How does copy protection work?

[Hulsie]

Hey guys,

 

I'm really interested in the proliferation and the processes of copy protection in Atari games. When I was very young, an Atari 130XE was my family's primary computer. I played it *all the time*. Once I learned how to copy disks, I began to trade some of the games we bought with friends and family who also had an 8-bit. I was introduced to the concept of copy protection when I noticed that only a fraction of the games successfully copied.

 

Ever since then I've had a fascination with this and how it was done, and I never really got these questions answered, so I thought I'd ask here.

 

I'm not a computer genius, but I have a general understanding of how different file systems work and how disks physically store data, so feel free to get technical if needed.

 

OK, bear with me, this is going to take a while. There's a ton of questions here and I don't expect every single one of them to be answered, but some input would be awesome.

 

1. Just how is copy protection achieved on the 8-bit/ST platforms? I know there are several methods, but how did some of them work?

 

2. How were people able to subvert these methods? I assume they used hex/sector editors for a lot of it, but how did they know what to look for?

 

3. I eventually acquired a sector copier, which copied more games, but still not all of them. How does a sector copier differ from standard copying and why is it more successful?

 

4. For the Atari ST, I had 2 disks full of copiers. Many of them worked on some software while others worked only on others. Are there that many ways to copy something?

 

5. Some cracked games which required verification from a manual or reference card had this process entirely removed. How can this be done without having the source code?

 

6. A lot of the times I would be given menu disks. How were these games converted from a disk to a single executable? I was under the impression that many games contained additional data/resource files (at least, I know Atari ST games did), so how were they able to combine these into one file?

 

7. Certain games written in BASIC were copy protected themselves. How is a copy protection routine written in BASIC? Also, when I type LIST to look at the programming for these games, they somehow deny or obscure the actual code. How/why is this?

 

8. On many copy-protected 8-bit/ST games, you are somehow restricted from seeing the actual files. They either show nothing, garbage characters, or give a (presumably fake) "bad disk" error. Why/how?

 

9. I had a couple of pirated games ("Ghostbusters" for 8-bit comes to mind) that still restricted showing the actual files, even though they were copyable. Considering these games were mainly distributed via BBS, how could you possibly archive them for distribution if you can't see the files? Was there some sort of disk imaging technology available that I am unaware of?

 

10. How does a Happy Drive work, and how common were they? Were they sold commercially or were they built independently by tech-savvy members of the Atari community?

 

11. Can every game be copied/cracked somehow, or are there some that are literally impossible to crack?

 

12. Some games had trainers that were added by the cracker. Again, I'm assuming this was done via hex editing. But again, how do you know what values to look for? Is it a trial-and-error process or is there a universal way of doing this?

 

13. I haven't experienced a single instance of copy protection in IBM-compatible software from that era. Why is this? Was it harder to achieve on this format?

 

14. I use the SIO2PC cable with the excellent, excellent Atari Peripheral Emulator (I can't stress how much I LOVE this hardware/software). Anyway, I noticed the copy protection still works on the disk image, as if it were just a regular copy of the game. Isn't disk imaging supposed to create an exact duplicate of the disk, protection and all?

 

15. (not really related, but kind of) How is some formatting software able to format disks to a size karger the standard disk limit but still use the same filing system? Why is this possible and does it shorten the life of the disk or make data more vulnerable to being corrupted/erased?

 

16. (also not really related, but...) I found that I can use HD disks on my Atari ST by simply covering the extra hole on the left corner with tape. Why does this work? How does this hole relate to the difference between DD and HD disks?

 

17. (your opinion) Do you think copy protection was overused? I bought many, many legitimate copies of games and couldn't back most of them up. This was at a time when Atari was being phased out in the United States and these games were very hard to come by and I was afraid I would lose some of them forever. Some games even used a strict form of copy protection AND manual-based copy protection. Do you think this was overkill?

 

OK, I know that's a lot of stuff, but I've been on an Atari kick again and these questions came back up. Any info would be appreciated!

 

Thanks,

Matt

[Rybags]

1. Just how is copy protection achieved on the 8-bit/ST platforms? I know there are several methods, but how did some of them work?

