I read the "76" as "TG", and you can't type it twice if you got the first one wrong, so it doesn't work if 2 different people see different things through that not-so-crisp lens
If they integrated it into a game, like a "secret message decipher" or "alien language translation device" instead of at the beginning, only for certain tasks, it might have been novel and engaging instead of frustrtating.
Several games (King's Quest III, The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2, Zork Zero, Wasteland etc.) had vital clues in the manual or other physical component, without which completing the game was either very hard or even impossible.
@@vytah Monkey Island 1&2 just had the code wheel which was a standard check. They dressed it up to be a bit more fun, but it wasn't like Zork or KQ3. Wasteland had the paragraph book which a lot of RPGs at that time had
Only because you can't install anything on these old computers! Even modern expansion carts are like softmodding a PS2. Just yank the storage and presto! Factory reset.
I remember Jet Set Willy's colour code. Colours could easily be swapped for their word equivalent, and I copied the whole chart Red = R, etc. It wasn't rocket science, just tedious, and briefly made me king of the nerds.
I remember, when we first started the game with a friend. We didn't know about the code, as we didn't see the code paper. We just randomly pushed numbers... And got it right... Never happened after that again! xD Though, as you said, it wasn't much of the work to write the codes by hand and then photocopy the paper ;) P.S. Though, it wasn't JSW, because it had only 1 sheet of color code... Maybe later print of Manic Miner...
A DRM scheme that made the game unplayable for a lot of paying customers, while pirates made off with the superior version. Glad to see that some things never change.
The world's first CAPTCHA. It's JUST as horrible as you'd think. ;) I'm pretty certain you could create a decoding stencil for the lens lock. Once you know what the letters are, it's pretty easy to read it. I'm sure you could train yourself to read the code with a friend's lens lock, and then go home and play the pirated version without too much difficulty.
Speaking of Capcha, the one I found a bit annoying is the Hcapcha which you have to pick all the relevant pictures from two page list to complete the check. Sometimes, some pictures are too small which you almost cannot determine if it is the right one or not. If you fail, you have to do the whole Hcapcha check again.
Those were all super super obvious, i don't really know how you could mess that up. It might be super hard to read from a non-camera perspective though. He _was_ just waving it about though and not even nearly keeping on the center line.
Oh my god that "Your Computer" magazine cover which says "ARE YOU GUILTY OF STEALING £100,000,000?" with a picture of a little kid in jail is priceless
yeah especially when I don''t get any money... I only get to play the game:.. and the companies actually do not loose any money.... they simply isn't getting what they expected to get...
@@thiesenf Yeah lol, it kinda irks me when people refer to pirating software as "theft". I can agree that piracy is a no-no, but calling it "theft" is just wrong lol. Also, iirc it has been thoroughly proven that more often than not, a person who pirates a game wouldn't *buy* said game, so even calling it a "lost sale" is somewhat debatable.
If I ate your sandwich it isn’t theft, it’s just a meal you didn’t eat. It’s theft bro. You’re enjoying the labor of someone else without fair recompense. I don’t care if you steal software, but stop the mental gymnastics.
@@billcarson6954 A stolen sandwich is something physical and finite that you are deprived of whereas software is an infinitely reproducible stream of ones and zeros and thus if someone who would never have bought a game pirates it no one has been deprived of anything. So no, its not stealing and the law doesn't define software piracy as such.
@@billcarson6954 There's a world of difference between a physical sandwich and digital data. Unless you've figured out how to right click copy/paste food items from your favorite shops, that is. To use the sandwich analogy, piracy is like you having the sandwich, and then me taking the sandwich and eating it.... only now there's suddenly TWO sandwiches, and we both can enjoy them fully with no loss of sandwich-ness.
I remember when the companies started including brown-on-slightly-lighter-brown docs in the games to try to defeat photocopying. Unfortunately, it also defeated my eyeballs, which meant I had to go and download the cracked versions off the local BBSes anyway even when I'd bought the game.
Imagine trying to use that with a 10-15 year- old crt, with all sorts of chromatic and aspect aberrations, because that's what many people were using at the time.
@@thomassmith4999 They gave up on Lenslock for new copies of the game, either due to customer complaints or due to enough cracked copies floating around out there. Why include something that costs them money once it's no longer effective, eh?
One of my favorite games was Tomahawk on the CPC 464; a cassette based system. At the time I had no idea software piracy was a thing but in looking for a solution to the annoyance of LensLok I soon discovered it! Funny how 'anti-piracy' measures invariably become self defeating; I went from someone who didn't know it existed and was happy to buy my games to someone who so resented being messed about I'd go out of my way to find cracked copies of games.
"Now kids, I'm gonna teach you how to bypass copy protection. Next up, trainers and cracktros. Also, no way I know Z80, do like everyone else and read the f--- manual." And that is the kind of credibility that ensures this channel is always filled with awesome content.
Yup! I saw it right away as well (and my vision isn't that great). That said, having to do the calibration and verification each time, I agree it was a bad implementation
I can remember this on the Spectrum, Harrier Jump Jet. My friends dad created LensLok and showed me and my friend the early versions. And yes, it was as painful as this shows back then.
@@Stoney3K Yea but if he didn't know enough to be dangerous he wouldn't have been able to simply bypass that conditional jump back to looping accepting lenslock character input (or exiting after 3 tries) and then be able to BE DANGEROUS in ELITE DANGEROUS! lol I think Lemon sees the play on words he was going for there I picked up on it too. To make it permanent instead of having to do that everytime obviously you can just nop that conditional jump, easy peezy. :)
@The Lavian i didn't say he didn't but its not even "Hard" to be deadly at ASM once you know how to break and pass through code anyone can be "deadly".
@@BroomopUK People who say "anyone can do it" are quite the anomaly as they are both not as smart as they think they are (for greatly overestimating what most people are capable of), while simultaneously being smarter than most people. There are a LOT (though not all) of console gamers out there who use a console specifically because they think PC gaming is "too complicated", and its a darn site simpler than using a debugger. I mean come on, were living in an age where every website/service needs an app because using the web browser on your phone is "too complicated".
@@alexatkin Apps on phones exist to provide a better experience. Apps work faster because they are running natively, not through a browser engine. They can have their own settings, you don't have to deal with the browser's search bar getting in the way, navigating them is easier, it's easier to store and read data, to send notifications, you can use them without connection, and it's easier to track people with apps. Honestly how dumb can you be to think apps exist because it's too hard to open the browser?
This brings back so many painful memories! I remember showing my friend Elite at his place. They had a huge old TV that was so big you couldn't get the calibration lines close enough for the LENSLOK to work. I used to leave my speccy running for days with Elite loaded so I didn't have to go through that hell again.
One of the hobbies I've gotten back into recently is reverse engineering old Spectrum games. Lenslok in particular... I even had the disassembly open when I spotted this video. If you're using an emulator, memory address 0xC799 holds the code in ASCII and it's therefore trivial to get it right every time.
Had the LensLok version of Elite on the Spectrum, it seemed to work better on the 14” type colour portable CRT tellies than the larger family TVs. It *was* frustrating, but to be fair it was a rare occurrence to fail all 3 goes and have to reload. Happy New Year MVG, great to see you back.
I experienced that the other day as I wanted to watch Netflix on my pc (Chromium 4 windows) and Netflix just didnt work at all.. Had to switch to edge :/
Well, that was actually kind of the point (or at least it was before the rise of internet file sharing). You wanted to frustrate the casual user who would share copies with a few friends or family members. It wasn't going to deter the dedicated cracker but because there was no way for the cracked ware to be easily distributed (pre BBS era) there was no need for tyrannical levels of protection (ie: dongles).
I used it so many times loading Elite on my Spectrum in '85 that it really wasn't a chore. You very quickly realised hold it still and aligned on the screen, and if you could read OK then the code was easy to read too. The key was just holding it still and aligned. Might dig it out again for old times sake later.
