Dungeon Master - Clever Floppy Disk Anti-Piracy | MVG
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- Опубликовано: 26 сен 2024
- Dungeon Master - the classic 16 bit dungeon crawler that defined a genre was one of the best ever games for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. Released in 1987 by FTL (Faster than Light) it saw many ports to different systems including the Sharp X68000, MS-DOS, Apple IIgs, Super Nintendo and more.
It also had one of the most devious floppy disk copy protection schemes ever created. In an age where most games were cracked in a matter of hours, FTL's clever protection took an entire year to crack with many attempts to defeat it, resulting in failure over and over again.
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#DungeonMaster #AntiPiracy #FloppyDisk
I used to be an Amiga developer back in the 80's and we used a similar method for copy protection. I didn't know it had a name until now :). To understand it, you need to know how the Amiga disk drive controller wrote it's data. The controller couldn't recognize a change in magnetization that occurred too quickly. It used a coding system to prevent too many null bits or too many 1 bits from following each other. So basically if you wanted to write out binary 00001111 , the OS would convert it to something like 001 001 011 011 (this is based on my memory so the actual encoding is probably different).
Now with this information, we took control of the hardware directly and bypassed the encoding. We wrote 000000000000 and 111111111111 directly to the disk drive at a certain location. We made sure it would not create an error with the sync marks or track locations, so a copy program would not think anything was wrong. Later, when we read that data the controller would try to make sense out of it and depending on the timing would return a value, which wasn't always the same every time. We would read that location multiple times and look for a change in value. We didn't care what value we got back as long as it was different over multiple reads.
If you tried to make a copy of the disk, the copy program would read the value and write it back properly encoded. So when we read the value, it would always come back as the same number. I think later versions of XCopy would perform a deep scan and look for fuzzy bits and write them back to the disk as we did.
This is all from my memory, so some details may be a bit "fuzzy" :)
Thank you so much for the explanation - the video glossed over the important parts.
For 00001111 would that have been x0 10 10 10 01 01 01 01 where x was the opposite of the previous bit?
@@fanzyflani3576 OK, I found the details in the Amiga Reference Manual"
The raw MFM data that must be presented to the disk controller will be twice as large as
the unencoded data. The following Table shows the relationship:
1 ---> 01
0 ---> 10 ;if following a 0
0 ---> 00 ;if following a 1
so you are correct, in my example above:
0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 =
x0 10 10 10 01 01 01 01
@@DonMilo When you expect a random value from that disc as a random number. No check, no copy protection code, nothing like that. But if the value would stay the same a few functions responsible for generating enemies or other vital content randomly could produce very bad results. No checks to disable, you would have to inject some extra code there. Which might be much harder and even harder if your game barely fits into the memory of that computer. Have fun cracking!
I played with ollysbg and once the table is read you can dump exe. I loaded a puzzle game I bought entered key and followed the program thru key process setting break points . The key is weak part as a hacker can set break points on all calls to key. If eax holds 1 usually uses a jump command to set bit. But sometimes is dumps a bit or s flag bit. Sets it to 1. Some use scramble encrypt to place these flags in a file and scramble them. Then load them and look for those flags. So even if u pass the key code loop you need to breakpoints the decrypt part and step thru the part and look at the addresses where data is decrypted. If done right you will see the scramble data become readable data. Then seconds later scramble up again. If I were to write a protection I would create s scrambled file that holds actual exe code for parts of the dll libraries and scrabble them so if the program is comprise the dlls exe code would be messed up crashing program. Using tricks like machine reboot and other things also deleting parts of the game files so next time a fresh install would be needed to run. Other tricks are terminate assembly instruction or a code to write a routine to s fresh memory spot and call it and pc processor will try to execute the bogus instructions crashing the game. So instead of going around the key they use a window command in assembly to isolate all window prompts. Once the prompt is break pointed stepping thru each key shows math to produce key. If u bought key which I did u can see the first letter load in compare length and then do some xor or other stuff on it. And see the flags being set. Once key math is found the hacker produces keygen . Better to pay for program and not steal. I only hacked the game for sake of challenge as I had a purchased key. Once u own a good key to find routine to get math formula is easy. I wrote s program with 2000 lines of code called xdr for mpcbe video player and used visual studio to write it. So I understand data, stack, registers, the push and pop off the stack. Jmp command to jmp thru instructions, the mov command to move a value into a register. Visual basic commands kinda do the same. For next loop. Jmp to call a portion of code many times and return. Put data into a variable like putting data into a memory address. Hex in hi level 01010 in ammembly. Just buy program lol
The best thing is that hackers must play the game to detect the next level of protection.
Which none of them have the time to. They are in it for the fun of cracking the copy right not the game, playing it to test it out is just boring.
@@maggiejetson7904 yes double pleasure for game makers
I disagree with the general comment
are you sure? I mean instead of identifying all the fuzzy bits, they could just tried to find all the checks in assembler, so they didn't have to play the game.
@@rfvtgbzhn yes I'm sure. This type of multi-layer protection is difficult because when you find and remove part of the protection code you don't know where is next one, or if it even exists. The game always works.
When the C64 came out with the 5.25" floppy drive, the DRM that companies would use was so destructive, my father actually started a business repairing the drives that inevitably would fail.
What they would do was laser damage a sector or sectors on the master. When the drive read head hit this sector, it would cause the read/write head to "knock" out and back repeatedly, trying to read the sector. After a few seconds, the drive would return an error, one that the software was looking for. You could never physically damage the exact sector that the master had and if I remember correctly, no software copying programs ever defeated it. Only hacking and removing the check itself.
In the meantime, this "knocking" of the drive heads would eventually cause the heads to go out of alignment. My father contacted Commodore and eventually convinced them to allow him to be a local repair location for these drives. They sent him the tools and some special disk that when read would allow for manual realignment of the heads.
Needless to say, this method wasn't around for too long. Nowadays, it would lead to an almost immediate class action lawsuit. lol
Love that story! Thanks for sharing!
Lol, my dad had enormity of problems with 8" floppy from dust in Arizona. Well unprotected spinning media just plain is unreliable. Thanks for your info.
