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aum
Posts: 626
Location: Booooh!
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 Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 15:49 Post subject: Protection on C64 |
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Hi
Does anyone have info how games (like Bubble Bobble) where protected on the C64?
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Jenni
Banned
Posts: 9526
Location: England.
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| Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 16:41 Post subject: |
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There was none.
Later on they used dongles and if I remember correctly lens lock. Although that may have been the Spectrum. But I remember just copying tape to tape and later on using floppies. There was a few manual checks. Page 5 line 3 sort of stuff. Or the rotating disks. The worst one I ever saw was a red clear film that put red words in a highlight.
But actual anti copy programs, there wasn't one built in from the start.
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aum
Posts: 626
Location: Booooh!
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| Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 17:04 Post subject: |
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I played some C64 games on a EMU and often you saw the "cracked by ..." message.
So maybe manual cracks
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Jenni
Banned
Posts: 9526
Location: England.
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| Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 17:09 Post subject: |
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They had release groups but they just packed them for bullein boards. They also added intro's.
But as for copy protection, nah there was none. You could just copy from tape to tape.
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| Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 17:14 Post subject: |
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tapes could be copied...even with a tape deck recorder with two tape decks...but there was copyprotection for the discs. i remeber that i was unable to copy some disks while other made no problems. intentional bad sectors and stuff i guess.
jesus christ was a gangsta rapper. they killed him. he came back and made a platinum album.
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Jenni
Banned
Posts: 9526
Location: England.
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| Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 17:18 Post subject: |
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You sure. I had two 1541's and I never had problems. I could be wrong though. We're talking about technology from when before Sublime was born.
Ahh the good old days, going to a computer club and swapping disks and tapes.
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EchoBit
Posts: 16
Location: Gothenburg
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| Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 18:06 Post subject: |
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*** I wrote this as whoKnows posted his message, so there are indeed peóple who knows the facts  And Jenni, I do not in any way mean to disrespect you, 'cause like whoKnows wrote, you probably only copied already cracked games. I just feel so trongly for this subject ***
*sigh* I suddenly feel very, very old... I am 35 yrs and have been a gamer since the age of 9 and I fully realize that I am old enough to be the father to many of the users here on NFOrce, but I couldn't imagine that the good old 64 days were forgotten. Don't get me wrong; I'm not dissing anyone but seeing that even someone I admire, such as the lovely Jenni, doesn't know that 64 games were protected makes me kinda sad. The fact is, they were protected even from the start. In the beginning (ie Trias) Commodore released many titles on cartridge and while they were not protected per se, a noob couldn't copy them. And when tapes were introduced (a little known fact is that tapes were big in Europe but almost unheard of in the USA) it wasn't just a matter of, to use a modern term, cloning them with a tape-to-tape recorder. You could be lucky and the copies would work but just as often they would not. Okay, the protection schemes used at that time were not as sophisticated as today's headaches but they did indeed stop the common man from just dumping the game onto discs. So the excellent crackers back then had a peek at the tapeloader and released the games as, in most cases with European games) compressed (we used the word crunched back in those days) one-parted files on floppy disks. Why else would groups such as Triad or Fairlight write CRACKED BY... if they didn't actually crack the games?
Anyway, tape protections were fairly easy to crack but disk protections... That's another ballgame indeed. The publisher that had the most advanced protection (at least IMO) was MicroProse. Sure, Eaglesoft cracked their games but WITHOUT the turboloader which made the cracked releases almost unplayable. There were programs such as the Burst Nibbler series that claimed they could duplicate any disk, but in my experience, they were wrong. First of all you'd have to have your disk drive, the good ol' 1541, hooked up to your 64 via a parallell cable which wasn't the standard for the 1541. Meaning that you'd have to "mod" your drive, and preferably, also your computer. Doing this was actually a good idea, 'cause hardware such as DolphinDOS and others were fairly easy to install without soldering. DolphinDOS would speed up reading and writing up to a factor of 25. Oh, I got a bit off topic there, sorry. Where was I? Oh, yes. I tried backing up my beloved MicroProse games with DolphinDOS and some version of Burst Nibbler but came up wanting. Indeed, to this day I still can't backup those games. Of course, now I don't have to 'cause when I want to play them, I play them on the PC using CCS64 and then it doesn't matter that the cracked releases loads dismally slow
Sorry for this long post nut the C64 days were an amazing period in my life. ANd it got even better in the Amiga era, but as they say, that's another story...
