Retro anti-piracy methods always make for top-tier stories, especially when the tech support / PR folk get to call out the 'totally legit customers' who fell into the developer's traps.
More modern games can also be sneaky. I remember Garry's Mod had a neat one for a while: if it detected that the game was pirated, it would crash with an error message followed by a long number. Obviously, people would go online and ask for help with their "error code". Thing is, that number was the users 64-bit Steam ID.
There was also Arkham Asylum where you couldn't use the cape to glide (obviously an important mechanic), Serious Sam 3 where a strong enemy would relentlessly pursue you, Mirrors Edge which would slow to a crawl, and Crysis I think had you stuck shooting chickens instead of bullets.
@joey0guy: That example from Arkham Asylum was especially funny; rather than gliding when the button is held, Batman repeatedly opens and closes his cape, as if you're trying to mash the button instead. A pirate reported the 'bug', and Eidos responded by saying "It's not a bug in the game's code; it's a bug in your _moral_ code."
Back in the day I called some company with three letters (I think they made the Blitzkrieg games or something like that) because they had the Commander Keen rights in my country. Turned out, they were sold out. Obviously, a few years later when I had internet access, abandonware websites, and later Steam and GOG, mitigated that issue. It's still crazy to think I legally own copies of all the games I played as shareware in my childhood - at least whereas Apogee is concerned.
I used a similar physical disk trick back in the 90s, but instead of making a hole in the disk, I used the fact that a factory-fresh floppy that had never been formatted would read different random data each time. So I developed a formatter that simply skipped a specific sector, and in the games checked that reading that specific sector multiple times yielded different results each time. Combined with other layers of protection, this meant that people would generally copy the game with a bit-for-bit copier, copying the random sector and writing it to the copy disk, meaning that a copy would have "static" data rather than continually random. We also used the tricks of making the game quietly become unplayable (eg enemies hurt you really badly) after a while if the protection had been cracked. I must admit I had as much fun cracking protection as developing my own.
@@Pfaeff i know nothing about how any of it actually works, but if i had to make i guess i would think that its always reading back a fluctuating value, but if a bit has been specifically set to zero, then that fluctuating value will be well beyond the threshold for "1" or "0" but if it hasnt been explicitly set, then the fluctuation will probably be right around that threshold point, so sometimes it might lean more towards 1 while other times it leans more towards 0
I remember as a kid, someone sneaked a copy of a game which I had to play when my parents weren't at home because they wouldn't allow me to play. This pirated version crashed when showed some specific wall or monster (not sure which one was). It was a hard crash the kind it wouldn't allow Ctrl alt del or alt f4. The panic I felt by thinking of my parents coming home just to discover their info was destroyed by some virus because of gaming :s.
@@Damaged7 Because it was also back when DRM wasn't a ticking time bomb that could remove access to a product you paid for if a server somewhere gets shut off. It was back when DRM only negatively impacted pirates rather than putting the paying customer at risk. Modern DRM creates more pirates than it stops, as pirates crack it day one and enjoy the game without any repercussions, whereas paying customers are gaming on borrowed time.
Back when people understood that using something like Denuvo as a drm and anticheat that gets ring 0 access is probably a bad idea due to it being outward facing, having tcp/ip stack access, and being pre-installed in games such as the new doom. You know given one vulnerability could allow a privilege escalation to ring 0? Surely that wouldn't be a target for hackers? Nah that's fine. Same with the LoJack software that lead to a uefi bootkit by writing to the spi chip just giving stuff very low level access is a solid idea. (this is intense sarcasm) Basically unless you understand the topic be quiet because you are advocating support for something that is dangerous. Don't scoff at us who understand enough to dislike these sort of things. Thankfully Id software listened and removed it. I freelance doing bug bounties on h1 and bugcrowd and when I'm not doing I frequently target software just like that to sell the exploit to a vulnerability broker such as Zerodium. In hopes the public sees the cve's and news clippings here and there and becomes more conscious of their security or bare minimum the negligence of companies with their security. So do us all a favor and either get educated or hush.
He knows what he's talking about. Most crappy youtubers have never even made a game so they're talking out of their ass and take 30 minutes to say 2 things.
The removal of the flooring reminds me of the first Deus Ex. Many on forums were complaining that they couldn't activate the boat to leave Liberty Island (level 1); which was a troll feature of the pirated version.