Ah yes, memories of error 21 and the death rattle on me poor ol' 1541 :'-(
They wouldn't be too afraid of lawsuits to do it again. About 20 years ago, major record companies included malware on their audio CDs that would disable your computer's CD burner if you put the CD in your drive.
The commodore 64’s copy protection really backfired on the companies that used it. This was because a lot of copy protection failed to check correctly on all but a certain type of drive or two. In many cases, if you didn’t have the original 1541 drive, the game would fail to load on something like the 1541c. So for many, the only games that would not play on their C64 were the ones with various amount of on-disk protection, leaving the cracked versions as the only ones that would run.
To sum it up:
If you bought Dungeon Master you'd play a dungeon crawler.
If you pirated it, you'd play a puzzle game instead. :D
I honestly regarded the copy-protecting as a puzzle to be solved before the game. I reverse engineered a few of the games' codes just by trial and error. Felt so satisying when I got another one correct. Eventually I got enough to play the game most of the time. And otherwise just reset for a new set of random questions.
If I ever was to get into making games, and being skilled or being backed up by skilled enough people, I would delibirately make pirate edition of the game - make it delibirately get weirder and something maybe akin to how Malklavians experience Vampire the Masquarade Bloodlines versus other races. Make it change the game style entirely and basically be it's own interesting thing, making basically "The breaking down" version of my own game, and have the full version.
Maybe even including that edition with the legit ones and including unique story but without needed context in the breaking version while offering completly own but - also encouraging to buy version of the game.
Of course, it would take one crazy indie without any self preservation instincts to actually get something like that out I am just shooting ideas I probably will never get to create.
@@SumeaBizarro I personally enjoyed how the creators of Game Dev Tycoon did it. They released their own "pirated" version of the game up on the relevant websites the same time they released the actual game.
Everything plays like normal for a while, until the players suddenly start losing money and there is seemingly no way around it. You eventually get a message saying "we're losing all of our money to pirated games" which you couldn't deal with, leading a bunch of people who "pirated" the game to out themselves by asking on forums how to get around the piracy issue.
it is a beautifully constructed piece of irony.
@@IndiBrony Later on, the "Pirate mode" was made available in legal copies, as an optional setting. And with the ability to make DRM to counter piracy
@@IndiBrony Yes, was thinking about that example when I read the OP comment. That's a real good way to maybe make some people aware that piracy is a real problem.
Another example, in Crysis 3, the final boss was unbeatable when you used a pirated version of the game. That's extra evil...
But on the other hand, this also may lead to negative reviews if players are unaware that those changes are a result of copy protection. They may think it's because the game itself is flawed.
I always liked the copy protection of "Pirates!", when you entered the code wrong you could still play the game, but the difficulty was really high.
FTL had some of the most clever anti-pirating code. A couple of their other titles:
The game SunDog would let you play most of the game, but when you got to the final part a message would appear telling you that you can't see the ending because you are a thief. OIDS was the smartest though. This Choplifter-like game would let you play the game, only the shield recharge would simply not do anything. So you could play the game, and see how cool it was, but it was really, really hard. All of these protections worked in that I eventually did buy all the games.
Years later, I worked on a PC game and was in charge of adding anti-pirate code. The code I added was subtle, the jump height was multiplied by 0.95. This made a fairly close jump about 15 minutes or so into the game into an impossible one. Not Spyro by any measure, but still fun to read the boards and see the players discussing that particular jump and asking for advise on how to make it.
nice
That's fantastic, thanks for sharing. Would be hilarious if the x.95 jump height was only on the weekends... like, you can pirate our game, sure, but you can only play it proper Monday through Thursday before 6pm...
Sounds like Mirrors Edge. I believe this kind of protection is a bad idea btw.
@Bernhard Häussermann When I was 6yr old I played Spyro at a friend who did not know his cousin bought a pirated copy for him. (Which came with CD print and manual and stuff). I liked it, but my friend told me why it's annoying overhyped garbage and so we avoided spyro for basically forever. I found out about 20 years later what was the probable cause of the game being broken.
@@paulmeyer9149 That's better advice for 20 years ago than today. Also, you and your friend are probably only part of a tiny percentage of people who legitimately did not know they had pirated copies.
Today people look things up. The 0.95 jump height would be doing pretty quick, and basically right away you'd get search results saying pirated copies change the jump height.
The key is to pepper these things all over. People will know quickly if it's a copy protection scheme, but if every time someone tries to use the latest cracked version something new doesn't work right, they'll get frustrated and either just stop playing or go but a legit copy. Issues with cracked version will also likely prevent more people from initially trying a cracked version.
You don't really care about people who won't play if it isn't cracked. You care about the ones willing to pay if they can't get it free.
Loved this! Honestly didn't know the specifics of how these copy protection schemes worked so yeah, thanks for enlightening 👍
thank you sir. means alot coming from you !
How many folks read this with LGR’s voice in their head? ✋🏼
@@davidinark Everyone. :)
the legend himself (you even taught me that every game has a pc port lol)
IT'S THE LAZY GREEN GIANT
Me: I couldn't care less about floppy disk DRM
Also me: Wow. MVG uploaded a video about floppy disk drm. I've always wondered how that worked
tbh MVG has made me interested in a lot of otherwise boring things
@@KibSquib48 Cause the man knows how to hold People's attention without breaking a sweat.. Someone may have the most exciting life but can make it seem boring when they talk.. Someone may have the most boring life but can it seem action packed when they talk.. It's about holding the attentions of others..
Exactly me.
Hands up who was so cheap that they used a drill to drill a hole on the other side of the floppy to make them double sided (or was it HD?) because double sided floppies was more expensive back in the day?
Me: Raises ✋
Reminds me back then when my cousin talked about this kind of thing. I have no idea at all about it back then.
As my grandfather likes to say, "a locked door only keeps an honest man honest."
Your Grandfather seems like the type of man I can listen to for hours.. seriously..
Your Grandfather is correct.
Another way of stating that is "Locks are only to keep honest people out"
The legal thinking of the time was that software is code and data and math, not something written by an author or created by an artist.
Software authors and companies did of course claim copyright and become increasingly paranoid/heavyhanded about being paid for their work.
But it technically wasn't "piracy" because no laws existed to protect software. You can't "own" math and you can't "steal" math.