PS. Epyx also used advanced protection, but you could in fact make backup copies without a parallell cable. A package called Fast Hack'em did they job for you. For which I'm very grateful since I could backup my precious Summer Games I and II together with Winter Games, still retaining the Vorpal loader. Neat, huh?
EchoBit signing off...
Got my first videogame in 1979 and been at it ever since...
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| Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 18:28 Post subject: |
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Jenni
Banned
Posts: 9526
Location: England.
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| Posted: Sun, 22nd Jan 2006 18:29 Post subject: |
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Ahh the good old Amiga. The subliminal message on Lotus Esprit Turbo.
"Do not copy this game"
As for the 64 I was right into it. I just don't remember it too well. I had all the top games. Elite (still not beaten in space genre) Mercenary was another wire framed classic.
The worst most over hyped game ever bar none was Nexus. My god I bought that pile of crap in it's grey fancy case. Such a let down. Racing construction set or was it kit. That was fantastic. Although try loading it from tape lol.
But you seem to think I wasn't really part of the CBM era and believe me I was. Yes I was a bit behind, I got all my brothers computer hand me downs. I first got into gaming from the Atari console.
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EchoBit
Posts: 16
Location: Gothenburg
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| Posted: Mon, 23rd Jan 2006 18:14 Post subject: |
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Jenni: I did not in any way mean to offend you. I guess I got a bit carried away and went out of line. I hope you accept my apology. You mentioned the Amiga days... Oh, my skin gets all goosebumpy! What great games there were. Of course, there were also some really crappy ones but the overall status of the games released for good old Amy was, IMO, excellent. And you mentioned a game that I also regret buying, namely Nexus for the C64. What a lousy game that was! Like you said, the packaging was really cool with its metallic and futuristic look, and the game was one of the first to include digitized piccies of people (the programmers) but when you had loaded it up you were faced with an absolutely unplayable game. I never got anywhere in it despite my efforts. It was buggy and too hard.
whoKnows: I'll see if I can enlighten you a bit regarding the ESI releases and MicroProse's excellent games. All of the games released by MicroProse (at least starting from Silent Service) used a disk turbo loader. As you probably remember, the good ol' 1541 was a slow beast and thusly many developers added turbo loaders. But in most cases these were removed from the cracked versions. I'm not really sure as to why but I guess it has to do with compatibility issues (PAL/NTSC). On the other hand, if you are American then maybe the ESI releases had the turbo loader intact. I am from Sweden so perhaps the importers (the traders who had access to American BBSs) removed the turbo to get it to work in Europe. Anyway, I bought many of MicroProse's best games. Ah, those incredible packages! I mean I read the manuals over and over again. Not because the games were hard to play nor that I am a slow learner, but because they were so very entertaining, well-written and you could actually learn a thing or two by reading them. Oh, and you also got needful things like the map of the Caribbean for Pirates! or keyboard overlays for the flightsims. Sometimes I long back to those days, 'cause take a look at most PC packaging today. They come in DVD boxes, although quite handy and stackable, but sadly lacking a lot when it comes to goodies. In some cases you won't even get a printed manual but a .PDF file instead  Nothing wrong with Acrobat, but I still would like to read the manual even without the use of my computer. But I still buy the PC games I really enjoy. Check out my page on 1UP.com if you're interested in what games I've purchased for some of my systems. I got off-topic again, didn't I? The disk turbo it was. I played the cracked version of Gunship (I can't remember what release, tjhough) but it was almost unplayable. Because of 1. the incredible loading times, 2. when you fired off a Hellfire it would take a trip behind the helicopter instead of charging the desired target. If you only knew how many times they shot me down because of that annoying bug you'd understand why I forked out $25 for the game When I booted up my purchased Gunship, I smiled as the turbo made a short job of the loading times. And the Hellfire-bug was eradicated. The only thing that worried me was that I couldn't make a backup copy of my MicroProse games. It worried me because some of those games saved on the game disk and the 1541, when it got a bit warm, could in fact destroy your disks.