The developers of Game Dev Tycoon did a similar thing with regards to sneakily changing the game for pirates. In Game Dev Tycoon you set out to start a game development empire but if you've got the pirated version of GDT people in the game start pirating your game like crazy so you never make any money and always wound up broke. A nice self-reference there! People were complaining in game forums that GDT is too hard because piracy is killing their profits ...
That’s quite a sneaky protection - most weren’t nearly as sneaky and were defeated by some well placed NOOPs, loading some fixed values into registers and jump or two and after boot it’s never called again (based on observation of the cracked versions). Intertwining it and obfuscating it in code that’s called constantly during gameplay is genius :D
This is the reason why I want to add this game to my collection. I love code that messes with pirates, especially one that references one of my favorite films.
Great video, it is nice to see different ways people handled copy protection, looks like a lot of fun. I know this video just covers the coding aspect but I do have a question about the end users experience. So Question: For the people who had purchased a pirated version unknowingly(i.e. parents that buys a second hand copy), or had a copy that was not legitimate without their knowledge(i.e. a kid who just wants to play a game someone purchased for them). Having reached the point where they are locked out and unable to pass, there is nothing to tell the player they have a pirated version. I could see that some would find it frustrating and possibly put it down to a poorly developer game, then possibly avoid games from that developer in the future. If they were to call up support and were humiliated for purchasing a pirated copy or playing a pirated copy unknowingly, it may make them a bit dubious to call up support from them again regardless of the legitimacy of the disk. I could imagine it would add extra strain on customer support having people call up for support. Is this something that crosses peoples minds when developing protection and add measures to prevent this? Or does/did this situation not occur enough to worry about taking it in for consideration?
The parents ought to contact the person who sold them the disk for a refund. Perhaps in conjunction with a service over-the-phone to have a new disk sent and billed to a debit card.
Too bad that some modern developers think they found proper ways of identifying a pirated copy while they didn't and so lash out at legit customers whose games broke because of that.
Brings back a lot of memories of how unreliable most of these copy protection systems were. I bought a lot of games, but always ended up getting the cracked versions anyway since they usually worked better or even just worked at all (just like the situation with modern games featuring DRM, really). All those horrible buzzing sounds coming from the floppy drive were games trying to prematurely wear out your floppy drive or throw it out of alignment.
Brilliant! Old copy protection was funny stuff. I'm no saint having played some pc games with unofficial versions, but it would've served me right to experience something like this.
For a number of minutes I thought the title and thumbnail were clickbait but I completely forgot that these DeadPirateRoberts lines of code were also specifically being wrote to that hole.
Love the ending. Still to this day get people posting on forums and comment threads with similar stories for other games "help! My game crashes at this point! What's wrong?!" "You got a pirated copy mate 😂"
I was using a bit for bit sector copying for the C64 It even read corrupted sectors and copied them so they were corrupted on copy but write protection had to be enabled on the disk for games to work, now this explains why, the original disks must have had real damaged areas.
You are a genius. At the beginning I thought it was same principle of have 2 locks in your door, but only lock one so picking both won't work. But your solution is better without the use of a probably lost manual or using weird devices to get a password. ---------------------------- EDIT: Totally different subject. The Game Dev Tycoon's antipiracy idea is the better I've seen so far.
There was a problem with this kind of protection. It got around that the game was bugged, not that the "pirated" game was bugged, but the game was bugged.
Wouldn't it be hard to know which part of the disk to shoot and also it may have been not many people had access to such a laser - recall he said it was a very precise laser.
I love this. Black and White 2 did a funny thing as well. If it was a pirated copy, your population would grow. So people took to the forums complaining of a bug where their population wouldn't grow, outing that they pirated the game.
reminds me of a story I heard about a a later game ( I wanna say deus ex or serious sam, but honestly I can't remember) supposedly, the developers had coded in an unkillable monster (some sort of man-crab hybrid or something) that would only appear in pirated copies of the game and basically relentlessly hunt the player down. people were calling tiplines trying to figure out how to beat the monster, only to out themselves as pirates, lol.
Jon, can you please do a video on how you successfully recreated the Universal Studios logo for the boot up screen of “Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex”?
Looked glitched to me since the text was on the bottom of the Earth, and not in the middle to fit the typical Universal logo affair. Plus, of all the things the artists did in Wrath, that’s what you’re interested in???
Even in modern games you get that. For example Mirror's Edge, where a jump at the start of one of the levels would always fail if you had a pirated version of GTA IV where Nico would get drunk.
@@Hans-gb4mv Copy protection is a joke nowadays, although that I do agree with your statements, in today's world you can get a backup in no time. Unless the software is using an online DRM. In wich case fuck 'em (not because you can't backup, being online all the time sucks ass).