Everyone knew sharing and copying software was "perfectly legal", most never thought it "dishonest" or "wrong" or "unethical" at all.
FWIW I didn't pirate, but I did hex-hack a copy of Deluxe Paint II so that it would include dh0: instead of df0: (hard disk instead of floppy) so I could load it off of my hard drive. I didn't want to be held hostage to the variable quality of 3-1/2 inch floppies and have my expensive program go bad on me!
That's cute, but it's super inaccurate. It completely ignores the fact that most crimes are crimes of opportunity. Imagine a thief in a parking lot looking for a car to break into. They will stroll through the lot, casually looking inside windows and testing the door handles. If they can find an unlocked door, that's the door they're going to open first, the unlocked one.
There was a string of break-ins by local teens in one of my old neighborhoods. The key similarity: all these houses left their back door unlocked, while people were home. They'd slip into the kitchen or something and snatch a laptop. Locking the door would be enough to stop that as breaking and entering is not only more illegal than trespassing, but also louder and more time-consuming, leading to a higher probability of being caught.
A more accurate grandpa saying is, "Security is not about making it impossible for a thief to break in, just about making it harder than breaking into your neighbor's home."
Of course, copy protection is different than a house or a car. But it's also not about hindering every single thief, just enough that it's not easy to be common-place. I disagree with it and think there are much better methods to discourage people from piracy, like fair pricing and convenience of use.
On a CD or DVD pits and lands are NOT directly representing ones and zeros, but the CHANGE from pt to land or land to pit would be a one and NO CHANGE would be teh zero.
Just FYI ;)
NZR encoding?
but we're talking about floppy disks
So changing the first land to a pit flips everything that's written after it. Nice piece of info. Thanks
@@spiney2291 Floppy disks don't have pits and lands, do they? I thought they were magnetic only. Only optical disks would have pits and lands.
You do know he briefly talked about CD bits in the video, right?
Incredible story mate. My love for computers began on my friend's C64 before my parents finally brought me an Amiga 600. It was an incredible time as a kid on those machines. The range of games and going to computer meetups to get copies of games was fun. Piracy was all I knew as a kid who had no money but an obsession for computers and gaming. This video brought back fond memories I'd forgotten. Thx
Oh my god, I did not expect to see you here Karl! Love your channel
I remember playing this game, buying it 3 times as I broke one disk, had the disk drive mangle one other copy when the sliding cover spring failed. But I also remember Never buying it again, it was "found out" that you could slow the drive speed down with a small screwdriver to a certain speed, write to a certain set of sectors and that basically duplicated the copy protection. You could tell the "cool hackers" by seeing that their drives had a small hole in the top so that they could adjust the speed without having to open the drive cover.
11:07
Quantum bit copy protection... dayum!
Ahead of their time by 30 years.
It's amazing how a 1980s home computer game is impossible to crack, but many modern AAA PC games could be cracked within a month from it's release
@@lucasn0tch *Was impossible to crack and games nowadays face hundreds more hackers than old games back in their day.
Plus it is like a sport to them (like lock picking) and groups compete to be the very first for street cred and bragging rights.
@@lucasn0tch It's not impossible to crack. It was cracked. The problem was, people stopped trying to crack it for too long because they thought they already had. When it turned out they hadn't they had to go in depth into the code and figure out what they missed.
Quantum? No...it'd have to be both 1 and 0 a while also not being both 1 and 0, not manually switched. As for 30 years, randomized pointers and whatnot were a thing somewhere in this period as well.
Loss of honor? Technically, these groups are amazingly clever and tenacious. But the egos are over the top.
I used to crack C64 games back in the day. From the classic tape drive buffer protection all the way to copy protection that executed entirely inside the disk drive, cracking was often more fun than the game itself.
It still is.
@@subtledemisefox Being told that you can't do something sure does make for a fun challenge. Back when I was in IT my favorite cases were the ones where the "Geek Squad" said a PC could not be fixed without a format and reinstall.
True, I used to crack Windows applications and make game trainers. Most of the times I didn't even care what program it was as long as I could crack it and release it as a zero day release. Gotta love Assembly X86 and C.
@@padmad3k63 Do you still have any of your trainers or stuff that you cracked?
@@nosirrahx ... I'm pretty sure "format and reinstall" was the Geek Squad's default position, because it was the quickest and easiest way to return a PC to a known-good, clean state without having to do any investigative work or touch the customer's data (or potentially expose their network to viruses), or more importantly conduct any particular staff training. Just give them a one-page cheat sheet that says "tell the customer you'll have to wipe their machine, put the bootable system image DVD in the drive, press [the magic keys], and come back in a couple hours".
I even brewed up something similar for an old PC given away to the daughter of a family friend to guard against the possibility of support calls coming back down the line (or against them not being able to do that). Stack of CDs made with Nero Imagedrive of the fully installed but otherwise bare system, marked "if all else fails..." + instructions for starting the reimage process...
Probably anything they said was a reimage job could be fixed in under an hour using rudimentary tools, by a halfway competent tech not working for a big box electronics retailer, maybe adding a few hours to run longform diagnostics for the trickier cases (actual interactive time wouldn't be much more though - set it up and then go do something else for a while). And I would expect half the things they said were fixable that way actually weren't... e.g. failing hard drives or memory, or a lack of meaningful virus protection crossed with a user who's a little too adventurous (or naive) when it comes to the internet...
1:45
"I have no fuc-"
Interesting... I think I can guess how the sentence ended.
I have no fuchsia pigment.
@@billytrespassers3123 Nailed it!
king idea
This is Doug Bell, the lead developer on Dungeon Master and the mind behind the DM copy protection.
Nice video. You got most of it right, except the part about the fuzzy bits. The disk protection was actually more sophisticated than the fuzzy bits used by other games at the time. Instead of one or more “random” bits (bits written with a magnetic signature on the threshold between a 1 and a 0), the bits on the sector were simply smaller than a normal bit. The position of the magnetic signature was moved in a sinusoidal pattern from one side of the track to the other side and back. This meant that the disk controller would start reading 1s (or 0s) and at some point switch to reading the opposite. So instead of random bits, it would read random length sequences of bits. This was important because a fuzzy bit could be created by a standard disk drive by toggling the write head on and off while it was writing. The bits on the Dungeon Master disk can only be written by one particular brand of disk duplicator that cost $40,000 at the time.