For disks, the earliest method was probably the simple bad sector or track. The game just then attempts to read that sector while loading, and if it reads successfully then it's obviously a copy and the game will usually just stop running.

Later on there was much more sophisticated schemes like duplicate sectors, CRC errors etc.

Duplicate sector is a nice one - put two versions of a sector on a track, and depending on what order you read that track, you'll end up with different data from that sector.

 

2. How were people able to subvert these methods? I assume they used hex/sector editors for a lot of it, but how did they know what to look for?

Disassemble the program, and just look for the code that reads the particular sector and does the check.

Of course copy protection got more sophisticated so it became harder.

 

3. I eventually acquired a sector copier, which copied more games, but still not all of them. How does a sector copier differ from standard copying and why is it more successful?

On the 8-bit a standard drive can't do anything special with software so far as copying disks goes. But of course, a sector copier will copy the entire disk where DOS will only copy which parts it thinks are in use - therefore copying games with DOS was rarely successful.

 

4. For the Atari ST, I had 2 disks full of copiers. Many of them worked on some software while others worked only on others. Are there that many ways to copy something?

The ST is a bit different - the computer has much more direct control over the floppy drive. But the nature of the controller of that machine meant that copying a floppy with a decent protection scheme wouldn't work.

As for variety of software - it's the same case with graphics editors, anything, more than one way to skin a cat.

 

5. Some cracked games which required verification from a manual or reference card had this process entirely removed. How can this be done without having the source code?

Similar deal to removing protection checks. Some hacker sits there slaving for minutes/hours/days and alters the program to skip the check.

 

6. A lot of the times I would be given menu disks. How were these games converted from a disk to a single executable? I was under the impression that many games contained additional data/resource files (at least, I know Atari ST games did), so how were they able to combine these into one file?

Typically you might just put the data into an extra file, then modify the game to read from that file rather than direct from disk.

 

7. Certain games written in BASIC were copy protected themselves. How is a copy protection routine written in BASIC? Also, when I type LIST to look at the programming for these games, they somehow deny or obscure the actual code. How/why is this?

You can't really copy-protect Basic stuff in the simple sense. The common method on the A8 was to just put random data in the variable name table, which made the program harder to read and usually impossible to modify.

 

8. On many copy-protected 8-bit/ST games, you are somehow restricted from seeing the actual files. They either show nothing, garbage characters, or give a (presumably fake) "bad disk" error. Why/how?

A bootable disk on either system, especially A8, can just be raw data and not use any DOS structure or directories.

 

9. I had a couple of pirated games ("Ghostbusters" for 8-bit comes to mind) that still restricted showing the actual files, even though they were copyable. Considering these games were mainly distributed via BBS, how could you possibly archive them for distribution if you can't see the files? Was there some sort of disk imaging technology available that I am unaware of?

As above, the game didn't use a filing system.

 

10. How does a Happy Drive work, and how common were they? Were they sold commercially or were they built independently by tech-savvy members of the Atari community?

Most drive mods were built independantly by companies. They work by allowing operations like copying entire tracks, and replicating errors in sectors that normal drives wouldn't allow.

 

11. Can every game be copied/cracked somehow, or are there some that are literally impossible to crack?

Practically every protected game from 1977 or whenever to the current day has been cracked. There's always someone willing to take on the challenge whether it takes 5 minutes or 2 months.

 

12. Some games had trainers that were added by the cracker. Again, I'm assuming this was done via hex editing. But again, how do you know what values to look for? Is it a trial-and-error process or is there a universal way of doing this?

Somewhat more complex than that. To an extent you need to reverse-engineer the program. Stuff like more lives, turning off collisions etc. is usually fairly easy to do though.

 

13. I haven't experienced a single instance of copy protection in IBM-compatible software from that era. Why is this? Was it harder to achieve on this format?

I suppose there was more "trust" to a degree. Also, games were a minor niche probably until the late 1980s, and by then many had protection schemes anyway.