If this doesn't make sense, keep in mind that the pirate wouldn't see the name "DreadPirateRoberts" anywhere, or the one-liner math equations involing it. They just see the end result of those equations.
Drm and Anti-circumvention, using self modifying (drm) code would be interesting, since it would modify game code based on several factors/states, makes it much harder to figure out too
If the protection worked by attempting to write to a specific location on the disk, what happens on a pirate copy when the write protection notch is set to read-only? Would that write operation also fail?
on amiga the games can directly access the drive bypassing the notch some used this to make a "save" system where they wrote a save "code" (mainly preset numbers) to disk and when loading up checked for that data and then loaded the corresponding "save" or "map" up
@@thecow2756 Thanks for the explanation. I had always assumed that write-protection was enforced within the disk drive itself. I did not know that a program could override the protection.
Not sure about the Amiga, never owned one... But on the PC, there were programs which would create bad sectors in the right places to mimic copy protection, like CopyQM did (can't remember if that name is hundred 100% right). It had a list of games covered. In some countries, they had hardware disk copies, that just exactly duplicated the exact sectors, thereby copying a protected disk almost exactly.
Why did you decide to use a custom cruncher for the data and not one of the many existing ones such a CrunchMania, StoneCracker, or even the old PowerPacker? It would be interesting to have an episode where you explain how the cruncher works and which algoritmes it uses?
I suspect Jon used a custom cruncher so pesky crackers couldn't simply rip the files from the disk, depack them, hack them and then repack them and then put them back on the disk. He wasn't trying to make it easy ;)
The laser method sounds neat and all, but I imagine it would be very difficult to implement because it isn't a feature of normal disk duplication hardware. They can write just about any magnetic pattern you can think of, but they can't damage the media for you. Was there ever a commercial duplicator that could do this?
0:44 Top trolling. Didn't the PlayStation do similar with purposely written bad sectors? The original dumps of Banjo-Tooie had a protection where Banjo couldn't jump very high, rendering the game impossible early on. And I seem to remember Earthbound would increase the encounter rate and had one protection routine waiting for you to get almost to the end of the game before deleting your save.
So this was kinda like Spyro, Year of the Dragon on the PS1. If the game saw that the anti piracy measure was cracked, it would let you play the game normally until a certain point where the fairy (Don't remember her name) would tell you that the game was hacked and that it may be pirated and problems would start happening. It would then play pranks on the player from removing eggs to crashing the game to other stuff. If you somehow made it to the final boss, the game would send you back to the first part of the hub world, erase your save, and reset all of your progress and does it all over again. It took 2 months for a properly cracked version to come out. I wonder how many days for a properly cracked version of Leander to come out.
Jon, I find it common that Amiga games have the option to play music OR sound effects, but rarely both at the same time, as was common on other platforms and game consoles. Why is that? Was there a technical reason, or is it simply a preference to reserve more audio channels for music?
Common? I don't think I've ever seen a game that did that. I mean, lots of games had the option to turn the music or the sound effects off, but they weren't mutually exclusive. It would always be possible to mix the audio in software before sending it to the audio chip. It's pretty easy to do on an Amiga (no need to do the constant switching mentioned in this video).
I copied another world from my friends original and I made a crude copy of the encryption wheel. I had leander as well but I don't remember having 4 disks.
I see a custom made tool out of wood and a nail where one may pinch the holes into his copies. So maybe laser was needed for required precision. I wonder if someone figured out the proper spot...
I wonder how is all that so hard to defeat, All you need to do is to patch the disk checking function rather than every reference to it. To find that function I would look to places in the code where the disk read function is referenced. alternatively rather just punch a hole in the same location using a needle and you will have a perfect copy
No such thing as stopping a hack it's mitigated or delayed and this game was cracked almost a week into it being released and is still available for emulators now to verify the claim. Not that is a good thing Jon is a great guy and his information and insight is invaluable its extremely kind he makes these videos for free too just to share knowledge. But I've been in the pentesting /bug bounty field and reverse engineering scene long enough to tell you the idea of security doesn't really exist its just mitigation and delays.
If, as the message at the start of this states, this form of piracy protection wasn't actually used, how were people contacting the company with complaints about it?