Dimitris, happy new year! In the mid 80's and early 90's I got really good at removing copy protection on the BBC Micro and the Acorn Archimedes. There were some evil things people did to floppy disks but the BBC Micro version of Elite was one of the hardest to copy/crack. Usually we would hack the checks out of the game, and be done with it, and then not even care about what they had done to the physical disk. For Elite it was not only really hard to copy the disk but it was equally hard to crack the assembly code to remove the protection checks. It wasn't really encrypted, in the modern sense, but it was very well obfuscated, it was multilevel and very clever in how it worked, it was ultimately a variant of XOR obfuscation but the key was dynamic and generated in a way that was hard to follow - all this takes is time and tools. Elite was one of the first games that would play if it knew it was cracked but it wouldn't play properly and you would never know because the game was so big, the player would already have put hours and hours in before they realized they weren't getting anywhere. There were a lot of cracked versions that didn't actually work and to this day I'm not sure I ever fully cracked it, it didn't matter because I did ultimately copy the disk. Why was it so hard to copy? In addition to a few other more typical disk protection tricks, the Elite disk simply had an unformatted track, literally unformatted, nothing at all on it. The code would do all sorts of hardware track and sector reads on the track it expected was unformatted, it had specific code for Intel 8271 and WD1770/1772 which were the two disk controllers available for the BBC. If it detected anything that looked like a track or sector it would trigger the protection. The protection was effective because you can't unformat a track, even back then 5 1/4 floppies would come pre-formatted for PCs, sure the BBC wouldn't use them them because it was the wrong files sytem, you would have reformat in DFS format, bit the physical disk was still formatted - the sector/track read code would detect something where there wasn't supposed to be anything at all. Once this became known it became a little easier to write code that would copy the original assuming you had access to an unformatted disk, to do this you had to deal with all the other more typical disk protections, but you had to start with a truly unformatted, never used, disk. The reason it works is the disk controllers can't unformat a track and they can only write legal tracks with legal sectors - there were some tricks you could do to change this by clever timing and writing to shadow registers, especially on the 8271, even so the end result was still a fairly legal looking track. The way we figured out how to copy it was to write a track with a single sector that was 4K long which is the longest sector an 8271 disk controller can write. Why did this work when you just wrote a legal track? It works because the physical track on the disk was only 3500 bytes long. Therefore it would start by writing a legal track header, and a legal sector header, it would also have legal gaps and therefore it would initially look like a legal, but weird, track. Because it's writing a 4K sector on a physical track that can only hold 3500 bytes, the physical disk would do a whole rotation and write over the sector and track header that it just laid down. BOOM, an unformatted track!!!! At least unformatted enough, the MFM flux encoding on the disk was legal but there was no sector or track headers and the disk controllers couldn't find anything-it worked flawlessly. BBC floppy disks are constant angular velocity, so even if they put the protection track on an outer track, it wouldn't have made any difference. A few years later, it all became moot, because of the Amiga. It didn't have a disk controller, it was all done in software, it could read and write raw bit patterns to the disk, no care in the world if it was legal or not, therefore could quite easily unformat the track. The Amiga became a key tool in copying Archimedes disks. EDIT: I guess it was FM aka single density modulation on a BBC Micro disk, not MFM - my memory is fuzzy trying to go back 35 years.
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, all this disk protection is still a pain in the ass, especially for people who want to preserve software. Old magnetic disks are starting to fail and making images of them is the only way to preserve them. Unless you are going to hack the game code, you have to be really careful how you image the disk, simply reading the data isn't enough. What you need is a raw flux image of a disk, which these days you can do with an Arduino, and then really good emulation of the disk controller. Getting the raw flux image is one of the things where the devil is in the details, it is actually quite difficult to do reliably, its not as simple as just sampling the flux pattern because you can get tripped up by variation in physical disk speed, both by the original machine that wrote the floppy years ago or by the speed of the floppy drive reading the disk today. The original hardware took care of by an analog PLL which would sync the sampling to the MFM data. If you are imaging on a really high speed processor you can take time stamps of the flux transitions and continually adjust the sampling - in effect emulating a analog PLL. The easiest way is to massively over sample the raw flux data and then clean it up in software. A raw flux image is a good way to read bad disks, especially bad disks with single byte errors. The original controllers were fairly crude and would simply check CRCs of the decoded data. Modern software can detect illegal MFM and keeping regenerating all the possible variations until one of them is right. This doesn't work well for long bursts of errors but it can correct a few bytes per sector and is a tool we have today that didn't exist back then.
Cannot remember much about it, but I had a program called Neverlock. I think it patched Lemmings to report the manual word to always be true. Maybe removed the words so just hit enter. Protections like this were tedious. www.goodolddays.net/apps/id%2C49/
In my opinion the color check still is the best copy protection, especially if it's part of the game. I remember Gobliins 2 for example, you had to mix color based magic potions to obtain the correct result, and it used a paper color wheel included in the box to do so. It was made fun instead of annoying, and as a kid I liked it.
This was a very interesting video as always but what's made it *really great* is the interactive debugging/cracking session with your explainations. I'd be really happy to see more of these since all there is on youtube about debugging is oriented toward x86_64 or ARM32/64 and nothing about retro/exotic architectures/assembly.
It would probably work fine nowadays with totally flat screens and ultra crisp resolution.. Remember how the image would BOW and warp depending on the colour saturation or contrast on those old portables....
They knew not everybody used a 14" screen. that's why the calibration process changes the size of the picture. The curvature of the screen probably won't make too much of a difference. WOrst case it jsut adds some 'noise' to the image.
happy new year MVG, here's hoping it'll be better than 2020 ! I remember this lenslok stuff that was sooooooo annoying you always had to have the right light, the right angle, the right screen... still the most annoying for me was those red codes sheet with black writing to avoid being copied because as a colorblind it was a pain to be able to decipher them ! That said LensLok was still a brilliant idea for protection/cost efficiency, was just a pain to use for the end-user and in the end very easy to crack (i usually would use cracked game of a legal copy game i had purchased to remove the pain as soon as the crack was available)
The first lenslok I ever encountered was with The OCP Art Studio by Silverbird software, which was connected to Firebire but these were more of a premium brand. I found it impossible to use the lenslok, luckily I had a friend who had a freeze cartridge who took a snapshot of the program once we got passed it. I also remember the Jetset Willy and Manic Miner protection. Thanks for taking a look at these forms of protection, there were other forms that you are probably aware of, such as the manual check, page number paragraph word. Happy New Year and it's great to see you back.
Back when I was a kid, the "whats the first word on page 3 second paragraph" copyprotection was popular. I managed to figure out that the game I loved stored that word at a particular memory address. So after getting the question, immediately get it wrong, load up a memory viewer, and navigate to that address. Boom. Theres the answer. After about 5 minutes of the game plucking through its list of "random" questions, you can have a healthy list of "P1, para2 = the" answers. Game manual be damned. Just wish I could remember what game it was.
7:38 I read the numbers '7' and '6' there. I remember this thing. I knew someone whose vision was not that great and thus using this was nigh impossible; in their frustration it got snapped in half. I do not blame them at all. In fact, I hope they got a refund.
Oh I remember copying the Jet Set Willy chart and painstakingly colouring it in by hand with felt tip pens! We didn't have scanners and coloured home printers back then it wasnt as easy to copy as you would think! ;D
Great video and an interesting step back to my childhood. I had a Multiface 1 on my Spectrum that could halt a game and dump the memory to storage. It was trivial to load a game, get past the copy protection and then save the game to tape. They sold thousands of the things.
Like with any protections to copyright, it only ends up hurting the end user, and in some cases, just causes more piracy. Love this channel. Thank you for all that you do in maintaining our video game history.