Thanks for your amazing game Doug (and the protection was elegant too)! My best friend and I played through it (yes on an original disc) after school all through high school. Truly elegant. And yes we finished it!
Unfortunately my friend is no longer with us but playing your game together created lasting memories of him that last to this day. Miss you Neall!
"I have no fu-"
Yeah that is pretty much me when dealing with copy protection.
Fuzzybit is a genius anti-piracy solution. Even today it can give you loads of headache.
Yeah, considering how small amount of PCs have disc readers still in them :P
The Schrödinger's 1/0 bit killed me :D
When I first discovered "Dungeon Master" in 1988 for the first time on the Atari ST my mind was completely blown. The ability to throw a shuriken at metal bars with some actually flying through the open space between them was simply jaw dropping.
Somebody describing almost exactly the same scenario as the one you mentioned is what made me get an Atari ST. Dungeon Master is still the only game that has made me get a system just so that I could play one particular game.
@@jaysmith2858 I know someone who also picked up an Amiga 2000 & monitor for Sword of Sodan...back in the day.
@@jaysmith2858 There has been a ton of later dungeon titles built on the back of this original.
@@ridiculous_gaming I know there have been a couple of fan made DM dungeons, but I've not played any of them.
Correction: 6:10 Spyro the Dragon was the first game of the series. The one with the protection is Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon.
Yeah, but it's not called Spyro 3 on the cover, just "Spyro: Year of the Dragon" hence people confusing it for the first one.
@@lmcgregoruk yeah, that might be true.
I know almost nothing about Amiga and Atari computers, so this was a fascinating look into it all. Awesome work, my dude!
I pity the fool who didn't grow up with Amiga ;)
@@Cuzjudd - ProTracker FTW.
All You need to Know is that The Amiga was heaps better
@@NeuronalAxon I agree Spend many hours making *.mod's
Yeah sadly us here in America really didn’t have the Amiga at all. Sucks because it looked like an amazing machine. I had a C64 tho for most of my childhood growing up
In ancient time DRM/copy-protection only negatively affect pirated copies,
in recent years its negatively affect legitimate users where pirated copy would have better experiences.
Where have it gone wrong?
They're trying too hard to beat the pirates completely, rather than just slow them down. They need only delay them for less than a month, since most sales are made in the first two weeks.
That's not correct, those stupid "enter code from manual/wheel/etc" were a massive pain for legitimate users too. And modern game DRM is basically transparent...
Or put them in the Epic store as exclusives. This has made piracy big again
Timothy Gibney Steam had a monopoly on the market lmao. The only way for Epic to realistically compete in the AAA market was to buy out exclusivity rights. But I guess Epic bad, Steam good, or something.
@@kilrahvp And by "transparent" you mean that they can then look through all your stuff remotely? ;J
As for the OP's question about where have it gone wrong: I would say at the time when people started accepting such shizzle and kept paying them money for such "broken" products. If you support what you don't like, it grows and screws you over even deeper next time. That's why I don't use any software with DRMs, nor any proprietary software whatsoever.
I hadn't heard of this one. It's very sneaky.
Two of my favourite "gotcha" anti-piracy systems were both from the 1990s. The first was the Turnpike email/usenet client that like much '90s software had a unique installation key for each copy. You could install it on as many machines as you liked, but any messages it sent were encoded with this key in the headers and if you received an email with the same key it would generate a cryptic-looking Windows dialog stating "Unknown message from myself." When people got this "error" message they would invariably turn to the product's own usenet support group asking why their friends couldn't email them, only to be told that their friends should buy their own copy. Brutal. It would probably have been described as a "self-own", had the term been around.
The second was the official Scrabble game for the Psion PDA. Supplied on a solid-state disk, the game had an extra zero-byte file written into the SSD's flash memory that could be seen by, but not copied by, the file system. With this file in place the game played normally. With it missing, as happened when you cloned the SSD, the game would appear to play fine but every time you played a word all of the replacement tiles you got would be "E". After two or three moves you ended up with a rack of EEEEEEE and the game became unwinnable. I don't know if anyone ever reported this one as a "bug" but yes, I did discover it first hand when I bought a copy for my brother and tried to rip it off. I had a good laugh about it and went and bought my own copy. A success all round for whoever thought it up.
That fuzzy bit stuff is wild, I never knew about that before. Thanks for the video!
Its like qbit
I remember when the publishers thought they were being clever by making their docs dark brown on very slightly lighter dark brown to try to defeat photocopying. Unfortunately they also defeated human eyeballs, with which I was equipped, which forced me to hit the warez BBSes for cracked versions even for games I'd purchased.
They probably used a variety of colours to try to defeat photocopiers.
@@NoJusticeNoPeace Yellow is a real bitch for some b/w copiers
The local "pirate club" over here simply copied it by hand, and then photocopied that. As an interesting piece of history, i still have that photocopy but the proper crack was quickly available in their bbs if i recall correctly. That said it was kind fun trying to see how far you could get with a city constantly getting disasters. In those days my country had banned imports, so its not like you could obtain a legit copy legally, as absurd as that sounds... I know a similar thing happened to eastern bloc countries. 98% of computer software in my country was pirated back then.
Dungeon Master still to this day, holds the number one spot for consuming the most amount of time for one specific title. I played the HELL out of this game. Countless hours spent training my team *WAY* beyond what was required to finish the game.
Yes indeed, although I think Captive has eked it out in recent years for me thanks to emulation. (^_^)
2K8Si even though I wasn’t born yet I honestly think it’s one of the classic and that there are many more gems from back then. I really want to get old PCs for playing old games. The downside being the death of crts and parts in the next 10 years but I guess I should enjoy it while I can I suppose.
Why doesn't this have more likes? I just want to say here that one of the hardest things to do with a RUclips channel is bring content and stories that we haven't all seen already. MVG does this over and over again. It's especially impressive considering the topic of retro gaming is largely based on "old news," and the category is pretty heavily populated on RUclips already.
Awesome work!