I’ve never played Leander but it would be fair to say that back then, I’d probably also would get stuck on level 4 😜 I loved hacking games! I do little basic demos now in my channel in the playlist: “breaking (impossible) high scores any way possible”. Often hacking the game is the quickest approach, compared to making tool assisted game plays.
imagine using up your entire harddrive for a single game, and then imagine in that game code there was a tiny bit of code to stop piracy. Which forced you to buy another harddrive or 3 in this case!. This alone is why (imo) modern "8bit/16bit" games dont compare to vintage stuff. When programmers were forced to write games in a hard limited space and all the crazy hacks and tomfoolery required to get some of the most amazing games.
Why didn't they just... cut a hole at that point in the disc? You'd think that just looking at the original floppy and seeing the code, they would have figured that out pretty quickly. Was it just too technically difficult to get it exact enough?
A distributor of an accounting Software using this method challenged me. I did a hole in an aproximated position as a Proof of concept and it worked and told the distributor it was ineffective. They ended switching the method.
If "just looking at the original floppy and seeing the code they would have figured that out pretty quickly", they could simply edit the code. Did you watch the video...?
Retro anti-piracy methods always make for top-tier stories, especially when the tech support / PR folk get to call out the 'totally legit customers' who fell into the developer's traps.
It is also funny when those things put backdoors into your computer or make your game not work.
More modern games can also be sneaky. I remember Garry's Mod had a neat one for a while: if it detected that the game was pirated, it would crash with an error message followed by a long number. Obviously, people would go online and ask for help with their "error code". Thing is, that number was the users 64-bit Steam ID.
There was also Arkham Asylum where you couldn't use the cape to glide (obviously an important mechanic), Serious Sam 3 where a strong enemy would relentlessly pursue you, Mirrors Edge which would slow to a crawl, and Crysis I think had you stuck shooting chickens instead of bullets.
@joey0guy: That example from Arkham Asylum was especially funny; rather than gliding when the button is held, Batman repeatedly opens and closes his cape, as if you're trying to mash the button instead.
A pirate reported the 'bug', and Eidos responded by saying "It's not a bug in the game's code; it's a bug in your _moral_ code."
yup, until they malfunction and false flag legit copies, though its always extra hilarious in hindsight then
Imagine phoning up the a game's publisher, unheard of these days
Back in the day I called some company with three letters (I think they made the Blitzkrieg games or something like that) because they had the Commander Keen rights in my country. Turned out, they were sold out. Obviously, a few years later when I had internet access, abandonware websites, and later Steam and GOG, mitigated that issue. It's still crazy to think I legally own copies of all the games I played as shareware in my childhood - at least whereas Apogee is concerned.
Yeah, and calling cheat hotlines for $2 per minute that you found in the back of a Sega magazine.
Dude. I call Sony all the time.. im like bro, I need my money back you borrowed.
@@Ryan-re1rs They are like - doesn't matter, your data was stolen already as well.
yeah you'd just tweet them now and make your shaming public
I used a similar physical disk trick back in the 90s, but instead of making a hole in the disk, I used the fact that a factory-fresh floppy that had never been formatted would read different random data each time. So I developed a formatter that simply skipped a specific sector, and in the games checked that reading that specific sector multiple times yielded different results each time. Combined with other layers of protection, this meant that people would generally copy the game with a bit-for-bit copier, copying the random sector and writing it to the copy disk, meaning that a copy would have "static" data rather than continually random. We also used the tricks of making the game quietly become unplayable (eg enemies hurt you really badly) after a while if the protection had been cracked. I must admit I had as much fun cracking protection as developing my own.
Why is it that the value changes every time? Are the bits neither 1 nor 0, but rather something in between? Is it the reading that affects the values?
Very creative! Can you mention some of the games that had this protection?
Welcome to "Weak bits" protection.
@@Pfaeff i know nothing about how any of it actually works, but if i had to make i guess
i would think that its always reading back a fluctuating value, but if a bit has been specifically set to zero, then that fluctuating value will be well beyond the threshold for "1" or "0"
but if it hasnt been explicitly set, then the fluctuation will probably be right around that threshold point, so sometimes it might lean more towards 1 while other times it leans more towards 0
It eventually biases towards one value unfortunately. Did it sometimes fail due to randomness appearing not random enough?
Floppy Disk reads "Sonic 3D Backup"
Jon casually says "this one OBVIOUSLY is not being used for anything important" 🤣
Never gets old!
Shots were definitely fired.
wow he invented the “he protec” meme
He protec
He attac
But most importantly...
he fight bac... pirates.
He protec, He attac, but most importantly platforms don’t come bacc.
@@RETROMAN-TH-cam-Channel Dude... you messed this up on purpose, right?