 

14. I use the SIO2PC cable with the excellent, excellent Atari Peripheral Emulator (I can't stress how much I LOVE this hardware/software). Anyway, I noticed the copy protection still works on the disk image, as if it were just a regular copy of the game. Isn't disk imaging supposed to create an exact duplicate of the disk, protection and all?

AFAIK, none of the current PC-side to real Atari disk emulators support protected images. Kinda pointless since you can just find a cracked copy and use that anyway.

 

15. (not really related, but kind of) How is some formatting software able to format disks to a size karger the standard disk limit but still use the same filing system? Why is this possible and does it shorten the life of the disk or make data more vulnerable to being corrupted/erased?

The ST used 80-track disks but the drives typically allowed 82 (83?) tracks. Also, 9 sectors per track was the default (like IBM), but you could actually cram 11 in (or was it 12?). Either way, it let you put ~ 800K on a disk instead of just 720.

To do so, you needed custom software to perform the formatting.

 

16. (also not really related, but...) I found that I can use HD disks on my Atari ST by simply covering the extra hole on the left corner with tape. Why does this work? How does this hole relate to the difference between DD and HD disks?

The hole just lets the HD drives know that the floppy is HD. You can cheat either way (tape or make hole).

But HD disks tend not to work very well in earlier drives.

 

17. (your opinion) Do you think copy protection was overused? I bought many, many legitimate copies of games and couldn't back most of them up. This was at a time when Atari was being phased out in the United States and these games were very hard to come by and I was afraid I would lose some of them forever. Some games even used a strict form of copy protection AND manual-based copy protection. Do you think this was overkill?

 

Not really. The protection in use back then was utterly tame and unobtrusive compared to some of the crap we have to put up with from today's games, apps and OSes.

[potatohead]

Opening the drive door for a moment, when it was about to read the bad sector, worked to defeat that protection on some games.

 

The first one I tried it with was ULTIMA II. 19 - 23 beeps in, open door, wait for the error tones, close door, life is good!

[lbaeza]

Hi

 

Good lecture on this subject over here:

 

http://www.retrobits.net/atari/treasurechest.shtml

 

Regards

[jacobus]

The reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with the some of the principals of Inhome Software (Alien Swarm, Capt. Beeble, etc). We were discussing methods to implement copy protection - apparently one of first schemes they used was the bad sector trick - the funny thing was how the created the bad sector...

 

1) Duplicate the new disk from the master

2) Apply a length of tape to the disk jacket so it would protrude out the drive door

3) Use a custom program that writes one specific sector ...

4) Initiate the program and at the same time give the piece of tape a little tug

5) If all goes well, the system writes a bad sector (bad due to track miss-alignment when the disk moved) and the disk is finished

6) Repeat for the next 999 disks your are duplicating

 

Needless to say, this method can be duplicated by the even the earliest Happy modified drives.

[carmel_andrews]

Didn't the AR series have a customised SIO system (as apparently it was programmed on a non atari disk drive), also I remember reading some reviews of some tiger development games for the A8 and apparently there was some sort of CP on these games that stopped you copying them with happy/SA/SA2 or similar

 

Also FSII had some CP on it that prevented loading the game on the XF551

[Mirage]

On this page, you will find a PDF for Alpha Systems' Atari Software Protection Techniques (along with a bunch of Commodore-related protection books). I also have the Advanced Atari Software Protection Techniques book, which I am scanning for AtariMania but haven't gotten around to it yet (sorry remowilliams, soon!).

 

http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/program-protection.htm

 

I have the Alpha Systems Impersonator manual (and hardware) as well, already scanned but not yet PDF'ed if anyone is interested. That was a system for copying cartridges. Also the Chipmunk and Disk Pack 1000 disk copy software packages from Alpha Systems. Not sure how much interest there is in things like that.

[Hulsie]

Rybags and others--

 

Thanks a million for the info and links. Very informative.

 

This does raise a couple of additional questions...

 

For disks, the earliest method was probably the simple bad sector or track. The game just then attempts to read that sector while loading, and if it reads successfully then it's obviously a copy and the game will usually just stop running.