Fascinating stuff! Back in the day we needed a form of copy protection for our training programs, and as we were a small company we didn't want to pay someone to do it for us. After a bit of experimentation I discovered a byte deep in the floppy boot sector that I set to a non standard value. Our software looked up this value at startup, (install disk had to be in the drive at startup) and if not present, it wouldn't run. An additional effect was that even doing a diskcopy wouldn't work, as the boot sector was never copied by that program.
Then one day we got a call from a customer saying they'd found a virus on our install disk. Turns out that there was indeed a virus around which did the exact same thing to disks. Oddly, of all the customers we had, only this particular company had anti virus software that spotted this.
Another odd form of copy protection was used by an authoring program called TenCore - it had a physical bad spot on the disk that was actually visible to the naked eye!
Wow. Watching this brought back so many memories. I think i played every game you used footage of. Some i thought i forgot. Watching the X Copy Pro footage brought a tear to me eye. Me and my best mate Chris would sit down for hours after school swapping and copying games. 12 years old. Thank you for this. I remembered things I had forgotten.
"Pirates at bay" seems like pun _intended_ to me, haha!
It was way before my time, but your video fascinated me nonetheless. Always great to watch!
Very clever, but how reliable was it? I would imagine depending on the particular magnetic strength of your drive, the ambient temperature, the amount of electromagnetic noise nearby, etc, the fuzzy bit might not be very fuzzy and might read the same almost every time. Were there a lot of people complaining about these issues even on a legit copy?
Incidentally, cartridges can do a similar trick called Open Bus. By reading memory that's not connected to anything, the result might be pseudorandom (depending how the system was wired). I don't know if any games used that, but it would have been a clever "fuzzy bit". However, Super Mario All Stars did this by accident. The variable that enables debug mode was never set, so every time you played it there was a chance it would read as "on". (Since this was in the SNES memory rather than the cartridge, it tended to be the same every time on the same console.) Also, Final Fantasy 1 uses this method for random number generation, but not for copy protection.
Many SNES games do use a somewhat similar trick: write to some region of the save memory, read back another region, and compare. On a real cartridge the memory was a certain size and repeated over the whole range, so the result would match. On a copy, they usually had more memory, so it wouldn't match.
80's Scene Hackers: "Been there, done that. Let's hack this."
Dungeon Master Fuzzy Bit: "Hold my 1 or 0."
Thanks for that tid bit!
@Brad Viviviyal Plot twist: it wasn't copyright protection, just sloppy coding with lots of bugs :)
@Brad Viviviyal whether there never was a craked version i can't tell (well 14:05 gets me straight on that matter). what i know is that i had a 'cracked' one and played Dungeon Master on the ST1040 all the way to the end. At some point i even had a screenshot of the final screen but i lost it.
Same with Sundog but without screenshot though.
i laughed way too hard at this
I got an Atari 520ST in 1987, and had it upgraded to 1 MB of RAM. One of my first games, other than the superb SunDog, was Dungeon Master. I played the hell out of that game on my ST for the 3 years I owned my system! When I sold my ST and switched to a 286-12 PC in 1990, I really missed my ST and that game more than anything else!
I still play it today on my PC using DosBox! I can honestly say I have played DM more than just about any other game before or after I got DM, even when compared to modern games on my various PC's I have had since 1990! Dungeon Master truly is one of the all-time greats, and for me, is quite possibly THE best game ever made!
I used to play that Indy 500 game so much. Loved that game.
I even remember a friend complaining, that the game wouldn't work properly on his ST :).
That fuzzy bit is genius! Really cool stuff. You know they were smart: stuff like the game slowly breaking is really cool.
(I mean it's cool, but I'm not a fan of DRM :P)
i dont think copy protection is the same as DRM lol
@@theSato DRM is an umbrella term used for a multitude of ways to weaken and stop your right to own what you have bought, and that includes making a copy.
Oh yes, it is all very genius. Until the day the checks start failing on legit copies. Then it is the same crap shot that modern drm represents.
@@Finsternis.. Yup. My "favorite" was that my legal copy of Red Alert 2 thought it was pirated and blew up the base after a couple of minutes.
(As an aside, the way they printed the key has practically faded completely now, nearly 2 decades later. Double DRM fail.)
@@Finsternis.. exactly, one of the many problems with drm
LOL! X-Copy! Man, I completely forgot about that! Wow, talk about Amiga memories!
Totally forgot about it too :) Haven´t seen this interface for 25+ years.
Talk about bittersweet nostalgia...
I remember getting my 1meg expansion before my 2nd floppy... X-Copy read the whole disk in one reading... so happy... kids won't understand the struggle... spending an hour after school copying games, checking newly copied games....
Yep, There came a time in my Amiga-owning days when I realized I was spending more time staring at little numbers appearing in a grid on X-COPY than actually playing games. At least copying games for the Spectrum (my previous computer) didn't hog the actual computer itself while you did it!
Then they came back tried to be legit and released the first dvd pirating software DVD X-copy iirc
I miss this type of DRM. If you bought it, you faced no restrictions at all.
The best retro video game channel,
No other,
This!
LGR would like a word.
My Life in Gaming is waiting in line.
My life in Gaming and DF retro want to know your location
8-bit Guy is also very good.
Guys, all great suggestions and now subbed. But my man MVG is still the king
One of the best games I played on my Amiga as a child :)
I can't believe no-one has mentioned that you've used an HD floppy to depict a DD floppy at 3:45. This isn't the internet I'm used to ;)
Thank You!!!!
Love the extreme details in this video and many others. Many thanks for your time. Really enjoyed watching!
it's really refreshing to watch a video where you *know* the dude knows his shit. Especially in the area of gaming; other YT'ers wouldn't have the knowledge to do this sort of thing properly
Wow what a trip down memory lane. I loved Dungeon Master so much!
For it's time, it was brilliant!
Now that's just cool. I knew about Spyro's multilayered DRM attacks but holy crap, I had no idea it was done to this degree on floppy disks! Dungeon Master, the original pirate battler.
MOST importantly, Dungeon Master's developers didn't punish their customers for the existence of piracy, but the pirates only.
They didn't spy on their customers.
They didn't interfere with their customers' computers' ability to function properly
Their copy protection didn't create a security risk for their customers data.
You could play the game offline....