No...
Club penguin is kil
I remember as a kid, someone sneaked a copy of a game which I had to play when my parents weren't at home because they wouldn't allow me to play. This pirated version crashed when showed some specific wall or monster (not sure which one was). It was a hard crash the kind it wouldn't allow Ctrl alt del or alt f4. The panic I felt by thinking of my parents coming home just to discover their info was destroyed by some virus because of gaming :s.
Did you manage to stop it?
@@happy.time.boredom not really. Only way to bypass it was to go map mode. Fighting the boss on map mode wasn't that exciting.
Jon "Fill the hole, there goes Level 4" Burton strikes again.
Back when DRM didn't steal your credit card info and friends list.
Back when people didn't freak out about something as inconsequential as DRM.
@@Damaged7 Back when it was inconsequential enough to not be worth freaking out over.
@@Damaged7 Because it was also back when DRM wasn't a ticking time bomb that could remove access to a product you paid for if a server somewhere gets shut off. It was back when DRM only negatively impacted pirates rather than putting the paying customer at risk. Modern DRM creates more pirates than it stops, as pirates crack it day one and enjoy the game without any repercussions, whereas paying customers are gaming on borrowed time.
@@Damaged7 shit take. modern DRM is just fluffed up malware.
Back when people understood that using something like Denuvo as a drm and anticheat that gets ring 0 access is probably a bad idea due to it being outward facing, having tcp/ip stack access, and being pre-installed in games such as the new doom. You know given one vulnerability could allow a privilege escalation to ring 0? Surely that wouldn't be a target for hackers? Nah that's fine. Same with the LoJack software that lead to a uefi bootkit by writing to the spi chip just giving stuff very low level access is a solid idea. (this is intense sarcasm)
Basically unless you understand the topic be quiet because you are advocating support for something that is dangerous. Don't scoff at us who understand enough to dislike these sort of things. Thankfully Id software listened and removed it. I freelance doing bug bounties on h1 and bugcrowd and when I'm not doing I frequently target software just like that to sell the exploit to a vulnerability broker such as Zerodium. In hopes the public sees the cve's and news clippings here and there and becomes more conscious of their security or bare minimum the negligence of companies with their security. So do us all a favor and either get educated or hush.
I wonder how this guy explains everything so well in such amount of time.
He knows what he's talking about. Most crappy youtubers have never even made a game so they're talking out of their ass and take 30 minutes to say 2 things.
Economy of words = high IQ.
@@RamonAlonsoLopezMartinez He's the guy who actually did the thing, and in order to have done the thing he has to have understood the thing.
@@RamonAlonsoLopezMartinez they want that run time for the sweet, sweet ad revenue.
The removal of the flooring reminds me of the first Deus Ex. Many on forums were complaining that they couldn't activate the boat to leave Liberty Island (level 1); which was a troll feature of the pirated version.
HE PROTEC
HE ATTAC
But most importantly...
HE PROTEC
HE STOP THE HAC
The developers of Game Dev Tycoon did a similar thing with regards to sneakily changing the game for pirates. In Game Dev Tycoon you set out to start a game development empire but if you've got the pirated version of GDT people in the game start pirating your game like crazy so you never make any money and always wound up broke. A nice self-reference there!
People were complaining in game forums that GDT is too hard because piracy is killing their profits ...
The ending turned this story into a legend, great work! You inspire me so much. :)
Every bit as celever as Dungeon Master's protection. Well done :)
That’s quite a sneaky protection - most weren’t nearly as sneaky and were defeated by some well placed NOOPs, loading some fixed values into registers and jump or two and after boot it’s never called again (based on observation of the cracked versions). Intertwining it and obfuscating it in code that’s called constantly during gameplay is genius :D
This was the first coding secrets I've seen back when first released. Awesome
This is the reason why I want to add this game to my collection. I love code that messes with pirates, especially one that references one of my favorite films.
Great video, it is nice to see different ways people handled copy protection, looks like a lot of fun. I know this video just covers the coding aspect but I do have a question about the end users experience.
So Question:
For the people who had purchased a pirated version unknowingly(i.e. parents that buys a second hand copy), or had a copy that was not legitimate without their knowledge(i.e. a kid who just wants to play a game someone purchased for them). Having reached the point where they are locked out and unable to pass, there is nothing to tell the player they have a pirated version. I could see that some would find it frustrating and possibly put it down to a poorly developer game, then possibly avoid games from that developer in the future. If they were to call up support and were humiliated for purchasing a pirated copy or playing a pirated copy unknowingly, it may make them a bit dubious to call up support from them again regardless of the legitimacy of the disk. I could imagine it would add extra strain on customer support having people call up for support. Is this something that crosses peoples minds when developing protection and add measures to prevent this? Or does/did this situation not occur enough to worry about taking it in for consideration?
good comment would be glad to see someone who knows something about this to answer it.
