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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (377512)	7/19/2018 2:30:26 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Respond to of 542907

I don't know about Mac, but the PC protections were never that easy and I still beat them. Here's a sample: Some games used "weak bits" in a sector. These are bits that are in the threshold between 1 and 0 and therefore are sometimes read as 1 and other times as 0. The program would read the sector several times and if the values did not change, it knew it's a copy. The way around it was to flip the write head on and off rapidly and allow the residue magnetism to imprint on the sector. Then there were "wide tracks", extra sectors, non-standard sized sectors. You could "fix" them through some low-level controller programming, Or you could have a fairly cheap hardware solution in the form of quarter-height floppy drive. This was not a common hardware, but it wasn't impossible to get either. It was a single floppy drive motor shared between two read/write heads, so they could fit two floppy disk drives in a space of one. But it fixed the above problem because when you copied one disk onto the other, the two were spinning in synchronicity and you could easily duplicate disk geometry anomalies. When all else failed, you could write a TSR program (terminate-and-stay-resident) that would do a memory dump from the point right after you bypassed the copyright protection. Those were fun days!!

To: bentway who wrote (377512)	7/19/2018 3:09:56 PM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542907

The problem with software is the unit pricing - companies get greedy. Generally, people hack something that they feel is overpriced. When was the last time that you xeroxed a novel? AutoCAD had a huge problem with piracy - they needed almost give it away for casual users (people who design for that home project or custom car part) and only charge corporate users. The rationale is that people will use what they are comfortable and have prior experience with. AutoCAD eventually got smart. When it comes time to go to work and suggest a product - people will use one they know. ProE was $20k to set up, and DesignCAD was $1000, with a free trial which limited you to 10 projects. The cheaper product was the better product and they figured most people using it casually wouldn't be looking to see how the limit was imposed. In your case, the game was too expensive and your endorphins gave you ambition to hack them. If you just did it because you were ornery, a way to enforce this is to introduce reduced playability when too many files or copies are generated or sections of the code don't checksum properly. It almost works, and because they access the information in a number of indirect ways (offsets that use a calculated address that is dynamic, and the password is moved around in memory as you play - possibly in one of the inactive or boss characters!), you might be able to find this but you probably would not bother if it was priced right.