Later on there was much more sophisticated schemes like duplicate sectors, CRC errors etc.

Duplicate sector is a nice one - put two versions of a sector on a track, and depending on what order you read that track, you'll end up with different data from that sector.

 

Aside from jacobus's interesting example of creating bad sectors, were there any other ways to intentionally damage sectors? Has it been revealed how huge companies like EA (I had the most trouble with their games) would apply this routine to thousands and thousands of disks? Were these disks physically altered or is there some sort of software that would somehow intentionally damage sectors or at least simulate them?

 

 

 

9. I had a couple of pirated games ("Ghostbusters" for 8-bit comes to mind) that still restricted showing the actual files, even though they were copyable. Considering these games were mainly distributed via BBS, how could you possibly archive them for distribution if you can't see the files? Was there some sort of disk imaging technology available that I am unaware of?

As above, the game didn't use a filing system.

 

I see, but how could you distribute a game like this via BBS? In my experience, you had to download archives or the game files themselves, but I didn't know of a way of duplicating or transferring an entire disk sector by sector via modem download. If the uploaders can't access the files on the disk to archive them, how could they upload these games in the first place? The only thing I can think of is that there was some sort of early disk imaging format I don't know about...

 

 

 

AFAIK, none of the current PC-side to real Atari disk emulators support protected images. Kinda pointless since you can just find a cracked copy and use that anyway.

 

I can see your point, but there are a lot of games that I would like to own in their untouched state. A lot of times the pirated version will completely eliminate a cool title screen or introduction, or it will mar several elements of the game with the logo of the cracking group, etc. I never minded cracktros or a brief blurb boasting about who cracked what (I actually found it interesting) but some of these people took it too far and basically modified the entire game. When I was about 12, I remember finding a cracked version of a game that I wasn't allowed to play because the cracking group was some white power group that had put swastikas and racial epithets everywhere in the title, loading screen, etc. I don't remember what the game was (it was a racing game) but it had nothing to do with racism (er, other than RACING) at all.

 

Also, I have some disks that I don't believe have been contributed to the Atari community because I can't find them online anywhere. I'd like to contribute some of them but I'm hesitant about damaging the original software. Maybe I can send it to someone who can attempt to crack them and they can send it back to me?

 

 

 

The protection in use back then was utterly tame and unobtrusive compared to some of the crap we have to put up with from today's games, apps and OSes.

 

I see your point but these days, with the WWW universally available, it is much, much easier to learn how to get by even the most complex copy protection schemes. With a few Google searches you can even find out how to fake registration phone calls and the like. But being an Atari 8-bit/ST user in 94/95, it became literally impossible (at least where I lived) to find any software, much less instructions for duplicating it. Most of my protected software never went bad, but some did--namely Deja Vu and Dungeon Master for Atari ST (two of the games I played the most) and I was never able to get replacement disks, even by writing to the companies. I have to assume that the companies either went out of business or stopped supporting this software because I never got any responses. At this time all of the Atari BBSes became IBM BBSes and my computer/bookstores didn't carry the European mags that were apparently still popular at the time.

 

 

 

Also the Chipmunk and Disk Pack 1000 disk copy software packages from Alpha Systems.Also the Chipmunk and Disk Pack 1000 disk copy software packages from Alpha Systems.

 

I completely forgot about this. I ended up inheriting disks with these titles, but I had no idea what they were because they had no manuals. I remember booting them up once but not doing anything with them because they looked too technical. As far as copying cartridges, I had two programs -- CARTCOPY and CARTDISK but they only worked on my friend's Atari 800. The Atari XE must handle cartridges differently because if you insert them while the computer is on it crashes everything.

 

Anyway, thanks again guys! You're great!

[TMR]

Aside from jacobus's interesting example of creating bad sectors, were there any other ways to intentionally damage sectors? Has it been revealed how huge companies like EA (I had the most trouble with their games) would apply this routine to thousands and thousands of disks? Were these disks physically altered or is there some sort of software that would somehow intentionally damage sectors or at least simulate them?