The parents ought to contact the person who sold them the disk for a refund. Perhaps in conjunction with a service over-the-phone to have a new disk sent and billed to a debit card.
Too bad that some modern developers think they found proper ways of identifying a pirated copy while they didn't and so lash out at legit customers whose games broke because of that.
Or even better, they implement copyright programs that actually break the game to stop pirating (DOOM Eternal).
If pirates didn't pirate the games then they wouldn't have to....
@@SpanishArmadaProd if people stopped using drm people would stop cracking them.
Brings back a lot of memories of how unreliable most of these copy protection systems were. I bought a lot of games, but always ended up getting the cracked versions anyway since they usually worked better or even just worked at all (just like the situation with modern games featuring DRM, really). All those horrible buzzing sounds coming from the floppy drive were games trying to prematurely wear out your floppy drive or throw it out of alignment.
Brilliant! Old copy protection was funny stuff. I'm no saint having played some pc games with unofficial versions, but it would've served me right to experience something like this.
Just found one of my new favorite channels, keep up the great work man.
Love getting insights on your three dimensional chess game against the hackers.
Well this was brilliant, I mean it seems like this protection worked better than most of what exist today
Getting some Dungeon Master vibes, love these ingenious Copy Protection schemes
Entel Argentina 4:47 LOL, in the land of piracy were it was harder to buy an original game, than it was to get a copy of it.
I noticed that too, those phone seemed familiar to me.
For a number of minutes I thought the title and thumbnail were clickbait but I completely forgot that these DeadPirateRoberts lines of code were also specifically being wrote to that hole.
Love the ending. Still to this day get people posting on forums and comment threads with similar stories for other games "help! My game crashes at this point! What's wrong?!"
"You got a pirated copy mate 😂"
I was using a bit for bit sector copying for the C64 It even read corrupted sectors and copied them so they were corrupted on copy but write protection had to be enabled on the disk for games to work, now this explains why, the original disks must have had real damaged areas.
I had one of those phones. With the ENTEL ARGENTINA logo in the middle and all hehe
narison
I love the Princess Bride reference! This is an iocane powder grade solution to game piracy. Well done indeed.
You are a genius. At the beginning I thought it was same principle of have 2 locks in your door, but only lock one so picking both won't work. But your solution is better without the use of a probably lost manual or using weird devices to get a password.
----------------------------
EDIT: Totally different subject. The Game Dev Tycoon's antipiracy idea is the better I've seen so far.
There was a problem with this kind of protection. It got around that the game was bugged, not that the "pirated" game was bugged, but the game was bugged.
So you're saying instead of shooting the disk with a laser, they used some other technique to destroy/mangle part of the floppy?
Wouldn't it be hard to know which part of the disk to shoot and also it may have been not many people had access to such a laser - recall he said it was a very precise laser.
I love this. Black and White 2 did a funny thing as well. If it was a pirated copy, your population would grow. So people took to the forums complaining of a bug where their population wouldn't grow, outing that they pirated the game.
I have been looking for this video for ages, glad to see it again /)
0:42 Oof, oh man, that one cut deep...
awesome stuff! very clever :D
I loved leander back on release, really was a very good game imo
reminds me of a story I heard about a a later game ( I wanna say deus ex or serious sam, but honestly I can't remember) supposedly, the developers had coded in an unkillable monster (some sort of man-crab hybrid or something) that would only appear in pirated copies of the game and basically relentlessly hunt the player down. people were calling tiplines trying to figure out how to beat the monster, only to out themselves as pirates, lol.
Jon, can you please do a video on how you successfully recreated the Universal Studios logo for the boot up screen of “Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex”?
Looked glitched to me since the text was on the bottom of the Earth, and not in the middle to fit the typical Universal logo affair. Plus, of all the things the artists did in Wrath, that’s what you’re interested in???
Isn't that just a regular 3D model? I don't think it even looked that much like the standard Universal logo you see at the start of films.
I know it's fake but watching you break open the "Sonic 3D Backup" is making me waaaaay too anxious
YOOOO My Man do be roasting pirates
back when anti-piracy was actually kinda funny but in a dark way.