And after a year you could crack and copy the disk as diskettes weren't made to last for ever.
Nintendo had it right !!!!!
All games should have come delivered in undestroyable, ever lasting modules.
This is true for today a sixty Euro game should be shipped on a 10 Euro crypto dongle.
I don't want to be online on Steam every 2 weeks to be able to play a single player game...
Put the dongle with the game in and play...that's how it should be.
It was 80's - 90's. Internet didn't fully exist back then so spying and online check up weren't possible
Unfair comparison, but whatever.
"nintendo had it right"? bahahahahaha!
If you don't want to sign in with Steam every 2 weeks, play non-steam games.
But they did punish the people. One can easily imagine their protection system behaving erratically on some disk drives due to minor differences in calibration.
Wizardry called, it wants its recognition back for gameplay. 1981
This was a great video on DM and old school DRM.
DooM wizardry has some nasty copy protection as well. I still remember to this day the churning and weird noises my drive made when reading the disk.
DM innovation was being a realtime game, not a turn-based roguelike crawler with a 3D view (plenty of those existed already)
I like how this channel covers both the hacking and the protection of video games. Thank you
Making pirates think they have won and hiding anti piracy measures in subtle ways to cause problems is pure genius and also a very elegant method for dealing with such things
Spyro wasn't the first to be well-known for having such a deterrent; Earthbound for the SNES gained notoriety for having a rather insidious and punishing multi-layer copy protection scheme where if you insisted on playing on a bootleg or a disk backup, the game would play tricks on you until the final level - all of your save files will be lost for good.
I may be wrong but I remember Donkey Kong 64 doing that too! And Halo.. Erase all your progress and in some instances destroy your console..
Serious sam 2 on pc had an invincible enemy spawn on pirate copies. Bit later than spyro though.
@@kenrickeason Doubt they'd end up destroying your console though, not unless if the cartridge's voltage draw is way out of spec.
@@meetoo594 That was Serious Sam 3 which had the insanely fast pink scorpions. From what I've heard, it was merely *nigh* invincible... and there's definitely way more than just one. Croteam also has an anticrack for The Talos Principle, of which the best-known case is that the elevator out of World A doesn't work properly.
Both games have more things in them, and both games WILL crash after a while if it detects it's been cracked. From personal experience Talos merely *looks* easy to crack (I and a few others all have legitimate copies but need to modify them for various reasons) but once the crack protection kicks in, uhh, enjoy your crashes and dysfunctional elevators I guess?
Also, there's a Steam Workshop item for SS3 which adds the scorpions back in. Some people have actually done speedruns of it. It takes longer than an hour, even on coop.
@@fanzyflani3576 Ahh, it was wasnt it, my mistake. I like the protection in that game dev simulation where pirates wreck your business over the course of the game making it impossible to finish. Another one was the anime porn game that posted your personal details (cribbed from your pc) to the devs forum and only a public apology for pirating it would get your name removed.
The best game on the ST end of. I spent so many hours on this game. I never knew about the sophisticated copy protection system at all. Really interesting and great explanation, thanks for sharing :)
@Brad Viviviyal If $29.95 was 1985 that would be $71.13 in 2019, so what do you mean "worth buying?" Game prices haven't tracked inflation very well, many game companies under charge, and games are still wroth buying. Unless it's EA and their garbage DRM that makes the pirated copies easier and better to play, but that's not most games.
You didn't explain how the fuzzy bit changed.
Or how someone finally figured out that was the culprit all along.
Suppose a 5v is 0 and 12v is 1. if you put the voltage in-between then you'll supposedly get sometimes this and sometimes that.
That is ROUGHLY what he meant, not the exact information.
This was my job way back I would program the trace disc duplicators that made hundreds of copy’s a day .
the disc image was mapped out like a menu written in unix and if I remember right a flakey bit was if you wrote two bits of data closer than they should be something easy to do on the trace copy system as you programmed everything how you wanted ,so if you speed up the disc faster than the compute could and wrote a few bits of data when the host computer red the sector it would produce a different result every time ,,think it was Rob northern who came up with the idea ,
Fantastic video which brought back a lot of memories.
I bought Dungeon Master and spent hundreds of hours playing on the Amiga. It led me on to other dungeon games like Black Crypt , Knightmare and in particular , Mindscape's Captive.
Captive was truly magnificent and kept me up for days at a time. I played it so much the the floppy began to fail to load so I bought another copy and tried to make a back up of the original disk using XCopy.
It did copy OK and it would load and let you commission your droids but as soon as you put your code in to to assign your droids the game would freeze.
On close inspection of the master disk, their copy protection came in the form of a tiny hole drilled through the surface of the disk, obviously in a strategic place. So you could make as many copies as you liked but without that hole, you were going nowhere.
Thanks again for the video. Liked and subbed. :)
That's an even better idea!
Oh, my god. Seeing Desert Strike gave me some damn good flashbacks.
That game needs a remake asap!
Fun fact: pirated Spyro is actually possible to beat and there are even playthroughs dedicated to getting 100%+ in the game without cheats, hacks (well, outside the obvious), etc.
I saw a guy attempt to beat it, there's a good chance your entire progress is lost when you get to the last level and most of the time, completing a level will cause a random egg to dissapear from the list
So yeah, pretty much unplayable
Dungeon Master is the best game I've ever played since 1981/82
eye of the beholder was pretty good too
@@nonegiven2830 True, it was good but Atari ST's Dungeon Master still comes on first place for me and on the second place comes Black Crypt to Amiga, mostly for its great graphics
All three Eye of the Beholder comes on third place for me.
I didn't have DM1 back then, started out with EoB2 and 3, then got DM2 and Stonekeep after that. Of course, also MM3-5, but they're a different class of RPG already.
What I still love about DM2 today is the trading system. Totally unbeaten with that haggling, different coin and gem types and those trading tables.
As for the genre in general, I can totally recommend both the Legend of Grimrock games though. They're modern, but feel like playing the good old games and especially the second one does some very nice things that I always wanted in the games back in the day.
Music at 6:51 is "Estrayk - The HER song 03 (trainer 2)"
Did I see SilkWorm IV?That game had the most massive sound in those days.