Now if there's anything else you wonder about the C64 days, just ask away 'cause I still have my C64, my C128, two 1541s and my C2N datasette together with other assorted cartridges and peripherals.
Cheers to both of you! I could talk about C64 and Amiga games 24/7 so if you want you could PM me or we can continue this discussion in this thread. I really like you two 'cause you were there when things were groovy You definitely have my respect. Word!
EchoBit signing off...
Got my first videogame in 1979 and been at it ever since...
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Jenni
Banned
Posts: 9526
Location: England.
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| Posted: Mon, 23rd Jan 2006 20:30 Post subject: |
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We can talk about it here if you like. It gives the chance of other people getting in on the conversation to add their input.
So which Amiga did you have. I had the A500. I remember wanting to play It came from the desert but alas 512k just didn't cut it. I was so jealous when my friend got the official armoured commodore expansion. My god I remember it had five inch think steel plating on it, heh or at least the wedge seemed like it did at the time. It cost him one hundred pounds. I think mine the none official one was forty nine. It was just a small circuit board.
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| Posted: Tue, 24th Jan 2006 16:57 Post subject: |
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| Jenni wrote: | We can talk about it here if you like. It gives the chance of other people getting in on the conversation to add their input.
So which Amiga did you have. I had the A500. I remember wanting to play It came from the desert but alas 512k just didn't cut it. I was so jealous when my friend got the official armoured commodore expansion. My god I remember it had five inch think steel plating on it, heh or at least the wedge seemed like it did at the time. It cost him one hundred pounds. I think mine the none official one was forty nine. It was just a small circuit board. |
My first Amiga was also A500, given to me by a fellow C64 buddy. Moved to an A2000, god what a great STABLE system that was!
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EchoBit
Posts: 16
Location: Gothenburg
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| Posted: Tue, 24th Jan 2006 17:40 Post subject: |
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Jenni: Sure, it's a great idea to dicuss this topic here. My first Amiga was an A500 which I got in 1987. Of course, in the beginning I only had 512K and no external drive so copying protected games using Marauder II destroyed my DF0 Damn, Marauder II took ages to read and write disks and the number of times you had to swap disks... Anyway, I got the cash and invested in an external drive, A1010 (the big one for the A1000), and later on Commodore's official memory expansion A501. With those two goodies new horizons opened. In 1991 I bought an A500 Plus, the one with the ECS circuits, 1MB ChipRAM and KS 2.0. Then I added the one thing I really missed; a hard drive. It was an A590 with a 20MB IDE HDD which set me back SEK 4.995 (about £480). I soon exchanged the IDE drive to a 52MB Quantum SCSI drive. I put 2MB of FastRAM in it but even then it wasn't enough So I bought a Supra 500RX with 2MB of RAM. I also invested in an USR 14k4 v32 modem. Thus my trading-days began
But I soon found that, although 14k4 was pretty nifty, an USR 21k6 TerboDS was better.
Could something top that? For a while, no, but when USR released the 28k8 daughterboard for the Terbo I didn't wait very long to get it. Trading with a 28k8 was really great but my A500 began showing signs of age... You can only get that far with 7.14 MHz and when I uploaded/downloaded, the computer was deadly silent. Even the drive clicking stopped Some time after that my brother bought an A2000 and a Derringer 68030 accelerator card which he gave me when he entered the PC realm. Now with the A2000 and the Derringer card I reached tremendous speed. Imagine an A2000 supercharged with a 68030@50MHz coupled with an 68882@50MHz. Add 8MB of 32bits DRAM and things are really looking good.
