| |
bugjam
Registered: Apr 2003
Posts: 2589 |
Onefile-demo with protection?!
Hi all,
here is a tricky one. A friend of mine tried to analyze a one-file-demo back in the late 80s, because he was impressed with the effects; it could have been a crack intro as well.
Unfortunately the only thing he remembers is that the program formatted the disk, after he had changed something in the code (he tried to run it block-wise, to see what each part was doing), so apparently it had some sort of very nifty protection against nosy rippers. :-)
Anyone ever encountered something like this? |
|
| |
Angel of Death
Registered: Apr 2008
Posts: 211 |
Can't recall a demo or intro with a disk-formatter.
I remember the old German Cracking Service didn't start the game if it found anything wrong.
And TMC's trained version of Wizball which screwed up the disk if tampered with was quite notorious in the day. |
| |
tlr
Registered: Sep 2003
Posts: 1790 |
There were several protector-programs that put a checksum on the a program and formatted the disc if it failed.
Those were more 85-86ish though. Presumably made for the purpose of hampering a rampant surge of recracks. |
| |
Zyron
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 2381 |
There were protectors causing that kind of behaviour, Checksum Protector V1.0 f ex. I remember getting a disk wiped by it because the file, loaded from tape, got a load error. Very annoying. |
| |
Zyron
Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 2381 |
Smurf :D |
| |
Count Zero
Registered: Jan 2003
Posts: 1932 |
I remember I had a version of Charset Mixer V1.0 on one of my disks and someday it killed that tool disk. Apparently since I loaded the program with a different speeder than usual. (FC3 vs AR5 or smthg)
Never really cared to investigate. Maybe someone else cares to check :) |
| |
bugjam
Registered: Apr 2003
Posts: 2589 |
Ah, so this was actually quite common - thanks a lot for the info, I had never heard of that protection mechanism before. Cheers! |
| |
j0x
Registered: Mar 2004
Posts: 215 |
I got a demo disk from Noise in the late eighties. Ran the first demo, pressed run/stop-restore in the last part, which caused the demo to do a format. I never got to see the rest of the demos on that disk... |
| |
Danzig
Registered: Jun 2002
Posts: 440 |
AFAIR this Fresh Intro had a "format-disk-protection", if one might call it so. |
| |
Smasher
Registered: Feb 2003
Posts: 520 |
we in Fresh protected our prgs so CFA could not recrack them, haha! :) |
| |
TheRyk
Registered: Mar 2009
Posts: 2246 |
Just write "THOU SHALT NOT STEAL" in memory at $0810 :D |
| |
Danzig
Registered: Jun 2002
Posts: 440 |
Quote: we in Fresh protected our prgs so CFA could not recrack them, haha! :)
Fresh on Top |
| |
Graham
Account closed
Registered: Dec 2002
Posts: 990 |
Quote: I remember I had a version of Charset Mixer V1.0 on one of my disks and someday it killed that tool disk. Apparently since I loaded the program with a different speeder than usual. (FC3 vs AR5 or smthg)
Never really cared to investigate. Maybe someone else cares to check :)
Yeah, I had the same experience with the same tooldisk. It was Magic Disk 64, Sonderausgabe 3:
Magic Disk 64, Sonderausgabe 3 Cover
It wasn't the FC3 fastloader which "killed" the disk though. But if you had a load error, it would quick-format the disk because of the wrong end-addy in the zeropage. |
| |
Count Zero
Registered: Jan 2003
Posts: 1932 |
Thx for clearing that up, Graham! |