I got my Amiga hooked up to my stereo and my stereo hooked up to my bass-guitar amp and it was awesome... those explosions made the whole house tremble. Literally!
With very few exceptions, 3½" DSDD formats had 80 tracks. 2 sides × 80 tracks × 9 sectors/track × 512 bytes/sector = 737 280 bytes or 720 KiB.
The exception being Amiga - formatted to 880k.
That is a huge part of why amiga is so frustrating to bring into the modern era - you about have to use a running Amiga to read a floppy to generate an .adf file of the disk (and no, it wouldn't if there were copy protection...) hacked "tamed" games can be ported to an .adf and run on an emulator.
I have Dungeon Master on the Atari 520ST, and for it's time it was some scary shit.
The atmosphere was top notch.
It was the game I spent the most hours of my life on. That is until bauldur's gate 2 on the PC came out, which I still play today on iPad. wRPG Forever....... Dungeon Master was utter, utter class. I was a teen in an absolutely new world. I dreamt of that game when not playing.
For me it was Pacmania and OIDS and occasionally Double Dragon 2, before I got my 90MHz Pentium.
OIDS was the shit.
So primitive, but still atmospheric. It had pretty long loading time though for the type of game it is.
One of the better encryption mechanisms I found was on an "F16 Fighter" PC game. The actual executable files were randomised on disk. When loaded into memory & executed. The application pointed to itself as if it were data, Then it decrypted itself using an XOR technique. Then the code executed, then it re-encrypted itself.
This meant you could not open the exec with a disassembler to figure out the encryption. As the code on disk was valid but not true. You had to watch it run in memory. Step by step, which took hours, to get to the part of the game in question.
To make it worse, a failed check just set a variable. The variable was then checked much later in the game. So you died, millions of instructions later. Making it very hard to find the self-modifying code.
Not sure, but I *think* floppies (and HDDs too) are not straight 1s and 0s...but close. I think they are encoded by the transitions in magnetic flux, so a change in a time slot is a 1 and no change is a 0. MFM. NRZ. or something like that. Anyhow....
I used to hear about floppies which were intentionally encoded with errors, so that a file-by-file copy as well as sector-for-sector copies would fail, because the OS would try to read intentionally damaged sectors. If the game were file-by-file, it would simply never call for a read of the "bad" sectors. Or the game would go read a specific sector on the disk, and if it came back OK, it would know it might be a pirate copy, because it was supposed to read an error.
I don't think I ever had one of those. But I did notice Marble Madness. Great game.
Yeah, they have error correction... Here's an article on CD-ROM error correction byuu.net/compact-discs/structure
Ahh the old Commodore 64. I actually had a Commodore vic20 too. But hacking on the Atari 2600 was the best. My god I dumped thousands of hours into that thing.
Loved every minute of it.
what a trip down memory lane. I forgot all the different crap I had to deal with the play games and get around the program to play copied disks. Thanks for the memories.
I played Dungeon Master from a pirated copy back then and while it was completely possible to finish the game, I had a slew of various glitches -- the most common of them being that all of your four heroes suddenly died with a blood curdling scream. At any rate I agree with you, DM is absolute classic of a game and true cult icon.
My first big software project was writing this whole game from scratch (except for copying the graphics).
C64/Atari time: Great games = 1.44 MB
Today: Crap = 100s GB‘s and you have to buy DLC‘s on top
There would have been an outcry if you bought a game in 1980's and were told you needed to pay extra for something else.
@@pcguru2000, In fact, some games had some sort of archaic way of DLC. For example Castlevania 2 (NES), it was impossible to beat it without help (Nintendo PowerLine or purchasing a Nintendo magazine)
@@pcguru2000 Actually we frequently DID have to pay extra for stuff. Expansions weren't free. Lemmings had 2 or 3 extra level disks released for instance.
@@cericat 90% of games not come with DLCs where before it was maybe 1 to 5%
@@eng3d I was just talking about PC games. Console game graphics sucked then and and still suck now
Copy protection so good, it copyright strikes this video 30 years later
Man, seeing that Indy 500 copy protection screen took me right back to my childhood. We had a well-worn Xerox of the manual.
One of my favorite copy protections was for Sid Meyer's Pirates!
Although you could copy and play the game, you were at a distinct disadvantage if you did not have the manual, map, and gold fleet/silver train schedules.
Firstly, when you started the game, you were asked to identify a particular pirate flag, which were listed in the manual. If you identified the flag correctly, you could win the initial swordfight and start with a better ship and crew, otherwise you would always lose the fight and end up in jail for many months, losing valuable time, and have to start with a bare bones crew and ship.
Later in the game, when meeting certain characters, you would be asked when the silver train or gold fleet would be in a certain town. If you knew the answer (found in the game materials) you would receive additional benefits.
Having the gold and silver schedules also meant you could target towns when you knew they were there, which really helped rack up loot. Of course it was easier to find those towns if you had the map.
When you received partial maps to find hidden treasure, it was easier to find the location if you could compare it to the world map.
So not having the game materials really put you at a disadvantage. It was a much easier and enjoyable game if you had those.
"It held the pirates at bay, no pun intended"
nice
And here I thought Viagra was used for "floppy protection"
”...managed to keep the pirates at bay”
Internet won for tonight.
Man, Dungeon Master scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. I never knew when I would turn a corner and run into four mummies slowly flailing their arms at me. I have it on my PC that runs through Dosbox, but it's just not the same without the long load times and suspense that I had as a kid.
Game developer Jon Burton also came up with a clever copy protection scheme for one of his Amiga game, Leander, involving burning a tiny hole with a laser into the original floppy disk. A program would then try to write data to that sector. If the data was written it meant that the disk was a copy. The written data would cause a slew of things to go wrong for the player, including stranding the player in an unbeatable 4th level. On his channel he made a video about how the programming behind the copy protection worked.
You could tell by looking for the burned hole on the disk.
I loved the FTL games of the day. Dungeon Master can still be played on the PC today.
I remember installing Microsoft Office from around 25 floppies.
Same lol ^_^
I thought IBM's OS/2 Warp was the future and got the floppy disk version... :L a big box of floppies...
I remember failing to install it because one of the cheap 720kb disks with the drilled out hole in the corner to convert them to 1.44mb disks would always have a bad sector you'd find half way through the process.
