A Pirate’s Life for Me, Part 3: Case Studies in Copy Protection

I&#x27;ve spent a lot of time both reversing and creating these kinds of schemes. Anyone else here?<p>I gave a talk a few years back, comparing both retro and modern copy protection schemes. Also designed hardware for dumping floppies at the bitcell level (ZoomFloppy) and co-designed the Blu-ray content protection system.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;rootlabs&#x2F;copy-protection-wars-analyzing-retro-and-modern-schemes-rsa-2007" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;rootlabs&#x2F;copy-protection-wars-anal...</a><p>Now my day job (SourceDNA) is building tools to reverse lots of code at scale. A never-ending stream of apps provides a ton of &quot;wat?&quot; moments as you never expect developers to make the choices they do.

Awesome post.<p>Part 1: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filfre.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;a-pirates-life-for-me-part-1-dont-copy-that-floppy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filfre.net&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;a-pirates-life-for-me-part-1-d...</a><p>Part 2: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filfre.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;a-pirates-life-for-me-part-2-the-scene&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filfre.net&#x2F;2016&#x2F;01&#x2F;a-pirates-life-for-me-part-2-t...</a>

I remember the Dungeon Master copy protection. Its weakness was that if the game was even only partially cracked, you&#x27;d still have some time to advance the game before the copy protection kicked in and it crashed or killed you so we got pretty far by sheer stamina. Luckily we as kids had a lot of time available for waiting the game to load over and over again. And it _was_ that good of a game even in retrospect.<p>I also successfully managed to pirate an original Chaos Strikes Back disks by repeatedly copying the data with a (pirated) synchronisation dongle and the Cyclone software. It required several attempts to get the fuzzy sectors correct because I was using a pre-used disk. This technique and the recommendation to use completely blank disks would have been mentioned in the manual of Cyclone but I wasn&#x27;t aware of it... Since I&#x27;d also pirated the software! I was also unaware of the fuzzy bits themselves, so it was just a bit of luck.<p>Anyway, CSB wasn&#x27;t as exciting experience as its predecessor. Boring maze-like transforming levels, hard monsters (in the sense that they took a lot of time, not skill to eradicate), little of anything new, etc. Disappointing after all that effort ;)

Great read and hopefully a lesson: you can spend time and money and annoy your customers to no end to provide entertainment and a challenge to young programmers or you could save yourself all the hassle and make lots of money by being smart like the good people at GoG and treating your customers better than the pirates.

The first two methods were dead on arrival with copy ][+&#x27;s track copier. It could do whole track copies as long as it could identify a starting point for the track. Later versions were even smart enough to use a simple substitution database, and sector location information (for sectors stored on quarter tracks) to tweak the track data as it was copied. I always wondered how they avoided legal action with that database which asked if the disk you were trying to copy was one of the hundred or so it knew how to &quot;crack&quot;.<p>Reminds me of another piece of modern software still in use by a lot of people, which pulls disk metadata from an internet database for similar purposes.

I recall the Apple II+ floppy drive would produce all kinds of choking, strangling, and coughing sounds when playing those copy protected games. When I got my next computer, my first Mac, I remember my shock at the silence of the floppy drive. Many times I thought it was broken (and since they were so slow to load, you had to &#x27;wait it out&#x27; to be sure).