
Oh man, I had turtles on my 128 way back when. I can't remember if i had it on tape or disk but wow, that takes me back.
Great video, Kari. Another but similar topic is age verification used in some early games, particularly on Leisure Suit Larry. I had that on my Atari ST (or might have been PC) and the questions were all about American sport and culture, so it usually took a few goes for me as a British teenager to actually get in to it.
I was not aware of the lenss lock!!! what a little nightmare it would have been if I had it... I remember loading game while having lunch so that I can play after. But with the lenss lock.... wowowow a lottery
The most memorable copy protection for me was in a "BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception". I absolutely loved this game and played it a lot, right through to the end. And, at the end, was where there was copy protection. Your team ended up in (from memory) some kind of hall where you had to select a certain set of planets from a set in order to open a door. Of course, the set of planets to select was highlighted in the instruction manual on like the back page or something. I'd never paid much attention to it and, for whatever reason, had no idea that this was how you were meant to proceed. It was some obscure copy protection right at the end of the game. So I remember getting incredibly frustrated and giving up. Years later I discovered an abandonwear copy of the game that explained how this final puzzle worked.
I loved the codebooks, code wheels, and booklets with numbered paragraphs. It would be nice if games still did that. Or came on physical media.
I don't think I experienced the lens lock but definitely remember looking up codes in the manuals on my spectrum +2.
I do vaguely remember you could load either a cracked version of the games or preload a crack before loading the game! Good memories!
That Critters T-shirt is awesome! I'm getting flashbacks of watching that at sleep overs as a kid.
LOL. We we had a double cassette deck that was used to duplicate cassettes, which was used a lot in the Vic-20 days. It seems that the copy protection in the UK was much more serious than that found in US and Canada. I had never seen the Lenslok before. That is certainly interesting. Of course we tended to use diskettes over tape, so they had different methods for copy protection.
One of the best copy protections I know of is in Starflight. It is a space exploration game where when you leave the stardock for the first time, it asks you to look on the map and use a tool to count how many stars are in that sector. The interesting part is that if you got it wrong, it wouldnt say so, and continue to let you play the game. But as soon as you ventured too far, the "space police" would arrive, and blow your ship into scrap with a message about not pirating!
I lived in the 80's....and I had no idea there were games on cassettes and records. Never even heard of them until now lol. I was 12 in 1987 so you'd think I would've heard of it.
The key to getting lenslok to work is making sure your have the calibration spot on, a fraction out and the codes will be mangled. I had OCP Art Studio with lenslok and never had an issue, in fact after so many uses you get to recognise the patterns to the point where I could tell what the code was without the lenslok as it was never truly random.
One of my first experiences of copy protection back then was when I bought a collection of games for the c64 (well, I guess it was probably actually my older siblings who bought it, don't really remember that well, but since I would've just been 8-9 years old at the time, I did not have much funds for buying games :) ). One of the games in the collection was Leaderboard Golf which required a dongle to play, there was just one problem, the box the games came in did not include any dongle.
With what I know now, I'd probably look a bit closer at the box and the cassettes to see how "legit" it looked, but from my vague memory of it, it really did feel like an official collection, rather than something pirated.
Considering how long ago it was, I don't even remember if we ever tried disputing it with where it was bought or not, I do know that in the end we never got it working, but since we had.. other options... for playing that specific game, it never felt like that big of a deal.
We had the copy protection bypassed nearly day one on just about every piece of software out there. A programmable drive and a little snooping and you could make it think it always had the right code. Yes, I'm even older than that.
Love this
I used to work at sierra online.. fun times! Ty ty
Code wheels were another one. Common with the Gold Box D&D games.
Wow very creative in Europe! The most unique ones I remeber were code wheels that you would turn to match symbols up.
Had Lenslok on Tomahawk and Elite on ZX Spectrum and personally don't remember it being a problem. Elite always felt like the longest tape load I ever experienced.
So many memories of trying to create "Backup" copies of my of course legitimately purchased software
Love the game play. Jet Set Willy. A game I never could complete, and I couldn't complete Manic Miner either without unlimited lives. That goddam power generator screen where the yellow beam took your air ... it was just too hard😠😠🤣🤣
JSW was actually bugged and could not be completed without a cheat, so don't feel bad. I still have great memories of MM though. I know exactly the level you're talking about - it was a complete PITA. The level that I remember more than any other though (apart from the first level because I saw it SO often), was Eugene's Lair. The timer once once you got the last crystal before Eugene descended to block off the exit was very stressfull...
@@jipster2020 JSW was one of people's most favourite games, even though it was unwinnable in it's original state. Also didn't really matter that you had so many lives, if you ended up in a falling loop.
Laser Basic and Laser Compiler for the ZX Spectrum had manuals with green and blue pages respectively. I found the green one very difficult to read, because it was so dark, so I experimented with various settings on the photocopier. The first copy had an annoying grey background, but the copy of the copy resulted in almost perfect black on white. I was so annoyed at having to to jump though hoops to be able to use a product that I had paid for that I gave the first (grey) copy to a colleague and he paid for my photocopying costs. A good example of copy-protection backfiring on the publisher.
