DigitalDilemma42 years ago, this was state of the art copy protection
Cherry
db0A direct ancestor to the glorious Monkey Island Dial-a-pirate!
tomiantIndiana Jones and the Last Crusade for Amiga I think it was which came with a photocopy proof translation table that you used with a red piece of translucent plastic overlay, which would reveal the codes underneath.
Or maybe that was Zak McKracken.
Both amazing games. I remember the Monkey Island 2 one also, but I think we had cracked versions for all of those games anyway tbh. :)
It’s understandable that companies wanted to protect their software, but this method was a bit feeble. On the ZX Spectrum at least, it could be overcome by a single POKE!
Still, at least it wasn’t the horrible, user-hostile LensLok system…
LensLok - Early 80's Anti-Piracy that frustrated | MVG
Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤIt wasn’t. A lot of the copy protection was the game asking for the word on a particular page and line in the manual. When you pirated the game (which was easy, since it was literally just copying the disk to another disk), you photocopied the manual as well. Or rather photocopied the photocopy of the manual, I didn’t see a lot of original games for the PC and Commodore 64 back in the 80s, but I sure had hundreds if not thousands of games.
/Colour/ Photocopiers cost about the same as a new car back then, so whilst they existed, they weren’t exactly within access to schoolkids.
The original Terminator game for PC had a similar grid paper with symbols you would have to select when starting the game. It was also dark red with black characters, so you couldn’t easily photo copy it
I remember a game (forget which one) that would ask which word was on a certain page in the game manual for its copy protection.
So did many Microprose simulators.
This requires game developers to actually finish the game before they release it though, so unrealistic by today’s standards.
wow. Im old enough this could possibly be a thing for me but I barely had seen and touched computers. wizardy and oregon trail.
maccentricAttack-Axe-Swing!
Anyone remember Dan Patcher?
honestly alls I remember about wizardry was wizmaker and it being the time I learned about doing a hole punch to make a disk double sided sorta.
meejleMy dad had some old games for his Amstrad computer that needed a Lenslok, to decode the characters displayed on the screen.
IIRC it didn’t work very well at all.
HiddenLayer555It always blows my mind just how much resources companies are willing to spend on DRM. Like, surely at some point your R&D costs will outweigh whatever piracy you might have prevented, and that prevention rate will never, ever be 100%. And that’s assuming they spent extra resources on DRM and didn’t take it out of the actual game development budget, resulting in a shittier product and less sales as a result.
It reminds me of when the transit system in my city introduced fare gates. It massively inflated the operating cost and guess what? It only ever stopped honest people who either forgot to load their card or were new to the transit system/city and didn’t understand the zone system, so loaded a 1 zone pass and had the audacity to ride even one station outside the city they got on (not to mention when the system glitched and refused to let you out even when you did pay). The people habitually not paying just casually push past the fare gates and no one stops them. I’d genuinely be suprised if they’re even breaking even with the operating/maintenance costs vs whatever few unintentional fare dodgers they manage to stop. Most likely they’re losing money, while making the transit system less efficient by introducing a bottleneck, while discouraging drivers from trying out transit, just because they can’t stand the idea that people can just walk on the train without paying (even though they haven’t actually stopped them).
Michael 🇺🇦@digdilem At that time I had bought a computer game (I guess it was "Elite") that always asked me about the word in the manual on some specific page. I was so upset about that, that I patched the random generator so that it returned a fix value. Then I changed the prompt so that it told me, which word to enter.
flangoDungeon Master was distributed on a floppy disk that had a specific weak sector that would randomly return 1 or 0 when read. The game would periodically read that sector and, if it returned the same but x times in a row, it would kill your entire party. When copying the disk, the original would read either 1 or 0 and then write that value in that specific sector, meaning the copy would always return 1 or 0.
All of these oold copy protections were so annoying. Some would just give you a page number from the manual and ask for the fifth word. Some AD&D games came with a decoder wheel with elvish runes n shit (looking at your Pool of Radiance!). At least the decoder wheel was fun to throw around at your friends.