@@cassiusdalcazarosta8010 not really. For example MacroVision was also copy protection, but completely analog. A serial Number is also a copy protection, but I wouldn't call it DRM. ... etc pp
Crap like this was honestly part of why my late uncle who belonged to a C64 users group would help copy, and crack disk, and then send them too me in the mail every so often. So about 1/2 my C64/C128 games where copied, and cracked sometimes with trainers on the cracktros, which at times where more interesting than the actual games.
I remember LensLok well. I had two games, Elite and Tomahawk, both for the ZX Spectrum that used the LensLok system. It was initially a pain in the neck to use, but once you got use to it and learned the 'blocky' character set, it was quite simple to use.
When anti-piracy is more frustrating to legitimate customers than it is to actual software pirates. . . . . . . Oh wait, that's pretty much every anti-piracy ever created.
Would trivial to copy the game to another disk, and flip the default state of the bit in the binary, if you knew the address... I can see why it didn't stick around. That and it's basically a terrible version of reCAPTCHA, but I'l give them points for a interesting design that's for sure. Stretchy smeared letters and optics is definitely thinking out of the box.
I had something like this on an early 90s game called Eye of Horus, but it was also printed on special paper that if you xeroxed it came out fully black (before the days of color scanners) so you HAD to have the original code matrix.
I thought the time limit might have been meant to keep pirates from reverse-engineering the order of the columns from the scrambled "OK" and then manually unscrambling the code they needed to type in.
Wow, I got my first computer during the second half of the 80's, and I thought I had seen pretty much all kinds of copy protections (hardware dongles, words from the manual, weird "wheels", unconventional disk formats or intentional bad sectors, then later Safedisc and Securom, ...), but I had never seen this one. Seems as annoying as some of its successors :-)
I never had an issue with the lens lock , I held it still!! It was almost impossible for the avergae 13 yr old to get cracked games in 1985, and back then waiting 10 mins for a game to load was no big deal. You have some funny ideas about what the home comp scene was like in the UK in the 80's.
Strange. I am Swedish and I was 11 in 85 and it was rather easy for most average kids to get cracked games. More or less it took half a year owning a computer until you got to knew someone who knew someone who had access to cracks. Later on I joined the demo scene and got to know people from whole of Europe and they had same experiments.
@@MiniKodjo I wouldn't go *that* far, but the conclusion I came to after watching this video is that, yes, the articles were trying to create controversy over nothing.
@@em00k That's because the camera has only one lens, and he was probably looking with his two eyes open. Had he read the instructions, he would have known to close one, and yeah it's quite obvious when you do so.
Had Elite on my Spectrum back in the 80s, and boy I remember what a holy horror these things were. Didn't help that they were incredibly flimsy and the side pieces would break off after a lot of use, so you'd kind of have to hover the thing above the TV screen and move it forward and back to find the sweet spot.
But he kind of did though, the process would have been basically the same... Only difference being he wouldn't of had this fancy public tool to do this so easily. You would of had to build custom tools and then the process would be similar just using those tools instead of this one he used here. In the 80's it's the same as today, you had to find that conditional jump which determines if its going to keep looping the lenslock input code/quitting after 3 wrong tries (by following the conditional jump at 0xC2AC back up to 0xC288 which is on the same screen visible). Then you nop it (NO OPERATION) so that regardless if C is set or not it always continues execution past the conditional jump (not following it to 0xC288) which then starts the game instead of looping for lenslock input or exiting. If you always typed wrong lenslock characters then it never makes it past that jump at 0xC2AC and just keeps executing that lenslock loop or exiting after 3 incorrect attempts. So any way you modify it that actually skips that lenslock loop and continues execution from 0xC2AE onwards will work to bypass the protection and start the game! :) Based on how he's done this here, it looks like if you patched that 0xC2AC with a NOP instruction and restarted the game with that patched permanently to the rom, the lenlock prompt still comes up but any input you type in is accepted rather than rejected and the game starts. To make it even better and skip the lenslock prompt entirely one could instead find the beginning of that lenslock loop (or really anywhere before it waits on user input for it) and put an unconditional jump up to 0xC2AE (where the real game code actually starts as told above). It actually looks like as a good guess that the LD A,$04 which is moved into $C77E is the number of tries you get + 1 (since it decrements before using immediately at $C28B after loading from $C77E)... So if you increased that number you would get more tries if I'm correct, ex. changing it to FF should give 254 tries instead of 3. But we don't want more tries just to immediately skip having to enter anything to start the game and have it just start. But the LD, A, $04 instruction at $0xC283 probably relating to lenslock allowed attempts shouldn't be neccesary for any of the games code to work, and its two bytes perfect for overwriting with a jump without having to nop more bytes to clean things up (Like if patching from C288 to jump to C2AE should work too but will leave the code looking wierd in the disaaseembler since the third byte no longer is part of the jump and is then its own not intended instruction there. So if doing that it'd be best to nop that 3rd byte) But here I'm just going to overwrite that 2 byte LD A, $04 at $C283 with a 2 byte jump to $C2AE and I haven't tested this, but I beleive it will most likely work :D Permanent patch one of these to copies of the rom and see the difference :D ==MVG quick version/Any lenslock input is accepted as correct== [$C2AC: 38 DA] JR C,$C288 Patch With: [$C2AC: 00 00] NOP x 2 ==Improved Version/Skip lenslock & directly load game (Probably)== [$C283: 3E 04] LD A,$04 Patch With: [$C283: 18 29] JR $C2AE dest - src - 2 = jump offset $C2AE - $C2AC - 2 ('JR x' instruction size) = $29
@@YourTVUnplugged in order to patch in such a NOP, you would also have needed to defeat the nonstandard tape loader. These predictions weren't designed to be "uncrackable" forever, but just enough to slow down early, casual "bedroom" piracy such that they could make some sales in the first few months after launch.
I remember back in the day my dad purchased The Art Studio for a C64 on tape. This program also had lenslok protection, but for some reason the dealer didn't supply the plastic lens. Not knowing any better, we always guess our way through. Somehow we managed to get into the program after the thirs or fourth loading attempt.
MVG, thank you for covering Lenslock in this video. I used to own Elite and OCP Art Studio on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k back then. And it was a real pain to get to play/use both of them due to their copy protection. Also, having a color deficiancy didn't exactly help with the Jet Set Willy protection either :-) It was a great watch though, being reminded of the ways that software publishers used to fight software piracy.
@@unitedfools3493 wasn’t meant to be take so literal. It’s a distant but funny coincidences: recognising letters in shapes, 30 seconds to input. I know the similarities end there.
I can only imagine that the protection would be more difficult to bypass in the ‘80s, without the benefit of modern emulators and debuggers.. not impossible, but certainly not as easy..
Oh yea definitely, which is was kind of like you had to really know your shit to do this kind of thing. That's basically since you had to make your own tools and everything, your own debuggers and assemblers and dissamblers and things which is not trivial or that most people would just know how to do. Now with lots of public tools and more advanced information flow it makes it require not being so "Elite: Dangerous" xD to pull off which can use premade public tools and information resources to learn and figure things out much easier! :D
Not horrible complicated -- just time consuming. Sure you had to know assembly language but boot tracing is pretty straightforward albeit extremely tedious in some titles. There were actually RAM / memory snapshot cards along with NMI / debugger hardware cards that sped the process up for the dedicated hackers and krackers.
Machine language monitor cartridge with a soft-reset button. Not actually more difficult for this task, when you have to walk one up the stack anyway and the program is just freshly started.