 

Once you have a master copy with a damanged sector, a professional disk duplicating machine can usually copy that master regardless of what is actually on the disk (literally the only exception i remember hearing about was a truly evil protection scheme on the Amiga game Venom Wing that had to be crippled before the duplicator could deal with it) - big firms like EA owned disk duplicators and smaller firms would rely on specialist companies with the right kit to handle things for them.

[Bryan]

You have to remember that though there may be limits to what you can write to a disk using a floppy drive peripheral, there are more powerful devices out there that can write and duplicate any track data you wish. Once you've written something the stock drive can at least partially read but cannot write on its own, you have an uncopyable disk.

 

Of course, many of these tricks actually could be duplicated once people figured out what they were and wrote software to generate the abnormal patterns. On the Atari 8-bit we were at a disadvantage since the drive used ROM-based firmware that could not easily be changed to support sophisticated copy routines.

 

If you really want to get into it, Google things like FM, MFM, and GCR (Wikipedia has good info on them too). You can learn about the actual flux patterns being written to the disk (which is essentially a big pancake of audio tape). Basically, you need the pattern to always fall within a specific frequency range for reliable operation with clear bit boundaries. That means you need clever patterns that guarantee transitions on a regular basis no matter what the source data is. From there you need to mark where sectors begin and end and what sequence they are in.

Edited February 26, 2010 by Bryan

[Rybags]

The tape pulling the jacket method was very primitive, and I doubt it was used much if at all by commercial houses.

I do remember it being recommended as an early method for people to try copying their games though.

 

I remember copying Great Amercian Road Race - I didn't bother trying to crack it, I just formatted a fresh disk and only let it do 30 tracks or so. Then copied that part of the original, it was sufficient to make it work.

 

"Bad" sector is maybe not the best description. You can also have missing sectors, "fuzzy" sectors and sectors where the checksum has been invalidated.

[Mirage]

 

Also the Chipmunk and Disk Pack 1000 disk copy software packages from Alpha Systems.

 

I completely forgot about this. I ended up inheriting disks with these titles, but I had no idea what they were because they had no manuals. I remember booting them up once but not doing anything with them because they looked too technical. As far as copying cartridges, I had two programs -- CARTCOPY and CARTDISK but they only worked on my friend's Atari 800. The Atari XE must handle cartridges differently because if you insert them while the computer is on it crashes everything.

 

Anyway, thanks again guys! You're great!

 

Well, if you want to read all about the Disk Pack and Impersonator (cart copier), here you go... these are the low res PDFs of my raw scans of those manuals. I'll upload the Chipmunk one later (have to make the PDF). To use the Impersonator, you have to insert the Impersonator cartridge, then unplug it, plug in the cart to be copied, copy it to disk, then in order to run that disk image in the future, you need to have the Impersonator cart inserted. I don't think there's a way of running the disk image without that Impersonator cart in there. Anyway, hopefully you can get something out of these. The Disk Pack 1000 has a copy program called "Back-a-Disk" and the manual has some info about bad sectoring and other copy protection techniques. Enjoy!

Alpha Systems - Disk Pack 1000 manual lowres.pdf

Alpha Systems - Impersonator manual lowres.pdf

[Mirage]

Here's the low res PDF of the raw scan of my Alpha Systems Chipmunk Disk Copier manual for any interested parties. I'll put it on my weekend to-do list to get the Advanced Atari Protection Techniques manual scanned in.

Alpha Systems - Chipmunk Disk Copier manual lowres.pdf

[+bf2k+]

 

I see, but how could you distribute a game like this via BBS? In my experience, you had to download archives or the game files themselves, but I didn't know of a way of duplicating or transferring an entire disk sector by sector via modem download. If the uploaders can't access the files on the disk to archive them, how could they upload these games in the first place? The only thing I can think of is that there was some sort of early disk imaging format I don't know about...

 

 

There were Disk imagers which compressed (somewhat) whole disks into files.

 

Disk Communicator 3.2 was the one I used the most but I remember a few others....

 

Masher, Scrunch and the SpartaDOS SCOPY (another one I used quite a bit).

