..Re: Software Piracy and Solo Flight
Ew...@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--
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