It's really good to know that game publishers decided *never again* to implement crappy copy protection that does little to nothing to stop pirates and only serves to punish consumers for doing the right thing and purchasing the game... LOL
Yeah I agree. Also it’s nice to know that consumers stopped copying software and instead payed for what they consumed making it possible for those developers who did not have copy protecting to survive... LOL
@@litjellyfish there are two main types of reasons why someone would get pirate a copy (maybe a third). 1) they are using it as a demo and the quality of the game is how a sale is achieved 2) they were never going to be sale to begin with no matter what the 3?) the anti piracy is so intrisive or causes that legitimate owners are playing it to get a better play expierence. making it a massive pain or impossible to play the legally brought game either does nothing to stop piracy or it gives more of a demand because of legal copies being worse to play than pirated copies
@@randomprotag9329 as i have been both using and doing piracy all my life I can say that those all reasons are just bulldogs. People pirate because it costs less and sometimes is more convenient. And they are not afraid to get caught. Simple as that. Same with movies. In the end it’s very simple. People understand that it’s illegal but as the chance of reprimand is so low they take the risk. We humans do usually this in every field. And always complains and give excuses for our reasons to do so if questioned about it.
I had to use this when launching Graphical Adventure Creator on the Amstrad CPC464. It’s really interesting to watch the demonstration of you using the lens because when I had to use this on the Amstrrad, this clearly had a physical monitor size which was the same for all CPCs. I never had to calibrate the lens size on the Amstrad and therefore never suffered the problems that other systems had if they were connected to a television. It’s very interesting to see the problems that other people had reported using the LensLok system, i.e. Having the wrong lens for the respective software. Funny looking back on it now, but I can understand the frustration that people had suffered with this copy protection.
it realy does seem like copy protection thats a) not intrusive to the expierence either due to performance or technical issues or just a massive pain or impossible for poeple to actually use and B) actually effective to where its not trivial to get crack it is basicly non existant.
@@bretonfabrice to expand on butters point even assuming that internet is perfect absolutely everywhere and their is no playability issues. the fact that servers are needed means that when they are shut down it becomes impossible to play in the intended way. the sega satalite gardield game has this issue as the satalite version had exclusive conentent which is very likely lost
@@randomprotag9329 I didn't say the opposite :p I just think we're soon going to see cloud exclusive games because from a company's point of view, this is the ultimate way to prevent illegal copying. For now big games cost too much to produce to make this profitable but it will end up happening sooner or later.
always awesome to see some of your content.. i'm 34 and i'm am at AWE that how gaming and digital history that we have ... welcome to 2021 and lets keep gaming for safety and fun
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It's great to be back. Have an awesome 2021 ❤️
Happy New Year!
ok
@@Humaid09 ok
Best wishes! Thank you for making my day better!
@@seamie997 ok
First 2 looked like "5o", and "76" pretty clearly to me. That said resetting the system after 3 tries is crazy.
I was also getting frustrated that he wasn't seeing it. It was clear as day!
Yeah I could also see it just fine.
I saw it too, and then realized you had to type two "LETTERS" !
@@zacharysmith2983 same, I was yelling at the screen!
I read the "76" as "TG", and you can't type it twice if you got the first one wrong, so it doesn't work if 2 different people see different things through that not-so-crisp lens
Had no idea this was a thing. So interesting.
O hai!
Hey Gavo
Don't copy that floppy
gavver
You should do a slow mo of you failing to get it to work. Hour long at least.
If they integrated it into a game, like a "secret message decipher" or "alien language translation device" instead of at the beginning, only for certain tasks, it might have been novel and engaging instead of frustrtating.
You would’ve made BANK in the 80’s.
Several games (King's Quest III, The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2, Zork Zero, Wasteland etc.) had vital clues in the manual or other physical component, without which completing the game was either very hard or even impossible.
@@vytah Kings Quest Heir today gone tomorrow had a manual clue how to solve glyphs to scale the mountain.
Like the magical formulas in Quest for Glory IV that you gave to the scientist so that he could do Totally Not Magical Science Stuff.
@@vytah Monkey Island 1&2 just had the code wheel which was a standard check. They dressed it up to be a bit more fun, but it wasn't like Zork or KQ3. Wasteland had the paragraph book which a lot of RPGs at that time had
"it's one of the most frustrating and just annoying versions of copy protection that ever graced video games"
at least it doesn't install any rootkits
Only because you can't install anything on these old computers!
Even modern expansion carts are like softmodding a PS2. Just yank the storage and presto! Factory reset.
If that would have been possible they would have tried it too xD
Why use a rootkit, everything on the c64 is root.
Fucking valorant
@@KopperNeoman If they were evil, they would have the game self-destruct on the floppy if you failed the check.
I remember Jet Set Willy's colour code. Colours could easily be swapped for their word equivalent, and I copied the whole chart Red = R, etc. It wasn't rocket science, just tedious, and briefly made me king of the nerds.
I remember, when we first started the game with a friend. We didn't know about the code, as we didn't see the code paper.
We just randomly pushed numbers... And got it right...
Never happened after that again! xD
Though, as you said, it wasn't much of the work to write the codes by hand and then photocopy the paper ;)
P.S. Though, it wasn't JSW, because it had only 1 sheet of color code... Maybe later print of Manic Miner...
@@miikasuominen3845 It just required one sucker. I was that sucker.
that was the first game i patched out the jmp instruction.
@@mostlyindica poke 64499,201 imprinted on my brain.
@@mostlyindica me too! And then I started to dig real deep, and made various adjustments to the map :-)
A DRM scheme that made the game unplayable for a lot of paying customers, while pirates made off with the superior version. Glad to see that some things never change.
i loved that dive into the debugger
Didn't expect you to be here!
kinda strange to see one of your comments with only 22 likes lol
@@drductape it's because they are an unfunny meme man
Who doesn’t?
ok
The world's first CAPTCHA. It's JUST as horrible as you'd think. ;)
I'm pretty certain you could create a decoding stencil for the lens lock. Once you know what the letters are, it's pretty easy to read it. I'm sure you could train yourself to read the code with a friend's lens lock, and then go home and play the pirated version without too much difficulty.
At least you didn't have to spot traffic lights and fire hydrants.
Speaking of Capcha, the one I found a bit annoying is the Hcapcha which you have to pick all the relevant pictures from two page list to complete the check.
Sometimes, some pictures are too small which you almost cannot determine if it is the right one or not. If you fail, you have to do the whole Hcapcha check again.
its different for each game though
mostly you would just copy down a hand full of codes and reload the game till you got one you had written down.... ask me how my OLD arse knows ;)
@@AshenTechDotCom imagine doing that with a cassette copy
lenslock: Remarkably clearly "76"
mvg: "That looks like a T.G. Nope, not that one either!"
instruction says it's letters, not numbers!
he was looking for capital letters, like the manual said, 3:32 look at #6.
I read it as T6.
@@SianaGearz He did say "5c" at some point too
Those were all super super obvious, i don't really know how you could mess that up. It might be super hard to read from a non-camera perspective though. He _was_ just waving it about though and not even nearly keeping on the center line.
Oh my god that "Your Computer" magazine cover which says "ARE YOU GUILTY OF STEALING £100,000,000?" with a picture of a little kid in jail is priceless
yeah especially when I don''t get any money... I only get to play the game:.. and the companies actually do not loose any money.... they simply isn't getting what they expected to get...
@@thiesenf Yeah lol, it kinda irks me when people refer to pirating software as "theft". I can agree that piracy is a no-no, but calling it "theft" is just wrong lol.
Also, iirc it has been thoroughly proven that more often than not, a person who pirates a game wouldn't *buy* said game, so even calling it a "lost sale" is somewhat debatable.
If I ate your sandwich it isn’t theft, it’s just a meal you didn’t eat.
It’s theft bro. You’re enjoying the labor of someone else without fair recompense. I don’t care if you steal software, but stop the mental gymnastics.
@@billcarson6954 A stolen sandwich is something physical and finite that you are deprived of whereas software is an infinitely reproducible stream of ones and zeros and thus if someone who would never have bought a game pirates it no one has been deprived of anything. So no, its not stealing and the law doesn't define software piracy as such.
