magnus@THEP.LU.SE (Magnus Olsson) (10/03/90)
First of all, I'd like to thank the people who replied by email to my posting on this subject in comp.os.msdos.programmer a while ago. Unfortunately, it seems my request was a bit unclear. Indeed, it must have looked very "beginner-ish" since several people found it necessary to point out that a common copy protection scheme is to have the program ask the user for some information from the manual. I already knew that, really! :-) I'm sorry I didn't formulate my question very clearly, so I think I'll repeat it a bit more in detail. Also, I'm crossposting to comp.misc since this isn't a specific MSDOS question. What I wanted was more or less technical info about how copy protection is actually coded - not just the usual explanation that "you format your disk in a non-standard way so DOS can't read it, and then supply your own disk I/O routines that can read it", but an explanation of how this actually is done. A code example or two would be nice. Note: I understand that this is a sensitive question. I hope you believe me when I say that I'm not asking this because I want to crack a copy-protected program, I'm just curious. If you have any information which you think shouldn't be posted, then don't post it - and please don't flame me for asking! I'm only asking for information which you think is ethical and/or legal to publish. Magnus Olsson | \e+ /_ Dept. of Theoretical Physics | \ Z / q University of Lund, Sweden | >----< Internet: magnus@thep.lu.se | / \===== g Bitnet: THEPMO@SELDC52 | /e- \q