I didn’t have a ZX Spectrum when I was at school, but I recall someone making a copy of the Jet Set Willy colour codes by writing out the colours as the respective digits. The resulting sheet was easily photocopied. I suspect the multi page version for the Amstrad would have similarly been overcome by a group of school boys who would rather spend an hour copying a page each, than forgo several week’s pocket money for a legitimate copy.
The Attic bug and some unreachable items meant you couldn't complete it. The Attic bug was where the arrow in the room was moved in memory but went a bit too far, overwriting some code.
I remember the flight sim game ACE having a lenslok, it was a nightmare!!!
Also Carrier Command on the Atari ST had protection in the form of you having to type a word from the game manual.., but that was easy to get round if you had access to a photocopier..
I remember a game called Targis on the Amiga. You needed to save the box. (So if you buy it used make sure it has the box). It would as questions about the image on it but after a couple of fails I think it finally asked "Do you like Targis?" A simple yes got it started.
One of the things that the Apple 2 would do is the publisher would modify the format of the disk so that you could not copy it with a normal utility. What we found was that the normal DOS RWTS routines (Read Write Track Sector) would be modified and loaded into the top of system memory and the game would use that to read the modified format. So once the game was loaded into memory, we would break into the monitor and load the copy utility Muffin into memory at $1000. Then we would locate the protected RWTS in RAM and update the hooks for reading in Muffin to point to that RWTS and muffin had a copy of the normal RWTS built in so once the hooks pointed to the game's version or RWTS we could tell Muffin to just copy and it would read the protected format using the game's RWTS and then write it in normal disk format stripping out any oddball format data they used for a protection scheme. Easy :)
ahh, the good old days. Problem is, we had far too much time on our hands back then. I remember copying the entire Jet Set Willy colour sheet back in the day.
I remember Lucas Arts Xwing in the early 90's made you look up and enter a planet name that was indexed by a three character code written in the Star Wars fictional language at the bottom of each page in the manual. It could have easily been defeated by a photocopy, but at least it was kinda fun for a anti-copy device.
The Star Trek 25th Anniversary game had a 'star map' to 'boldly go' to the right planet.
Great video. Made me think of how these copy protection methods eventually lead to the Warez scene. In NZ I used to buy tonnes of cracked pirated games mail order for the Amiga and PC. May be a good topic for a video!
In the 90s King's Quest 3 you had to refer to a "Spell Book". It would tell you to give the page number the certain spell or ingredient was on
The ninja turtles one was used again on the Worms original game released on PC. My mate spent a weekend manually copying out all the codes. They were discovered that if you held down a key for something like 20 characters it would overflow and bypass the copy protection
Did Worms for PC come out on Floppy and CD-Rom, because I'm sure I had the CD-Rom version, and didn't need to use any copy protection. Also got Reinforcements later on, which required copying MOST of the Worms CD to Hard Drive.
@@lmcgregoruk I honestly can't remember, I just remember this black book with gloss letter on a matt background. That and sneaking it onto one of the schools computers for lunchtime educational purposes
Star Control II Star Systems. I remembered about 15 systems so I could enter the game quickly with just a few tries 😅
In the U.S. we just had to look up Page x, paragraph y, word z from the manual and type it in. I did not realize how good we had it, manuals were easy to copy at the school library.
This channel is going to be huge. Keep going. You're smashing it.
Having your own photocopier is a real flex 💪 I'm suitably impressed 😎 😄
isn't it just a multi function printer + scanner??
I have no recollection of the Jet Set Willy CP, played it loads though. Thankfully, I never encountered lens lok, my god that would have been binned in my childhood 😂 I'm sure it's incorrect recall, but I've got memories of certain games that just copying the tape meant the copies always failed to load.
Love the videos!
Back in the BBS days (pre Internet)... We had some lovely guys, who would manually copy all the passwords, codes or whatever the protection information was, and put them into text files 🤣🤣... We all just logged onto the BBS, downloaded this - it was dial up connecting direct to a phone + computer, so wasn't quick!
The most common protection I remember was when the game asked you to find a word in the game manual by giving you the page number, line number and position in line.
Obvious problem was photocopies of manuals.
I do remember copying a game on the BBC micro. The game loaded into a non standard memory location and then loader code would shift it around to the correct location.
You just had to copy the game from memory when it had finished moving to the correct memory location.
lol. Never stopped us. Your shirt is awesome.. I was just talking about Critters... luz. 80s horror fan growing up.
I remember the Sim City red sheet that me and my friend could not copy. So we went downtown to a printing company that had color laser printers and they actually sold us a color copy. It was printed on a glossy paper that resembled a comic book cover.
Some photocopiers back then could definitely copy those dark red pages. I remember having readable photocopies of these. There was very dark gray noise all over the image but the text was readable enough.
Not really copy protection but the age verification questions in the first Leisure Suit Larry game were a riot.
You is one extremely brilliant young lady, i bet ya folks are really proud of you
I remember those red paper blue ink "copy" protections. They greatly underestimated the tenacity of a teenager with a ream of tracing paper and too much time.
Only Lenslock I ever encountered was for Elite on the C64 platform over here in Canada. Worked like a charm and felt kind of quaint. Way less annoying than looking up words in the manual for Elite Plus.
I had a flashback when I saw that red TNMHT password book. My neighbour owned a legal copy (most of our games were pirates back then) of that game for C64 with the same copy protection.