[+bf2k+]

Speaking of Electronic Arts, I remember making a sector copy of Pinball Construction set and booting while practicing hitting the <break> key a few times in the correct places and sequences. Using this method I got to where I could boot the copy play it every time (I had lots of time on my hands then ).

[Rybags]

Strange - they tended to have fairly solid protection on their releases.

 

I can remember a book on Atari Protection Techniques being advertised fairly regularly in Compute and other magazines. Don't remember though if it was the one linked earlier.

[potatohead]

Speaking of Electronic Arts, I remember making a sector copy of Pinball Construction set and booting while practicing hitting the <break> key a few times in the correct places and sequences. Using this method I got to where I could boot the copy play it every time (I had lots of time on my hands then ).

 

 

Yeah, Ataris make noise, which helps with simple, stupid hacks. There were variations on that, opening the door, etc... we all knew about as kids.

 

Back then I had a good scope. Never got around to running it with the disk drive. Should have.

[Shawn Jefferson]

You have to remember that though there may be limits to what you can write to a disk using a floppy drive peripheral, there are more powerful devices out there that can write and duplicate any track data you wish. Once you've written something the stock drive can at least partially read but cannot write on its own, you have an uncopyable disk.

 

Has anyone come across any of this hardware that the big game companies used to create their copy protections, like phantom sectors, etc.. ? I've never heard of anyone owning anything like that, and you think that would be very interesting for us any vintage collector.

[Rybags]

The Happy Board was able to duplicate most of the schemes - not sure about some of the later ones though.

 

The thing about the Atari drives is that there aren't a good deal of different errors that can be returned, and the computer doesn't have anything near the level of direct control compared to something like a PC, ST or Amiga.

 

I think some schemes might also have relied on timings, but you (as a software distributor) can get into a lot of trouble there because the latencies involved can vary among drive brands, and even between firmware or mechanism variants for a single model.

[Shawn Jefferson]

1. Just how is copy protection achieved on the 8-bit/ST platforms? I know there are several methods, but how did some of them work?

 

2. How were people able to subvert these methods? I assume they used hex/sector editors for a lot of it, but how did they know what to look for?

 

5. Some cracked games which required verification from a manual or reference card had this process entirely removed. How can this be done without having the source code?

 

This has been answered, but I thought I would add my two cents. There were many methods of adding physical defects or abnomalies to the disk (and copying the disk on an Atari disk drive would not re-create these) that the disk drive would then return specific error codes for. There are techniques that time how long the transfer takes... a copied disk would not take as long, sinc the copy would not have the "abnomalies" of the original.

 

However, all these techniques have a common flaw. Somewhere in the code there is a routine that does this:

 

if (copy protection exists) then (play game) else (die)

 

All the cracker has to do is find the place in the code that does this check, and remove it. Voila! Copy protection gone, and the game can be copied. Crackers used disassemblers to be able to read the code more easily, and probably hex editors and machine language monitors (Omnimon for instance) to detect where these checks are done and then make their changes. It's really as simple (and as complicated) as that. Some overly paranoid companies would add multiple copy protection checks at various stages of game play, or try to obfuscate their copy protection checks somehow. Usually this was a losing battle and almost (all?) every game was eventually cracked. The "find a word in the manual" copy protection scheme is defeated exactly the same way.

 

3. I eventually acquired a sector copier, which copied more games, but still not all of them. How does a sector copier differ from standard copying and why is it more successful?

 

4. For the Atari ST, I had 2 disks full of copiers. Many of them worked on some software while others worked only on others. Are there that many ways to copy something?

 

A disk is arranged into tracks and sectors, and "standard" copying of a disk is basically a sector copy. You could do a "file" copy, and this differs in that you would be using DOS to read each file off the disk and then write each file to a new disk. A sector copier just reads the 128 byte sectors from the source disk and copies them to the destination disk, not caring what's actually in those sectors. There was an issue early on, I belive with DOS 2.0s sector copy function, in that it did not copy sector 720 of a disk. This was utilized by some companies early on to put "copy protection" on their games (ie. put a special flag in sector 720 of the disk that would not get copied by the kiddies using DOS to copy their game.)

