fcm@ihuxp.UUCP (F.C. McAtee) (04/27/84)
a x-x Having received SOLO FLIGHT for Christmas, and not having a lot of time to use it, I finally got around to it. A very interesting experience. However, as I like to do, I thought that I'd make a backup copy if possible. The disk copied OK. Imagine my surprise when I attempted to run the copied disk and save the original when the operations of the flight took place at 1/10th lthe speed of the original. It took 10 seconds to complete each function that took 1 second on the original disk. I'd like to see some comments on this. F.C. McAtee AT&T Technologies Bell Labs - IH
merlyn@sequent.UUCP (04/28/84)
> From: fcm@ihuxp.UUCP > Message-ID: <735@ihuxp.UUCP> > Date: Fri, 27-Apr-84 13:22:56 PST > > ...Imagine my surprise when I attempted to run the copied > disk and save the original when the operations of the flight took place > at 1/10th lthe speed of the original. It took 10 seconds to complete each > function that took 1 second on the original disk.... I've noticed that on my properly backed-up version of Solo Flight (for the Atari... I dunno if yours is on the Atari as well) will about once out of every fifteen times go into slow mode. I have an 810, and the backup could not be made using standard DOS disk copying (they use redundant sectoring on this one... good thing I have hardware-assist widgets to make my backups!). I think that what they did is made the s/w on the disk with redundant sectoring, and then put a hook into the program to go ahead and boot up on a "copied" disk, but run the clock at a super slow rate. Different from the other protection schemes, which simply go bonkers on the copies. If you wanna make a backup of your Solo Flight disk, go find someone who has a Happy Drive, an ATR8000, or the Chip (all are hardware assists to do image bit-for-bit copies of disks). Flames about the pirating possibilities with a bit-image copier can be sent to /dev/null. People have an honest need to make backups. (Curse "Electronic Arts" for using sector skewing on their latest releases... even the Chip has a heckuva time with those!!) Randal L. ("joy stick") Schwartz, esq. (merlyn@sequent.UUCP) (Official legendary sorcerer of the 1984 Summer Olympics) Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. (503)626-5700 (sequent = 1/quosine) UUCP: ...!XXX!sequent!merlyn where XXX is one of: cdi decwrl nsc ogcvax pur-ee rocks34 shell unisoft vax135 verdix
Ewing@YALE.ARPA (05/14/84)
From: Ricky Ewing <Ewing@YALE.ARPA> 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-- ------- -------