Copy Protection in the 1980s | Retro Dream
Vložit
- čas přidán 31. 07. 2024
- Since software existed, so did software piracy and copy protection. In the days before online DRM, there was not much that software publishers could do to prevent consumers from making as many copies of their purchase as they liked and sharing them with others. And since the origins, game software was at the forefront of this new battleground between pirates and publishers. The degree of vulnerability greatly depended on the support: if games on cartridges were largely copy-proof because of their intrinsic design, this was not the case at all for games on magnetic devices like tapes or disks. This type of support was highly vulnerable to piracy, and needed a specific protection to be added. But in what form? This is when it becomes interesting.
The challenge was to find a way to offer at least some degree of protection, without adding too much to the price, and without annoying the actual buyers. For games released in the 80s and early 90s, copy protection was mostly analog, instead of software based. Software developers and game creators tended to be extra inventive in their anti-piracy devices.
Let's review a few gems from that era, by browsing through my game collection!
0:00 Intro
1:33 General Presentation
2:00 Monkey Island
2:36 Loom
3:13 Indiana Jones
4:08 Maniac Mansion
4:27 Battle of Britain
4:52 Ultima VI
5:31 Ultima VII
5:58 F-19
7:05 Civilization
7:20 Captain Blood
7:52 Dungeon Master
13:56 Conclusion
#Retrogaming #Videogames #Retro #Computers #Atari #Amiga #MSDOS #DOSgames #Retrogamer #Bigboxgame #Retrocollection - Hry
This was very thorough. Your production quality, and the diversity of your collection, are excellent. I hope you continue to make more videos like this.
The only correction I would make for future videos of this type is to not imply that the majority of copy protection in the 1980s was not disk-based. As someone who cracked games then, and continues to do so today as part of an archival collective, I can tell you that, for the PC at least, the overwhelming majority of copy protection methods were disk-based until roughly 1988. This is because that is roughly when hard drives for PCs started to become more economical and common, and that's when customers started writing to companies asking for hard drive installable versions of their games.
Thanks for your interest and for sharing your thoughts. Point noted!
Great video! Shout out for Leisure Suit Larry's copy protection/age verification system. It asked questions intended to be only answerable by someone at least 18 years old, such as "which of the following is NOT an Elvis song" or "what is detente?" It challenged my brothers and I but we were able to defeat it fairly regularly...
Thanks!
Yes Larry was something of a kind
This production quality is so high. How do you not have more subscribers?!
Haha good question :)
Planning to have more subs soon!
Thanks for your interest and your support.
@@RetroDream Well, you have at least one more now :)
IIRC, Ultima VII was the first game I played with a Sound Blaster and the voice in the beginning blew my mind!
Oh yea, the Guardian's voice, terrific!
Outstanding video! Glad I got to live through this era but damn I miss it.
Thanks for your interst!
Lense lock had a bendable screen you bend over a tv monitor that has a bar code on the screen. The bar code changed a number of time so you had to have the bendable plastic viewer
Wow, quite a cool feature :)
Thanks for sharing!
Calling software protection "mostly analog" when it's literal hardware + software (in case of dongles) or software (in case of passwords/etc) is the only correction I would make, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the heads-up and for your interest!
Dungeon Master was a pain. It didn't matter if you bought the original or a copy it would eventually stop working. The "fuzzy Bit" worked best on certain dive types and without opening up your system you would know what drive you had. On top of that due to the way that bit was written the disc would degrade causing read errors on it making it be detected as a copy even though it was original. I knew people that repeatedly sent back their original discs for replacement as they kept failing (probably a drive it didn't like) I know two people who gave up and didn't send the disc back and just waited for a fully cracked version to come available.
Great game, anti-consumer just needed loot boxes......hang on.....
Very interesting feedback. Yes this technique was not very user friendly. But I wasn't aware it also depended on the drive manufacturer, thanks for the heads-up! It totally makes sense. To think that original buyers were bugged to the point of replacing their original game with a cracked one... What a pity
@@RetroDreamThat's just the capitalist free market correcting itself. No wonder corporations hate the concept so much.
Old games are so cool that even the DRM look like a lot of fun. I miss quality manuals.
Great video indeed
What I'd like to know is how PC games could detect a pirated CD. Sure on consoles the discs had certain intended "imperfections", but didn't affect the ability to read the data off the disc, the console could detect that and determine whether the disc was genuine or not, but PC CDs to my knowledge are not like that, so how did THEY detect a copied disc? Is it something similar to "fuzzy bits"?
Good question that requires investigation...
You cant have a pit or land (1 or 0) that would be similar to a fuzzy bit (intermittent 1 & 0) on a CD, but what you can do is modify the CRC checks (error correction) so that when the CD is burned it automatically corrects as it will not write an error on purpose.
@@daishi5571Unless you have sophisticated software that can burn a 1 to 1 copy. In some cases it may need to feed a false checksum to hardware, IIRC.
HOW THE HELL DOES THIS VIDEO ONLY HAVE 453 VIEWS? THE QUALITY IS SO GOOD
Thanks a lot!
I know by experience that growing a channel is especially hard in the beginning. A few months from now this will be a very different picture.
Cool
You missed AMiga Robocop which was the first game to have a hardware dongle that had to be plugged into the other joystick port. It was an LS74LS74 flipflop chip. I know, i cracked it!!!!
Didn't know about that!
Oh you've missed loads, LensLok (another nightmare), ALien breed with its black numbers on black paper, jet set willy colour card, Robocop, Weak bit, Strong bit, fuzzy bit from the AMiga and ST... C64 had Hyperload which was designed to stop cassette to cassette copying as was the norm back then. Plenty for you to do a follow up on.@@RetroDream
Thanks for sharing! Absolutely could use that for a sequel!
It seems like code wheels were very popular.
Yes indeed ;)
As per why Dungeon Master sold so well... it doesn't necessarily mean that piracy hurts sales. More... that people enjoy a good puzzle
The increased sales was from people who wanted to figure out how to break into the game and deal with the DRM controls. Essentially the game they were buying wasn't the cRPG... no the game they were buying was breaking into the cRPG
Think of it like escape rooms, locking picking stuff and other puzzles like that
Interesting point of view, thanks for sharing
There is some confusion around regarding "fuzzy bits". It's not true (but they could not obviously say otherwise) that a $40K machine was the only way to write it.
Any drive could have :D
In RUBICON (C64 Disk Version) the author used a very complex way to write a sector, adding what you call "fuzzy bits", but they are not what the kids of the time thought they were.
A floppy drive can't read more than 2-3 (sometimes even 4 or five) zeroes one after the other. And that's why they used a particular encoding (MFM on 3.5" and GCR on most of 5.25").
If you read a sector which contains let's say 8 bits at "0", the drive will lose sync, invert a bit or 2 and probably skip a bit too. This will cause all subsequent bits to be skewed (shifted).
The author of Rubicon protection, complimented me personally (as I did to him) for being ebakle to copy and even to write the original protection using a normal C64 and a normal disk drive.
More on this here: github.com/Zibri/Rubicon-C64
Wow, that's interesting!
Thanks for sharing and for the correction :)
I was sceptical too regarding the $40000 machine they used
Hackers?
"You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means"
Try “Crackers”. Like they are the ones that crack the copy protection.
Yea, I guess that's more correct.