One that comes to mind were Ocean’s copy protection that was hacked by a load of 1 into the accumulator and a return. They had a “bool IsValidDisk()” type of routine.
After cracking one of their games I could crack others in less than 2 minutes directly on a copied floppy.
For those who don’t know, deleted sectors are an obscure legacy feature which was part of IBM’s standard for floppies, and floppy disk controllers which aimed at IBM compatibility often supported it. Essentially, the floppy can contain two types of sectors, normal and “deleted”, with a flag byte in the sector header distinguishing the two, special commands to read/write the deleted sectors, and a setting on the controller to determine whether the normal read sector command skips deleted sectors or not. Very little software used it; copy protection was the main exception. The original use case was to support very primitive databases in which each database record was stored in a separate sector, and hence you could delete a record in-place by marking the sector as deleted.
Platforms which used off-the-shelf IBM-compatible floppy controllers generally supported them, e.g. IBM PC and compatibles, Ataris, Acorns, Amstrad CPC. Whereas platforms which rolled their own floppy controllers, such as Apple II, Macs, C64, generally didn’t.
Unlike "Le Manoir de Mortevielle" or "Leisure Suit Larry" which I was never able to crack...
The manual had a really good description of the floppy controller interface + various tricks one could use to copy protect floppies.
I know where to find several versions of the program. I am not interested in those. I am only interested in the manual.
Unfortunately, the manual doesn't quite match my memories. I recognize a lot of the text and layout so it is clearly something I have seen before, but the technical info isn't really there.
This manual is from May 1989. I read the manual a bit before that, perhaps in 1987, perhaps 1988.
So, does my memory play tricks on me or did they remove all that lovely tech info? All there's left in this version is Chapter 12 "Technical Terms" (which I recognize as something I have read a version of before).
I know I have read about using track reads to catch some of the copy protection tricks (like in the two MartyPC blog posts) and track writes (occasionally even track writes that are aborted at just the right time) to force the data on disk to be just the right kind of wrong.
I double checked that it wasn't in the Copy II PC manuals I could find: the V6 manual from 1990 and the Copy II PC Option Board manual.
Article from 11 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41346124
Laugh-ability:
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/lotus-1-2-3-r3-copy-protection/
1. Cover the write protect notch on a 5 1/4” floppy with a sticker to enable writing.
2. Melt an extra hole in a 3.5” floppy with a cheap soldering iron to double its capacity to the 1.44MB that later became the standard.
Of course, the floppy manufacturers warned that the cheaper single sided floppies had only been tested on the front side, and might have defects on the back. But I don't remember that ever being a real problem.
I remember someone telling me that the floppy manufacturers were obviously lying, because C=64 computers normally wrote on one side (back, I think), while Apple ][ series computers wrote on the other side, so the disks had to be tested on both sides anyway so they could be used in either computer.
https://www.forum64.de/index.php?thread/38406-diskettenloche...
https://martypc.blogspot.com/2023/06/hardware-validating-emu...
Probably should be a separate HN submission at some point.
https://joeldare.com/that-time-i-built-a-crack-for-nearly-al...
I imagine a documentary like the one for BBSes but for the cracking/cracktro scene would be k-rad
From the wikipedia page:
"THG was run by professional men, who were available each day "by 10:30" when FedEx, or UPS delivered. The other groups had to "wait until they got home" in the afternoons."
now I understand why they were faster :-)
Probably the simplest explanation is that management decreed that Superlok was to be used, and the developer tasked with it complied in the most minimal manner possible.
It's not odd at all, if you think again about this:
> Softguard Systems was founded by Joseph Diodati, Paul Sachse and Ken Williams in 1983
Obviously it's not Ken who implemented the copy protection.
(ofc if this that Ken at all)