Even in modern games you get that. For example Mirror's Edge, where a jump at the start of one of the levels would always fail if you had a pirated version of GTA IV where Nico would get drunk.
@@Hans-gb4mv Copy protection is a joke nowadays, although that I do agree with your statements, in today's world you can get a backup in no time. Unless the software is using an online DRM. In wich case fuck 'em (not because you can't backup, being online all the time sucks ass).
@@Hans-gb4mv gta 4 got pirated in like under a month without those anti-piracy measures
If this doesn't make sense, keep in mind that the pirate wouldn't see the name "DreadPirateRoberts" anywhere, or the one-liner math equations involing it. They just see the end result of those equations.
Drm and Anti-circumvention, using self modifying (drm) code would be interesting, since it would modify game code based on several factors/states, makes it much harder to figure out too
“Nothing important” you cheeky bugger!
He protec
He attac
but most importantly...
He piracc
imagine you got a bad disk from a game store and you get told that you are a bad person for stealing
Fantastic
If the protection worked by attempting to write to a specific location on the disk, what happens on a pirate copy when the write protection notch is set to read-only? Would that write operation also fail?
on amiga the games can directly access the drive bypassing the notch some used this to make a "save" system where they wrote a save "code" (mainly preset numbers) to disk and when loading up checked for that data and then loaded the corresponding "save" or "map" up
@@thecow2756 Thanks for the explanation. I had always assumed that write-protection was enforced within the disk drive itself. I did not know that a program could override the protection.
Not sure about the Amiga, never owned one... But on the PC, there were programs which would create bad sectors in the right places to mimic copy protection, like CopyQM did (can't remember if that name is hundred 100% right). It had a list of games covered. In some countries, they had hardware disk copies, that just exactly duplicated the exact sectors, thereby copying a protected disk almost exactly.
Psygnosis... Legendary.
I love clever solutions like this!
Ooh, a lazer! How come *you* don't have a lazer, Woody?
That's not a laser! It's a little red light bulb that blinks!
A Princess Bride reference and labels like LOOPYPOOS. We're like code brothers. _Inconceivable!_
Did Rob Northern do something very similar on the 8 bit micro's?
nice one lad
“This one isn’t being used for anything important”
Why did you decide to use a custom cruncher for the data and not one of the many existing ones such a CrunchMania, StoneCracker, or even the old PowerPacker?
It would be interesting to have an episode where you explain how the cruncher works and which algoritmes it uses?
I suspect Jon used a custom cruncher so pesky crackers couldn't simply rip the files from the disk, depack them, hack them and then repack them and then put them back on the disk.
He wasn't trying to make it easy ;)
The laser method sounds neat and all, but I imagine it would be very difficult to implement because it isn't a feature of normal disk duplication hardware. They can write just about any magnetic pattern you can think of, but they can't damage the media for you. Was there ever a commercial duplicator that could do this?
0:44 Top trolling. Didn't the PlayStation do similar with purposely written bad sectors? The original dumps of Banjo-Tooie had a protection where Banjo couldn't jump very high, rendering the game impossible early on. And I seem to remember Earthbound would increase the encounter rate and had one protection routine waiting for you to get almost to the end of the game before deleting your save.
Could you see where the data was written on the disk. Would the spot with no data, be a different colour? Could you just poke a hole in that spot?
he protec, he attac, but more importantly he stop hac
It must be satisfying to know that you stopped a lot of pirates back in the day
So this was kinda like Spyro, Year of the Dragon on the PS1. If the game saw that the anti piracy measure was cracked, it would let you play the game normally until a certain point where the fairy (Don't remember her name) would tell you that the game was hacked and that it may be pirated and problems would start happening. It would then play pranks on the player from removing eggs to crashing the game to other stuff. If you somehow made it to the final boss, the game would send you back to the first part of the hub world, erase your save, and reset all of your progress and does it all over again. It took 2 months for a properly cracked version to come out. I wonder how many days for a properly cracked version of Leander to come out.
I would love to have heard those phone calls.
What I would really like to know is how these cool animations are made using rotation and 3D effects that we usually see in cracked games. :)
look up demoscene
You are a legend
Jon, I find it common that Amiga games have the option to play music OR sound effects, but rarely both at the same time, as was common on other platforms and game consoles. Why is that? Was there a technical reason, or is it simply a preference to reserve more audio channels for music?