 

Some of the "copiers" actually knew which bytes on the game disk to patch to defeat the copy protection. I believe Chipmunk worked this way. Essentially, you are making a copy and the program is "cracking" your copy of the game.

 

6. A lot of the times I would be given menu disks. How were these games converted from a disk to a single executable? I was under the impression that many games contained additional data/resource files (at least, I know Atari ST games did), so how were they able to combine these into one file?

 

Once the game is loaded into RAM, you can dump that memory to a file. Tack a loader program on the front, and you've just by-passed all the programmers "custom" loading routines, etc.. You didn't see many games that loaded a bunch of data off the disk turned into single executables on the Atari 8-bit... there just wasn't enough RAM to hold all the data that would be required for most games.

 

8. On many copy-protected 8-bit/ST games, you are somehow restricted from seeing the actual files. They either show nothing, garbage characters, or give a (presumably fake) "bad disk" error. Why/how?

 

9. I had a couple of pirated games ("Ghostbusters" for 8-bit comes to mind) that still restricted showing the actual files, even though they were copyable. Considering these games were mainly distributed via BBS, how could you possibly archive them for distribution if you can't see the files? Was there some sort of disk imaging technology available that I am unaware of?

 

When you ask DOS to get a directory listing, it is just reading a sector on the disk that it expects to have a directory structure in it. If you decided not to write a valid directory structure, then you will only get garbage printed in DOS. Better yet, why not insert some nice message, like "JOE BLOW GAME COMPANY, PLEAE DON'T COPY" in this sector for the curious individuals who try to do a disk directory command on it? Some games/disks have that.

 

10. How does a Happy Drive work, and how common were they? Were they sold commercially or were they built independently by tech-savvy members of the Atari community?

 

Ijor is probably one of the most knowledgeable people on the forums regarding this. I'm curious to hear about how the Happy drive worked too. I have/had one, and while I have an idea of how it worked, I don't want to tell you something that isn't factual.

 

11. Can every game be copied/cracked somehow, or are there some that are literally impossible to crack?

 

Everything can be cracked. There are degrees of difficulty, and diminishing returns of course.

 

12. Some games had trainers that were added by the cracker. Again, I'm assuming this was done via hex editing. But again, how do you know what values to look for? Is it a trial-and-error process or is there a universal way of doing this?

 

Usually, some sort of a monitor (a special program that is able to "monitor" memory locations, or break into a program that is running) are used to create trainers or cheats. If you can patch the game to take out the copy protection, why not find the part of the code that says: if (last man just killed) then (end game) and just take it out?

 

One thing I used to do was use a hex editor to find locations on the disk that would contain stats on my characters or high scores, etc. Usually using a search feature of the hex editor, search for the value of my current hit points or some attribute, and then try to change it to 99 or some other high number. This was a bit of a trial and error process, but it usually worked very well.

 

13. I haven't experienced a single instance of copy protection in IBM-compatible software from that era. Why is this? Was it harder to achieve on this format?

 

There were. I had some floppy disks that were copy protected. However, it seemed they were easier to copy with standard hardware and the right programs... I don't remember having much trouble copying things on the PC.

 

14. I use the SIO2PC cable with the excellent, excellent Atari Peripheral Emulator (I can't stress how much I LOVE this hardware/software). Anyway, I noticed the copy protection still works on the disk image, as if it were just a regular copy of the game. Isn't disk imaging supposed to create an exact duplicate of the disk, protection and all?

 

The normal image format (the ATR format), does not have a way to encode the physical defects or anomalies of the physical disk, so there is no way to use this format to make an image of a copy protected disk. Special image formats have been created though, .PRO and .ATX formats have the data structures to describe this information, and thus allow the emulated disk drive to emulate the copy protection to the computer.

 

16. (also not really related, but...) I found that I can use HD disks on my Atari ST by simply covering the extra hole on the left corner with tape. Why does this work? How does this hole relate to the difference between DD and HD disks?