Karl Hungus what a time to be alive.
Lol I remember struggling installing ms word in dosbox that did not have a floppy switching feature.
5:51 I appreciate that you mention Skullgirls ^^
I'm addicted to this channel, the voice, the music, the videogames... Omg
I loved how you highlight a compare instruction specifically suggesting it was a single line of code that made all the difference, because it likely was.
Copy-protection was just a symptom of a problem : availability.
True. The only way to get a game was to mail order. It took months, and cost an arm and a leg.
How about making a video about copy right protection going wrong and causing more trouble to legit users than actually preventing piratism. I bet there's lots of cases.
Isn't it, like, _most_ cases? :J
BTW it's "piracy", not "piratism".
like the limited install time protection games like Spore used to have? what was it, 3 installs or something and then it would refuse to ever install again?
C64 not loading tape cassette games with standard included tape drive. The same game works in computer game store on their non standard tweaked to perfection drive making people unable to get a refund or another copy.
So what did people do - fook up part of the tape before taking it back to the store so it would be guaranteed to not work and they could get another copy or refund.
Like Worms 4 Mayhem, one of my favorite games being ruined by a malware called StarForce?
Well they got their wish, now Spore can't be played as intended at all.
in 1988 I met a French pirate who as a "matter of honor" never ever bought a game. He pirated 1 game a month, exactly. After 6 months of failure, he finally bought Dungeon Master.
Never bought a game as a matter of honor? What a loser.
Awesome, I didn't know Dungeon Master had copy protection. I love Dungeon Master, I rarely ever see anyone talk about it.
So fun to play after school everyday.
I think the most durable copy protection was implemented in Exile (Amiga-ECS version). It took years before it was finally cracked fully. It too let you play the game until the world itself broke at a late point in game, creating invisible barriers for the player.
Good times. I was part of a demo group called Silents in those days. We made demos for the Amiga and PC 😁
wow. which system(s) you used back then? you still have stuff? please contact me, somehow... I'm collecting/preserving/rescueing hard- and software...
Big smile when I see X-Copy Pro
Can you hear the sound too if you close your eyes?
The red circles have always brought tears to my eyes. xD
@@BillAnt but, but ...sometimes if you kept trying and retrying over and over the red sector would be read as orange ( I don't recall what that meant exactly, partially corrupted but read?) Or if you got really lucky it would actually "click" in green.
Played the monochrome version of SimCity on the Mac when I was young. That game came with an code card that was printed on dark brown paper so it couldn't be photocopied... =))
That was pretty common for games in the 80s. Some of the cards were pretty elaborate
@@jkyles313 Infocom and Sierra had some pretty interesting ones too, ie a radio station frequency in an ad for Ballyhoo (Infocom), Police Quest (Sierra) you actually needed to follow correct procedure which meant if you didn't read your manual (which also had your locker code and code calls) you'd be out of luck before you were 10 minutes in. The best protection is not obvious as such frequently.
I absolutely love your anti-piracy and "mistakes were made" videos. I come back and watch them again all the time. Thank you so much!
A copied game:
A bootup logo, and possibly errors in game, BBS call costs
A purchased retail game:
loaded with copy protection, and in game checks throughout with a manual, with a cost
So each has it's pros and cons
Modern vintage gamer, is the clever floppy copy disk Dungeon master!
When ever I think of speedball 2 I hear "ice cream ice cream" in my mind lol.
speedball 1 was the purer better game imo!
Totally agree on Dungeon Master!
It scared the crap out of 9 year old me!
The A.I felt alive in a game for the first time,,,
I had never heard of floppy disk DRM or fuzzy bit until now. It is amazing how FTL was able to prevent pirates from pirating Dungeon Master for a full year. 🤓
@UnknownDarkDragon I held a floppy disk when I was a kid but never used it.
1:25 omg x-copy! that takes me back!
Nice video. The random bit is a development of fuzzy sectors. That was where the header of the sector was written but no data. By reading the same sector twice you then had a copy check as the unformatted data should read differently on each occasion.
The protection check in a lot of the games were of a similar ilk, read sector, read same sector. If a==b then set pirate flag.
It was interesting you mentioned the Rob northern methodology, there were a few niceties in the way the suite ran. Decrypting and executing from the stack iirc, but it had a fatal flaw.
As it was sold to companies as a ready made solution it tended to be added as an afterthought, unlike the built in from the ground up, with gradual degradation (like dungeon master). The RNC file consisted of an encrypted wrapper around the original code. Sometimes the game would check if the code returned by the disc was valid, but that was a rare occurrence at the start.
To break all RNC protected software came down to figuring out where the game content ended in the file, loading it up from an original disc and attaching to the horizontal line interrupt. RN protection disables all interrupts but has to re-enable before game starts. At this point your interrupt would trigger and you had an unencrypted exe in memory. It was possible that you would catch it as it had started running and all the jump offsets then had to be recalculated. Stunt car racer was the first to fall using the hack tool IIRC. Run auto hack software, insert protected disc, wait for screen to stop flashing, insert formatted floppy, press space bar to save. You could then manually go through the saved file checking for the standard disc number check code.
I'd also add that a similar protection was included in the firmware of pioneer 939 high end dvd players. If you dumped the firmware and made the player multiregional then you got a nice surprise after 15 minutes or so - it would lock up with an error. It caught a few of the multiregional DVD player companies a bit by surprise.
On top of the usual firmware CRC check there was another embedded in one of the other processors iirc, this was for ensuring the DVD audio firmware component had not been altered I believe.
Nice throwback MVG! Keep dropping those awesome videos mate!
i still have my monkey island 1&2 codewheel
As a child I was fascinated by disk-based copy protection, and although I knew it was something to do with preventing the disk from being read unless booted to the game, I never fully understood how it worked. This was really interesting to watch. Thanks for posting!
Your comment in the video reminded me of my friend's pirate copy of Carrier Command on the Amiga. It seemed to play fine for 15-20 minutes then the sound started to go eerily distorted and the game would eventually crash. I did buy the game for PC and played it for hours in glorious CGA. I remember it came with the theme tune on cassette.
I absolutely love the copy protection videos you create