Common? I don't think I've ever seen a game that did that. I mean, lots of games had the option to turn the music or the sound effects off, but they weren't mutually exclusive. It would always be possible to mix the audio in software before sending it to the audio chip. It's pretty easy to do on an Amiga (no need to do the constant switching mentioned in this video).
I copied another world from my friends original and I made a crude copy of the encryption wheel. I had leander as well but I don't remember having 4 disks.
That's awesome!
Can you also show us the other way round? I AAAALWAYS wondered so hard how someone removed a copy protection for instance for an Amiga game!
Thumbnail: defeat hackers with laser?
Title: Laser disks beat hackers
Video: laser printed disks beat hackers...
My head: * shoots hackers with comically large lasers *
I see a custom made tool out of wood and a nail where one may pinch the holes into his copies. So maybe laser was needed for required precision. I wonder if someone figured out the proper spot...
What was the different method?
Plot twist: It was discovered that you could write on air as well so that laser hole concept was discarded.
So here's my question: what would've happened if the game was copied, but then the disk or drive were set to run in read-only mode?
He protecc
He attacc
But most importantly, he stop hacc
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
I wonder how is all that so hard to defeat, All you need to do is to patch the disk checking function rather than every reference to it.
To find that function I would look to places in the code where the disk read function is referenced.
alternatively rather just punch a hole in the same location using a needle and you will have a perfect copy
WAIT WAS THAT THE SONIC 3D SOURCE CODE ON THAT FLOPPY DISK YOU BROKE OPEN!?!?!?! YOU FUCK'N MADMAN :O
now I remember playng a game when I was a kid that did not worked well. I think now I know why
He protec
He attac
But most importantly..
He stop hacc
No such thing as stopping a hack it's mitigated or delayed and this game was cracked almost a week into it being released and is still available for emulators now to verify the claim.
Not that is a good thing Jon is a great guy and his information and insight is invaluable its extremely kind he makes these videos for free too just to share knowledge.
But I've been in the pentesting /bug bounty field and reverse engineering scene long enough to tell you the idea of security doesn't really exist its just mitigation and delays.
If, as the message at the start of this states, this form of piracy protection wasn't actually used, how were people contacting the company with complaints about it?
Something similar but slightly different was used.
They probably created a malformed or unreadable sector and just checked for that instead.
Ha, just brilliant.
Did not floppies have write protect notch. Shouldnt it not allow to write anything, thus return valid disk?
That returns a different error, it's easy to distinguish the two.
@@RFC-3514 Ah, that makes sense.
I was really fond of Psygnosis because they made a very weird game when I was young: Brataccas. What was your relationship with Psygnosis?
1:37
"LOOP *BRA* LOOP"
branch
4:11 - @LOOPYPOOS, ha! I might be wrong, but pretty sure that's no coding standard...
He protec
Dread Pirate Roberts
I’ve never played Leander but it would be fair to say that back then, I’d probably also would get stuck on level 4 😜
I loved hacking games! I do little basic demos now in my channel in the playlist: “breaking (impossible) high scores any way possible”. Often hacking the game is the quickest approach, compared to making tool assisted game plays.
he protec.s
he put hole in track
but most importantly
he prevent crack
You are so sneaky.
did you need to insert the disk at a certain orientation?
No, just like a HDD a floppy drive will know where every sector and track on the disc is.
Only if you got the game on vinyl.
The person who bought a used but hacked copy at a local ma and pa shop: bruh.
Sweet revenge
imagine using up your entire harddrive for a single game, and then imagine in that game code there was a tiny bit of code to stop piracy. Which forced you to buy another harddrive or 3 in this case!. This alone is why (imo) modern "8bit/16bit" games dont compare to vintage stuff. When programmers were forced to write games in a hard limited space and all the crazy hacks and tomfoolery required to get some of the most amazing games.
Why didn't they just... cut a hole at that point in the disc? You'd think that just looking at the original floppy and seeing the code, they would have figured that out pretty quickly. Was it just too technically difficult to get it exact enough?
A distributor of an accounting Software using this method challenged me. I did a hole in an aproximated position as a Proof of concept and it worked and told the distributor it was ineffective. They ended switching the method.
many people just put the disk in the drive and clicked copy...
the average user dont looks at the disk
If "just looking at the original floppy and seeing the code they would have figured that out pretty quickly", they could simply edit the code. Did you watch the video...?
Imagine asking for a refund because there was a hole in the original disk.
Hmmm, writing to a write protected disk?
I wonder how many people even know who Dread Pirate Roberts even was
The guy who ran Silk Road, right? ;)
He protec