@@billcarson6954 There's a world of difference between a physical sandwich and digital data. Unless you've figured out how to right click copy/paste food items from your favorite shops, that is.
To use the sandwich analogy, piracy is like you having the sandwich, and then me taking the sandwich and eating it.... only now there's suddenly TWO sandwiches, and we both can enjoy them fully with no loss of sandwich-ness.
I remember when the companies started including brown-on-slightly-lighter-brown docs in the games to try to defeat photocopying. Unfortunately, it also defeated my eyeballs, which meant I had to go and download the cracked versions off the local BBSes anyway even when I'd bought the game.
I wonder if MVG has ever gone to a cookout, someone asked him what went on, and he answered "Steaks were made."
Whose steaks? Muh steaks were made.
Aussies go to BBQs mate. AKA "Barbies".
@@tennesseejack1 With prawns. Weird.
@@mangek009 grilled prawns
mmm steak
Imagine trying to use that with a 10-15 year- old crt, with all sorts of chromatic and aspect aberrations, because that's what many people were using at the time.
probably works better due to the lack of pixels.
or being vision impaired
My first thought when he went to try this gizmo was will it even work on an LCD screen.
I'm imagining the TV we used to have in the 80s with the push-pull on/off switch in the corner 😂
The code says: You won't be playing Elite today.
Yeah so weird, I had the original C64 Elite and never heard of lens lock until today
@@thomassmith4999 They gave up on Lenslock for new copies of the game, either due to customer complaints or due to enough cracked copies floating around out there. Why include something that costs them money once it's no longer effective, eh?
"drink more ovaltine"
Random teenager in the 1980s: *hits debugger key* Not if I can help it. Hold my Mountain Dew!
Modern Elite: Dangerous: too boring to play today.
One of my favorite games was Tomahawk on the CPC 464; a cassette based system. At the time I had no idea software piracy was a thing but in looking for a solution to the annoyance of LensLok I soon discovered it! Funny how 'anti-piracy' measures invariably become self defeating; I went from someone who didn't know it existed and was happy to buy my games to someone who so resented being messed about I'd go out of my way to find cracked copies of games.
To Quote Clint From LGR: " Also each game title came with a diffrent set of prisms and sometimes the wrong LensLok is shipped with the wrong game."
Imagine owning all games with lenslok and then mixing up the pile of prisms....
@@desertfish74 That would have been a hilarious prank to pull back then. Just swap a few LensLoks around in your friend's collection.
@@ArvexYT restorable if you have three or so but imagine the number of permutations with a dozen games. Better buy them again :)
@@ArvexYT what do you mean with “would”? ;)
There were only 11 releases using Lenslok anyway.
"Now kids, I'm gonna teach you how to bypass copy protection. Next up, trainers and cracktros. Also, no way I know Z80, do like everyone else and read the f--- manual."
And that is the kind of credibility that ensures this channel is always filled with awesome content.
50, 76, rd. Though it was made harder with your hand moving so much. Edit 5o, not 50. I saw the smaller 'o' but was thinking numbers. :)
agreed. if you hold it still its super easy to read
Yup! I saw it right away as well (and my vision isn't that great). That said, having to do the calibration and verification each time, I agree it was a bad implementation
To be fair he's behind/beside the camera, looking at an angle.
Yup, though i think the first is actually 5o
@@Devo_gx Yep, I had Art Studio as a kid and didn't find it hard. I think ModernVintageGamer's eyes aren't so modern anymore :)
I can remember this on the Spectrum, Harrier Jump Jet. My friends dad created LensLok and showed me and my friend the early versions. And yes, it was as painful as this shows back then.
9:56 "I know Z80 assembly language and I know enough to be dangerous."
Dangerous...
Elite Dangerous 8-)
In reality, still probably mostly harmless.
@@Stoney3K Yea but if he didn't know enough to be dangerous he wouldn't have been able to simply bypass that conditional jump back to looping accepting lenslock character input (or exiting after 3 tries) and then be able to BE DANGEROUS in ELITE DANGEROUS! lol I think Lemon sees the play on words he was going for there I picked up on it too.
To make it permanent instead of having to do that everytime obviously you can just nop that conditional jump, easy peezy. :)
@@YourTVUnplugged And if you ever played Elite Dangerous, you also know where the choice of words of "Mostly harmless" comes from.
Whooosh!
O7
RUclips autoplay is doing a good job, I left the room to feed my cat & came back to this beauty.
"I know enough to be dangerous"
-Modern Vintage Gamer 2021
sad... simple jump and now hes dangerous.
@The Lavian i didn't say he didn't but its not even "Hard" to be deadly at ASM once you know how to break and pass through code anyone can be "deadly".
@@BroomopUK People who say "anyone can do it" are quite the anomaly as they are both not as smart as they think they are (for greatly overestimating what most people are capable of), while simultaneously being smarter than most people.
There are a LOT (though not all) of console gamers out there who use a console specifically because they think PC gaming is "too complicated", and its a darn site simpler than using a debugger.
I mean come on, were living in an age where every website/service needs an app because using the web browser on your phone is "too complicated".
He's an elite, elite dangerous.
@@alexatkin Apps on phones exist to provide a better experience. Apps work faster because they are running natively, not through a browser engine. They can have their own settings, you don't have to deal with the browser's search bar getting in the way, navigating them is easier, it's easier to store and read data, to send notifications, you can use them without connection, and it's easier to track people with apps. Honestly how dumb can you be to think apps exist because it's too hard to open the browser?
This brings back so many painful memories! I remember showing my friend Elite at his place. They had a huge old TV that was so big you couldn't get the calibration lines close enough for the LENSLOK to work. I used to leave my speccy running for days with Elite loaded so I didn't have to go through that hell again.
One of the hobbies I've gotten back into recently is reverse engineering old Spectrum games. Lenslok in particular... I even had the disassembly open when I spotted this video. If you're using an emulator, memory address 0xC799 holds the code in ASCII and it's therefore trivial to get it right every time.
Awesome!
Had the LensLok version of Elite on the Spectrum, it seemed to work better on the 14” type colour portable CRT tellies than the larger family TVs.
It *was* frustrating, but to be fair it was a rare occurrence to fail all 3 goes and have to reload.
Happy New Year MVG, great to see you back.
DRM: more harmful to the end user than pirates
I experienced that the other day as I wanted to watch Netflix on my pc (Chromium 4 windows) and Netflix just didnt work at all.. Had to switch to edge :/
I'd argue it's worse now even though the end user isn't interacting with it because of the impact on the system and game performance.
4k is even worse with HDCP2.x.
Well, I simply click on the MKV file and off it goes. Even if its a shitty VGA monitor without any digital circuits.
If you supported DRM with money you only have yourself to blame.
Well, that was actually kind of the point (or at least it was before the rise of internet file sharing). You wanted to frustrate the casual user who would share copies with a few friends or family members. It wasn't going to deter the dedicated cracker but because there was no way for the cracked ware to be easily distributed (pre BBS era) there was no need for tyrannical levels of protection (ie: dongles).
I used it so many times loading Elite on my Spectrum in '85 that it really wasn't a chore. You very quickly realised hold it still and aligned on the screen, and if you could read OK then the code was easy to read too. The key was just holding it still and aligned. Might dig it out again for old times sake later.
At the Dunovo HQ: O M G this lenslock thing is amazing we must implement it immediately.
Your „TG“ looked as a „76“ to me. 🤣
he was looking for capital letters, like the manual said, 3:32 look at #6.
That was really interesting, anti-piracy methods from the 80s always fascinate me...
I had no idea that this was even a thing. I love learning about stuff like this. What a great video to start off 2021.
