Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!sdcsvax!sdcrdcf!hplabs!sri-unix!Ewing@YALE.ARPA From: Ewing@YALE.ARPA Newsgroups: net.micro Subject: Re: ..Re: Software Piracy and Solo Flight Message-ID: <701@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Sun, 13-May-84 17:17:16 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.701 Posted: Sun May 13 17:17:16 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 15-May-84 02:29:52 EDT Lines: 53 From: Ricky Ewing I should have suspected that the protection for SOLO FLIGHT fell into the line of "Let's quietly screw this pirate royal" schemes. When the program boots, the protection process proceeds to do its merry check, and if the checking process comes up wrong, then its feeds the games' timer clock (for program speed control) a big fat #$FF (Binary for the number "255", the largest number in eight bits), thus the program proceeds to work at a crawl versus the normal speed with the normal delay value in the timer rountine. Very sneaky. I should have thought of it sooner. I have seen a lot of protections like this which chose to quietly tell you that you lose rather than grinding the drive and writing nasty messages all over the screen (yes, some programs have written very nasty letters to you on the screen). Flight Simulator ][ (I have an Apple ][plus) does this also. If you copy it with any of the standard nibble copiers, the game seems to come up normally and proceed as scheduled for about a minute when the screen all-of-a-sudden turns black and your Apple freezes up (@%#&*$!!!!). For a young company, Electronic Arts has come up with some very formidable protections for several machines. In the basketball game "Julius Erving and Larry Bird Go One on One", if the prootection check fails on boot (a bizarre type of quarter- tracking) then (if the game comes up at all), the heads of the two players are spinning around and around like in a dumb cartoon and their hands are held fast over their heads and all you can do is move them around and watch. No shooting or any game play is possible. Such a humorous protection. Much more pleasant than "YOU WILL BE SHOT AT SUNRISE FOR COPYING THIS DISK!!!" (Some protectors have come just short of saying this in some programs). An interesting note: Some companies are starting to leave messages for pirates inside protected code. One program asked nicely not to distibuted the now assumed cracked program at a large scale level. Electromic Arts sprinkles throughout its game disks this message: "Don't break this game, write you own instead!" Very amusing. However, Electronic Arts failed to realize (or maybe it was intentional) that every place on the disk where this message was (there were 3 places), there was code right next to it which had something to do with the protection. Made it much more easier to crack. Anyway, I'm taking a little advice from Electronic Arts: I am going to start to write my own....PROTECTIONS! (If you can't beat them, and I can beat them, join them I guess.) Look for me on my latest protection; we pirates who have looked at several different kinds of protections are the best at writing our own. Who said I can't change my stripes...... "Captain, Jim, please! Don't stop me. Don't let him stop me. It's you career, and Captain Pike's life. You must see the rest of the transmission." "Lock 'em up!" --Ricky-- ------- -------