 

This is pretty simple. If the disk had this hole in it, then the disk drive "knew" the disk was a HD disk. There was no other way for it to know. I used to drill holes through DD disks and use them as HD disks. At that point in time, there was little difference between the coatings on the disks (as I suspect it just was too costly to have two different processes for manufacturing), and these "fake" HD disks worked perfectly fine. There is some chance that the magnetic coating was not sufficiently high quality to hold the magnetic charges of the individual bits as long as a HD disk, but I didn't care about that at the time, and most people probably didn't who used this method.

 

17. (your opinion) Do you think copy protection was overused? I bought many, many legitimate copies of games and couldn't back most of them up. This was at a time when Atari was being phased out in the United States and these games were very hard to come by and I was afraid I would lose some of them forever. Some games even used a strict form of copy protection AND manual-based copy protection. Do you think this was overkill?

 

I think that the time and effort required to create the protection was probably not worth it. A simple bad sector copy protection, with a few checks here and there in the code would probably have done equally well in keeping the "average" user from being able to freely copy the game. Those that would crack them, and/or seek out cracked copies would always be able to get them-things have always been this way and always will.

 

Any corrections or additions appreciated!

Edited February 26, 2010 by Shawn Jefferson

[Rybags]

IIRC, there was a "scheme" that involved having a laser hole in the actual disk media.

 

No idea if it was ever used on anything for the Atari.

 

I remember an Infocomm sampler disk I've got having a weird loading time... it's as if they deliberately put some stupid sector skew factor on it, it actually read the disk about half as fast as a normal one.

No idea why... AFAIK they never used copy protection on any of their older games.

[Heaven/TQA]

I was removing some protection schemes but mostly I did it with tapes. International Karate f.e. was first tough but in the end not...

 

the 4 sector loader in sectors 1-4 was loaded into ram and then decrypted as some of the loaders were. after that I replaced the crypted one with the decrypted one (without calling the decryotion routine). if the game loads fine I simply checked where the game branches to an error message or what kind of situation causes the game to stop. all done with a disc hex editor and dissassembler.

 

For IK I played around with exchanging BNEs or BEQs with BMI or BPL etc.... and suddenly it worked... nothing "hard" there I have to admit...

 

I was little bit proud as in my area there was no copy available of IK only of the slow Epyx US version...

[Rybags]

The weird thing about tapes was that AFAIK, nobody seemed to use the obvious:

 

Just have a 2-part load, and use variable block sizes on the second part.

 

Done the right way, it'd make software copying techniques totally unworkable.

 

"Cracking" as such wouldn't be quite the term, but you could make the manual process a lot of work for someone.

 

Of course though, by the mid 1980s, there were decent dual cassette players around which duplicated Atari stuff fairly easily.

[+rdemming]

The ST used 80-track disks but the drives typically allowed 82 (83?) tracks. Also, 9 sectors per track was the default (like IBM), but you could actually cram 11 in (or was it 12?). Either way, it let you put ~ 800K on a disk instead of just 720.

To do so, you needed custom software to perform the formatting.

 

82 tracks worked on every drive I've seen. More tracks was only possible on some drives.

11 sectors per track was possible but unreliable. Quite a few 11 sector disks I have are now unreadable.

Also possible was sectors with 1024 bytes per sector. Because you needed less sector overhead, a track could store more data. So a track could have 5*1024 byte sectors + 1*512 byte sector. And 1024 byte sectors were not copyable by most copiers.

 

Robert

[Heaven/TQA]

The weird thing about tapes was that AFAIK, nobody seemed to use the obvious:

 

Just have a 2-part load, and use variable block sizes on the second part.

 

Done the right way, it'd make software copying techniques totally unworkable.

 

"Cracking" as such wouldn't be quite the term, but you could make the manual process a lot of work for someone.

 

Of course though, by the mid 1980s, there were decent dual cassette players around which duplicated Atari stuff fairly easily.

 

not much work... done it several times... the "work" was mainly waiting for the damned 1010 loading a 64k game...

 

I "overrun" the loader by an preloader or patched the loader of the game. when complete loaded into memory I dumped the memory on disc and then main work was done... ok, writing Cracktro and that's it...