Not a minute ago I was thinking about when you were gonna upload your 4th jan video, nice timing and awesome video as usual :)
Same here
This stuff is insanely interesting, I always get super excited when I see your videos pop up in my recommended section!
Denuvo 2022 drm: please insert your first-born into slot
Before or after being asked to drink a verification can?
please drink verification can
"You can't play this game until you give us your daughter!"
Speaking as a parent that sounds like a good deal. Um, how do I avoid getting her back?
Still better than inserting the tool used to make the first born.
what if i have no kids?
Dimitris, happy new year! In the mid 80's and early 90's I got really good at removing copy protection on the BBC Micro and the Acorn Archimedes. There were some evil things people did to floppy disks but the BBC Micro version of Elite was one of the hardest to copy/crack. Usually we would hack the checks out of the game, and be done with it, and then not even care about what they had done to the physical disk. For Elite it was not only really hard to copy the disk but it was equally hard to crack the assembly code to remove the protection checks. It wasn't really encrypted, in the modern sense, but it was very well obfuscated, it was multilevel and very clever in how it worked, it was ultimately a variant of XOR obfuscation but the key was dynamic and generated in a way that was hard to follow - all this takes is time and tools. Elite was one of the first games that would play if it knew it was cracked but it wouldn't play properly and you would never know because the game was so big, the player would already have put hours and hours in before they realized they weren't getting anywhere. There were a lot of cracked versions that didn't actually work and to this day I'm not sure I ever fully cracked it, it didn't matter because I did ultimately copy the disk. Why was it so hard to copy? In addition to a few other more typical disk protection tricks, the Elite disk simply had an unformatted track, literally unformatted, nothing at all on it. The code would do all sorts of hardware track and sector reads on the track it expected was unformatted, it had specific code for Intel 8271 and WD1770/1772 which were the two disk controllers available for the BBC. If it detected anything that looked like a track or sector it would trigger the protection. The protection was effective because you can't unformat a track, even back then 5 1/4 floppies would come pre-formatted for PCs, sure the BBC wouldn't use them them because it was the wrong files sytem, you would have reformat in DFS format, bit the physical disk was still formatted - the sector/track read code would detect something where there wasn't supposed to be anything at all. Once this became known it became a little easier to write code that would copy the original assuming you had access to an unformatted disk, to do this you had to deal with all the other more typical disk protections, but you had to start with a truly unformatted, never used, disk. The reason it works is the disk controllers can't unformat a track and they can only write legal tracks with legal sectors - there were some tricks you could do to change this by clever timing and writing to shadow registers, especially on the 8271, even so the end result was still a fairly legal looking track. The way we figured out how to copy it was to write a track with a single sector that was 4K long which is the longest sector an 8271 disk controller can write. Why did this work when you just wrote a legal track? It works because the physical track on the disk was only 3500 bytes long. Therefore it would start by writing a legal track header, and a legal sector header, it would also have legal gaps and therefore it would initially look like a legal, but weird, track. Because it's writing a 4K sector on a physical track that can only hold 3500 bytes, the physical disk would do a whole rotation and write over the sector and track header that it just laid down. BOOM, an unformatted track!!!! At least unformatted enough, the MFM flux encoding on the disk was legal but there was no sector or track headers and the disk controllers couldn't find anything-it worked flawlessly. BBC floppy disks are constant angular velocity, so even if they put the protection track on an outer track, it wouldn't have made any difference. A few years later, it all became moot, because of the Amiga. It didn't have a disk controller, it was all done in software, it could read and write raw bit patterns to the disk, no care in the world if it was legal or not, therefore could quite easily unformat the track. The Amiga became a key tool in copying Archimedes disks.
EDIT: I guess it was FM aka single density modulation on a BBC Micro disk, not MFM - my memory is fuzzy trying to go back 35 years.
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, all this disk protection is still a pain in the ass, especially for people who want to preserve software. Old magnetic disks are starting to fail and making images of them is the only way to preserve them. Unless you are going to hack the game code, you have to be really careful how you image the disk, simply reading the data isn't enough. What you need is a raw flux image of a disk, which these days you can do with an Arduino, and then really good emulation of the disk controller. Getting the raw flux image is one of the things where the devil is in the details, it is actually quite difficult to do reliably, its not as simple as just sampling the flux pattern because you can get tripped up by variation in physical disk speed, both by the original machine that wrote the floppy years ago or by the speed of the floppy drive reading the disk today. The original hardware took care of by an analog PLL which would sync the sampling to the MFM data. If you are imaging on a really high speed processor you can take time stamps of the flux transitions and continually adjust the sampling - in effect emulating a analog PLL. The easiest way is to massively over sample the raw flux data and then clean it up in software. A raw flux image is a good way to read bad disks, especially bad disks with single byte errors. The original controllers were fairly crude and would simply check CRCs of the decoded data. Modern software can detect illegal MFM and keeping regenerating all the possible variations until one of them is right. This doesn't work well for long bursts of errors but it can correct a few bytes per sector and is a tool we have today that didn't exist back then.
For a second I thought it said the early 80s anti piracy that frustrated MVG.
Glad it wasn't just me 😁
I think that's pretty clear by now that it frustrated MVG also :P
Cannot remember much about it, but I had a program called Neverlock. I think it patched Lemmings to report the manual word to always be true. Maybe removed the words so just hit enter. Protections like this were tedious.
www.goodolddays.net/apps/id%2C49/
Nothing can stop him, especially when he uses some Lube
It frustrated Lantis maybe but not MVG ;)
In my opinion the color check still is the best copy protection, especially if it's part of the game.
I remember Gobliins 2 for example, you had to mix color based magic potions to obtain the correct result, and it used a paper color wheel included in the box to do so.
It was made fun instead of annoying, and as a kid I liked it.
MVG makes Monday morning something to look forward too! @MVG
Makes me shiver to remember the arsing about you had to do with that thing. Brrrr!
5:00 "go ask your mother" on the shelf
don't tell me you didnt frame the video like that on purpose to give us this message 😎
This was a very interesting video as always but what's made it *really great* is the interactive debugging/cracking session with your explainations. I'd be really happy to see more of these since all there is on youtube about debugging is oriented toward x86_64 or ARM32/64 and nothing about retro/exotic architectures/assembly.
Wasn't expecting this :) not so much "mistakes were made" as "assumptions were made", ie. that everyone used a 14" curved CRT.
It would probably work fine nowadays with totally flat screens and ultra crisp resolution..
Remember how the image would BOW and warp depending on the colour saturation or contrast on those old portables....
Now screens (especially ultrawides) are starting to be curved again.
They knew not everybody used a 14" screen. that's why the calibration process changes the size of the picture. The curvature of the screen probably won't make too much of a difference. WOrst case it jsut adds some 'noise' to the image.
Usually they're curved concave to be easier to see straight on, rather than curved convex because price and technology.
@@Asmodai1234 I thought that when just after I posted that they would probably work on modern FLAT screens....
You are correct
I love these older bits of history so much! Thank you MVG !!
happy new year MVG, here's hoping it'll be better than 2020 ! I remember this lenslok stuff that was sooooooo annoying you always had to have the right light, the right angle, the right screen... still the most annoying for me was those red codes sheet with black writing to avoid being copied because as a colorblind it was a pain to be able to decipher them ! That said LensLok was still a brilliant idea for protection/cost efficiency, was just a pain to use for the end-user and in the end very easy to crack (i usually would use cracked game of a legal copy game i had purchased to remove the pain as soon as the crack was available)
The first lenslok I ever encountered was with The OCP Art Studio by Silverbird software, which was connected to Firebire but these were more of a premium brand. I found it impossible to use the lenslok, luckily I had a friend who had a freeze cartridge who took a snapshot of the program once we got passed it. I also remember the Jetset Willy and Manic Miner protection. Thanks for taking a look at these forms of protection, there were other forms that you are probably aware of, such as the manual check, page number paragraph word. Happy New Year and it's great to see you back.