I still love my "girlfriends" and have started transferring all of my Amiga disks. I have thusfar only reached disk no. 160. Only 3571 to go
Okay, that was a bit of my story. I am a bit longwinded. Perhaps I should start writing a blog? Next time we can discuss some of the great games and apps that really made the Miggy shine. 'til next time, my friends!
EchoBit signing off...
Got my first videogame in 1979 and been at it ever since...
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spankie
VIP Member
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Location: Belgium
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Jenni
Banned
Posts: 9526
Location: England.
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| Posted: Tue, 24th Jan 2006 19:05 Post subject: |
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Heh I used to have fun with those tapes. I could get the loading screen and add my own loading lines. Then they would wait ages for a game that appeared to be loading but really wasn't.
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| Posted: Wed, 25th Jan 2006 01:53 Post subject: |
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C-64 - Yes I remember games having protection. Using "Disk Nibbler" to make copies of the games that were cracked. Accolade (Test Drive/4th and Inches), Epyx - tons of games and even had their joystick. I had a "fast load" cartridge in back of the c-64. Played my first game called Bruce Lee on a tape deck .Ran a BBS on an Ivory and C-Net system.
Amiga 500 - Shadow of the beast was my favorite. OMG.
RYZEN 5 2600|RADEON 570| |ASRock X370 Killer|DDR4@2800Mhz||Corsair SPEC-05 Case|AOC G2590FX 24.5''144hz 1ms|
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| Posted: Wed, 25th Jan 2006 03:40 Post subject: |
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| todd72173 wrote: | C-64 - Yes I remember games having protection. Using "Disk Nibbler" to make copies of the games that were cracked. Accolade (Test Drive/4th and Inches), Epyx - tons of games and even had their joystick. I had a "fast load" cartridge in back of the c-64. Played my first game called Bruce Lee on a tape deck .Ran a BBS on an Ivory and C-Net system.
Amiga 500 - Shadow of the beast was my favorite. OMG. |
A buddy of mine ran his board on a moddified version C-Net, nice BBS setup.
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| Posted: Wed, 25th Jan 2006 06:30 Post subject: |
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| TheDiggler wrote: | | todd72173 wrote: | C-64 - Yes I remember games having protection. Using "Disk Nibbler" to make copies of the games that were cracked. Accolade (Test Drive/4th and Inches), Epyx - tons of games and even had their joystick. I had a "fast load" cartridge in back of the c-64. Played my first game called Bruce Lee on a tape deck .Ran a BBS on an Ivory and C-Net system.
Amiga 500 - Shadow of the beast was my favorite. OMG. |
A buddy of mine ran his board on a moddified version C-Net, nice BBS setup. |
Wow!! So glad to hear that! I modified the C-net too! I would change tthe intro to--Welcome to The Mad Hacker..My friend ran the Mad Hacker 2. All the text was modified..My handle was Hulk Hogan..hahahha. We had so much fun. No colors. No sound. Every post or reply = 1 download credit.. those were the times..
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| Posted: Wed, 25th Jan 2006 08:10 Post subject: |
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| todd72173 wrote: | | TheDiggler wrote: | | todd72173 wrote: | C-64 - Yes I remember games having protection. Using "Disk Nibbler" to make copies of the games that were cracked. Accolade (Test Drive/4th and Inches), Epyx - tons of games and even had their joystick. I had a "fast load" cartridge in back of the c-64. Played my first game called Bruce Lee on a tape deck .Ran a BBS on an Ivory and C-Net system.
Amiga 500 - Shadow of the beast was my favorite. OMG. |
A buddy of mine ran his board on a moddified version C-Net, nice BBS setup. |
Wow!! So glad to hear that! I modified the C-net too! I would change tthe intro to--Welcome to The Mad Hacker..My friend ran the Mad Hacker 2. All the text was modified..My handle was Hulk Hogan..hahahha. We had so much fun. No colors. No sound. Every post or reply = 1 download credit.. those were the times.. |
Oh the days of the Zmodem transfer!
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I can't remember a single Microprose game cracked by ESI wich wasn't fully playable like Pirates for example, i played that for a very long time. Could you shed some light on what you meant please 