"enough to be dangerous"
Yeah, i got that impression a long time ago.
Back when I was a kid, the "whats the first word on page 3 second paragraph" copyprotection was popular.
I managed to figure out that the game I loved stored that word at a particular memory address. So after getting the question, immediately get it wrong, load up a memory viewer, and navigate to that address. Boom. Theres the answer. After about 5 minutes of the game plucking through its list of "random" questions, you can have a healthy list of "P1, para2 = the" answers. Game manual be damned.
Just wish I could remember what game it was.
That was the game
7:38 I read the numbers '7' and '6' there.
I remember this thing. I knew someone whose vision was not that great and thus using this was nigh impossible; in their frustration it got snapped in half. I do not blame them at all. In fact, I hope they got a refund.
Oh I remember copying the Jet Set Willy chart and painstakingly colouring it in by hand with felt tip pens! We didn't have scanners and coloured home printers back then it wasnt as easy to copy as you would think! ;D
9:58 You mean, you know enough to be Elite: Dangerous?
Great video and an interesting step back to my childhood. I had a Multiface 1 on my Spectrum that could halt a game and dump the memory to storage. It was trivial to load a game, get past the copy protection and then save the game to tape. They sold thousands of the things.
Watching those lenslok attempts were painful.
to be fair, he was probably looking at it through the camera
@@gravysamich And he is incapable of maintaining his hand steady.
How he manage to do this ? Have it Parkinson's disease or what ?
LMAO right? Really cool video, just horribly inept at the simple task of putting your hand on the screen.
Missed your videos every monday, glad to see you back man
I would have pirated the game EVEN if I owned the original, just to avoid this awfulness.
It still happens even today. People even "pirate" free gratis games just to avoid the DRM.
Still do
Happy new year MVG! Thanks for the fun retro lookback.
Just thinking about all the frustrated parents back in the 1980s trying to get the LensLok to work for their kids.
Like with any protections to copyright, it only ends up hurting the end user, and in some cases, just causes more piracy.
Love this channel. Thank you for all that you do in maintaining our video game history.
It's nice to have a new video that involves DRM's!
It's not so much DRM as optical copy protection.
@@6581punk, isn't DRM and copy protection the same thing, or not?
@@cassiusdalcazarosta8010 not really. For example MacroVision was also copy protection, but completely analog.
A serial Number is also a copy protection, but I wouldn't call it DRM.
... etc pp
@@TheRailroad99 OK, tnx.
Loving the direction the channel is going
You should do a new series of copy protections and how they were bypass. (Systems don't count and not mistakes were made, only and any software)
Thanks for covering the lens lock! What a great blast from the past. :)
This would have frustrated the hell out of me if I'd have been around in 1985! Great vid and welcome back MVG
Crap like this was honestly part of why my late uncle who belonged to a C64 users group would help copy, and crack disk, and then send them too me in the mail every so often. So about 1/2 my C64/C128 games where copied, and cracked sometimes with trainers on the cracktros, which at times where more interesting than the actual games.
I remember LensLok well. I had two games, Elite and Tomahawk, both for the ZX Spectrum that used the LensLok system. It was initially a pain in the neck to use, but once you got use to it and learned the 'blocky' character set, it was quite simple to use.
When anti-piracy is more frustrating to legitimate customers than it is to actual software pirates.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Oh wait, that's pretty much every anti-piracy ever created.
Your videos are always so well put together and informative! Thanks for everything
I had a Sinclair Spectrum ZX. But I'm not sure I'd call computers of that era 'cheap'...
Compared to dedicated actual computers on sale for thousands of dollars, it is "cheap" by that context...
I thought this was another retro tech reviewer on youtube, surprised it was you. I like your style more than the others!
"I know enough to be dangerous" sounds like something you would tell your older sibling :D
So great to get an insight into the beginning of piracy and copy protection
I thought that when you were using the debugger, you were going to look for the String LensLok was comparing the user input to. Nope. :D
Would trivial to copy the game to another disk, and flip the default state of the bit in the binary, if you knew the address... I can see why it didn't stick around. That and it's basically a terrible version of reCAPTCHA, but I'l give them points for a interesting design that's for sure. Stretchy smeared letters and optics is definitely thinking out of the box.
I had something like this on an early 90s game called Eye of Horus, but it was also printed on special paper that if you xeroxed it came out fully black (before the days of color scanners) so you HAD to have the original code matrix.
Plot twist: Trying to read the letters was the actual game
Its because only then youre part of the elite. Or not.
I thought the time limit might have been meant to keep pirates from reverse-engineering the order of the columns from the scrambled "OK" and then manually unscrambling the code they needed to type in.
WOW! This is where Elite Dangerous came from?! Thanks for learning me MVG.
Wow, I got my first computer during the second half of the 80's, and I thought I had seen pretty much all kinds of copy protections (hardware dongles, words from the manual, weird "wheels", unconventional disk formats or intentional bad sectors, then later Safedisc and Securom, ...), but I had never seen this one. Seems as annoying as some of its successors :-)
I never had an issue with the lens lock , I held it still!! It was almost impossible for the avergae 13 yr old to get cracked games in 1985, and back then waiting 10 mins for a game to load was no big deal. You have some funny ideas about what the home comp scene was like in the UK in the 80's.
Strange. I am Swedish and I was 11 in 85 and it was rather easy for most average kids to get cracked games. More or less it took half a year owning a computer until you got to knew someone who knew someone who had access to cracks. Later on I joined the demo scene and got to know people from whole of Europe and they had same experiments.
7:38 That's *obviously* "76".
You're supposed to close one eye, you know.
Also, first one was "5o".
they don't read the f*cking manual and complain.... Lens lock protection is the most convenient copy protection system ever made.
@@MiniKodjo I wouldn't go *that* far, but the conclusion I came to after watching this video is that, yes, the articles were trying to create controversy over nothing.
Have to agree I was cringing watch MVG try to use the lenslock - I could read the codes on the video!
@@em00k That's because the camera has only one lens, and he was probably looking with his two eyes open. Had he read the instructions, he would have known to close one, and yeah it's quite obvious when you do so.
@@PsychOsmosis He was looking at the camera's screen, obviously.
Had Elite on my Spectrum back in the 80s, and boy I remember what a holy horror these things were. Didn't help that they were incredibly flimsy and the side pieces would break off after a lot of use, so you'd kind of have to hover the thing above the TV screen and move it forward and back to find the sweet spot.
can't be the only one mildly disappointed that you didn't show how someone from the 80s would have bipassed the security.
But he kind of did though, the process would have been basically the same... Only difference being he wouldn't of had this fancy public tool to do this so easily. You would of had to build custom tools and then the process would be similar just using those tools instead of this one he used here. In the 80's it's the same as today, you had to find that conditional jump which determines if its going to keep looping the lenslock input code/quitting after 3 wrong tries (by following the conditional jump at 0xC2AC back up to 0xC288 which is on the same screen visible). Then you nop it (NO OPERATION) so that regardless if C is set or not it always continues execution past the conditional jump (not following it to 0xC288) which then starts the game instead of looping for lenslock input or exiting. If you always typed wrong lenslock characters then it never makes it past that jump at 0xC2AC and just keeps executing that lenslock loop or exiting after 3 incorrect attempts. So any way you modify it that actually skips that lenslock loop and continues execution from 0xC2AE onwards will work to bypass the protection and start the game! :)
Based on how he's done this here, it looks like if you patched that 0xC2AC with a NOP instruction and restarted the game with that patched permanently to the rom, the lenlock prompt still comes up but any input you type in is accepted rather than rejected and the game starts. To make it even better and skip the lenslock prompt entirely one could instead find the beginning of that lenslock loop (or really anywhere before it waits on user input for it) and put an unconditional jump up to 0xC2AE (where the real game code actually starts as told above).
It actually looks like as a good guess that the LD A,$04 which is moved into $C77E is the number of tries you get + 1 (since it decrements before using immediately at $C28B after loading from $C77E)... So if you increased that number you would get more tries if I'm correct, ex. changing it to FF should give 254 tries instead of 3.
But we don't want more tries just to immediately skip having to enter anything to start the game and have it just start. But the LD, A, $04 instruction at $0xC283 probably relating to lenslock allowed attempts shouldn't be neccesary for any of the games code to work, and its two bytes perfect for overwriting with a jump without having to nop more bytes to clean things up (Like if patching from C288 to jump to C2AE should work too but will leave the code looking wierd in the disaaseembler since the third byte no longer is part of the jump and is then its own not intended instruction there. So if doing that it'd be best to nop that 3rd byte)
But here I'm just going to overwrite that 2 byte LD A, $04 at $C283 with a 2 byte jump to $C2AE and I haven't tested this, but I beleive it will most likely work :D
Permanent patch one of these to copies of the rom and see the difference :D
==MVG quick version/Any lenslock input is accepted as correct==
[$C2AC: 38 DA] JR C,$C288
Patch With:
[$C2AC: 00 00] NOP x 2
==Improved Version/Skip lenslock & directly load game (Probably)==
[$C283: 3E 04] LD A,$04
Patch With:
[$C283: 18 29] JR $C2AE
dest - src - 2 = jump offset
$C2AE - $C2AC - 2 ('JR x' instruction size) = $29
@@YourTVUnplugged in order to patch in such a NOP, you would also have needed to defeat the nonstandard tape loader.
These predictions weren't designed to be "uncrackable" forever, but just enough to slow down early, casual "bedroom" piracy such that they could make some sales in the first few months after launch.
I remember back in the day my dad purchased The Art Studio for a C64 on tape. This program also had lenslok protection, but for some reason the dealer didn't supply the plastic lens. Not knowing any better, we always guess our way through. Somehow we managed to get into the program after the thirs or fourth loading attempt.
So the captcha was basically invented way back in the 80s :)
Whoever invented captcha honestly deserves to rot in hell. Captcha is one of the absolute worst inventions ever made.
MVG, thank you for covering Lenslock in this video. I used to own Elite and OCP Art Studio on my Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k back then. And it was a real pain to get to play/use both of them due to their copy protection. Also, having a color deficiancy didn't exactly help with the Jet Set Willy protection either :-)
It was a great watch though, being reminded of the ways that software publishers used to fight software piracy.
I just hand drew and coloured my version of the Jet Set Willy code card back in the day :)
Took ages
Lovely to hear you talking about the Spectrum MVG... I'm a bit of a fan.
So this is the precursor to captchas / TOPT
Nothing to do with it.
Or even each other.
@@unitedfools3493 wasn’t meant to be take so literal. It’s a distant but funny coincidences: recognising letters in shapes, 30 seconds to input. I know the similarities end there.
It took me a while to realise i had the lens the wrong way around i.e. back to front. I should have read the instructions fully lol
Captchas are annoying as sin. Whoever invented them honestly deserves to rot in hell for what they created.
YOU HAD TO WAIT 10 MINUTES TO LOAD A GAME?! I’m glad for my laptop now
11:45 C is the carry flag, not the “condition” flag...
Don't be dangerous... 😏
@@beforth ???
The intro music is halfway between The Exorcist and Kikstart II. I love it.
I can only imagine that the protection would be more difficult to bypass in the ‘80s, without the benefit of modern emulators and debuggers.. not impossible, but certainly not as easy..
Oh yea definitely, which is was kind of like you had to really know your shit to do this kind of thing. That's basically since you had to make your own tools and everything, your own debuggers and assemblers and dissamblers and things which is not trivial or that most people would just know how to do. Now with lots of public tools and more advanced information flow it makes it require not being so "Elite: Dangerous" xD to pull off which can use premade public tools and information resources to learn and figure things out much easier! :D
Not horrible complicated -- just time consuming. Sure you had to know assembly language but boot tracing is pretty straightforward albeit extremely tedious in some titles.
There were actually RAM / memory snapshot cards along with NMI / debugger hardware cards that sped the process up for the dedicated hackers and krackers.
Machine language monitor cartridge with a soft-reset button. Not actually more difficult for this task, when you have to walk one up the stack anyway and the program is just freshly started.
this is so cool to know as a person whos first console was ps1 I would like to see more videos about even older consoles i never had
It's really good to know that game publishers decided *never again* to implement crappy copy protection that does little to nothing to stop pirates and only serves to punish consumers for doing the right thing and purchasing the game... LOL
Yeah I agree. Also it’s nice to know that consumers stopped copying software and instead payed for what they consumed making it possible for those developers who did not have copy protecting to survive... LOL
@@litjellyfish there are two main types of reasons why someone would get pirate a copy (maybe a third). 1) they are using it as a demo and the quality of the game is how a sale is achieved 2) they were never going to be sale to begin with no matter what the 3?) the anti piracy is so intrisive or causes that legitimate owners are playing it to get a better play expierence. making it a massive pain or impossible to play the legally brought game either does nothing to stop piracy or it gives more of a demand because of legal copies being worse to play than pirated copies
@@randomprotag9329 as i have been both using and doing piracy all my life I can say that those all reasons are just bulldogs.
People pirate because it costs less and sometimes is more convenient. And they are not afraid to get caught. Simple as that. Same with movies.
In the end it’s very simple. People understand that it’s illegal but as the chance of reprimand is so low they take the risk. We humans do usually this in every field. And always complains and give excuses for our reasons to do so if questioned about it.
I had to use this when launching Graphical Adventure Creator on the Amstrad CPC464. It’s really interesting to watch the demonstration of you using the lens because when I had to use this on the Amstrrad, this clearly had a physical monitor size which was the same for all CPCs. I never had to calibrate the lens size on the Amstrad and therefore never suffered the problems that other systems had if they were connected to a television. It’s very interesting to see the problems that other people had reported using the LensLok system, i.e. Having the wrong lens for the respective software. Funny looking back on it now, but I can understand the frustration that people had suffered with this copy protection.
it realy does seem like copy protection thats a) not intrusive to the expierence either due to performance or technical issues or just a massive pain or impossible for poeple to actually use and B) actually effective to where its not trivial to get crack it is basicly non existant.
Cloud gaming will be the ultimate form of copy protection for games. You can't record the game code, only the stream itself.
@@bretonfabrice that would fall under category a.
@@bretonfabrice to expand on butters point even assuming that internet is perfect absolutely everywhere and their is no playability issues. the fact that servers are needed means that when they are shut down it becomes impossible to play in the intended way. the sega satalite gardield game has this issue as the satalite version had exclusive conentent which is very likely lost
@@randomprotag9329 I didn't say the opposite :p I just think we're soon going to see cloud exclusive games because from a company's point of view, this is the ultimate way to prevent illegal copying. For now big games cost too much to produce to make this profitable but it will end up happening sooner or later.
I still have my lenslok and the box of ZX Spectrum Elite. I met the designer of the lenslok - he gave us all his unconditional apology! :)
i see "76"
mvg: "TG"
he was looking for capital letters, like the manual said, 3:32 look at #6.
Always love your stuff! All the best for 2021
me: 76 76 76
Him: T and E?
me: ahhhhhhhhhh
he was looking for capital letters, like the manual said, 3:32 look at #6.
@@vasopel I know xD
@@normankiefer6033 ;-)
always awesome to see some of your content.. i'm 34 and i'm am at AWE that how gaming and digital history that we have ... welcome to 2021 and lets keep gaming for safety and fun
The code said "Drink more ovaltine"
RUclips did not notify me of this video. I'm here bc I enjoy your channel enough to manually check.
:)