screwing with pirates

[peteym5]

I look at this thread as another excuse for bashing.

[VladR]

Honestly, it only took me a few posts to identify already last week that Jackel192 either is a reincarnation of 2600problems, or a perfect copycat.

I thought it was obvious from his first post. I originally wanted to congratulate him that he reduced his 2,6000 problems into mere 192

[TMR]

I look at this thread as another excuse for bashing.

i'm not sure why you'd feel that way; this thread started off being about the C64's BASIC, passed through a few other dialects, finally got onto topic when he switched to Atari BASIC on page 6 and eventually ended up being about writing a Mega CD "game" which he'd distribute that, if it were "copied to an actual cd, the system's data becomes corrupted". This was, apparently, an "experiment" which supposedly made being a scumbag to other people okay or something...

 

It's not as though nobody tried to help over the months he was posting either; people pointed out here and on other parts of the forum when he was asking the impossible or at least the nonsensical, offered alternatives that stood a better chance of working, explained the faults or logic issues in his posted listings and answered many of his questions directly, but he ignored almost all of that, instead swerving off in a completely different direction, often jumping ship to another programming language or indeed platform in the process.

[flashjazzcat]

I assumed Pete meant the thread was an excuse to bash him, since it began as what appeared to be a parody of risible piracy paranoia.

[TMR]

I assumed Pete meant the thread was an excuse to bash him, since it began as what appeared to be a parody of risible piracy paranoia.

That never crossed my mind personally, but we'll have to see if he expands on that comment...

[Guest]

If the password is in the program it'll be found in no time. If you do fancy encryption it'll take seconds/minutes longer.

In the modern day, emulation and debugging means you can't hide much at all.

The way to go with a password would be to encrypt most of the program then have the password actually form most of the decryption key.

By doing that, it's not discoverable by any other way than actually getting it right.

 

Then again, brute force password hacking is easy with fast modern CPUs.

and we all know how pirates prefer brute force?

 

FWIW, i'd suggest any password that disables the A R G H keys would stump most pirates

[peteym5]

It will be better to encrypt at the machine language level over basic. You can hide the password by dividing into into sections throughout the decrypting program or make it look like a set of ml instructions, or some other piece of data used by the program. There are many ways of doing this, I have played with encryption keys for shareware programs on the PC.

[fujidude]

Honestly, it only took me a few posts to identify already last week that Jackel192 either is a reincarnation of 2600problems, or a perfect copycat.

 

Hehe; "problems." That's more appropriate than perhaps he intended.

[TMR]

You can hide the password by dividing into into sections throughout the decrypting program or make it look like a set of ml instructions, or some other piece of data used by the program.

The latter is sort of how my simple example in WannaClone works, it isn't using a password but there's the seed value from a pseudo random number generator, a page of the music data (i'd have used the system ROM but the C64 version banks all of that out) and whatever the last value decoded was being used to unencrypt the next byte.

 

It could be applied as an anti-tamper protection (levels encrypted against part of the code with a lives counter or collision detection so a trainer will, in essence, trash the data) but wouldn't last against a persistent cracker because both the key and decoding routine need to be present; it's only a matter of time before someone puts them together, unwinds the data and then NOPs the decoder routine out.

[CPUWIZ]

I assumed Pete meant the thread was an excuse to bash him, since it began as what appeared to be a parody of risible piracy paranoia.

 

Lets not go down that route because of some troll, that had both of his accounts banned. Just let this thread die.

[flashjazzcat]

I would be delighted to see that happen, I assure you.

[peteym5]

I am more paranoid about being caught up in an endless and useless arguments on threads like this. Anyone who publishes software has the right to take steps to protect their copyrights.I know there are ways to detect if a program is not running off the original media they originally ran from. If someone wants to hide a password and other information that is stored somewhere will take takes steps to encrypt it. Even before emulators, there was ways to view memory with an hex editor or memory monitor programs.

[flashjazzcat]

Does that mean I was right?

[TMR]

Anyone who publishes software has the right to take steps to protect their copyrights.

Nobody in this thread claimed otherwise and, at least according to the cursory glance i just gave the last seven pages, the only person talking about protection from that standpoint even in passing was you, everyone else was either discussing a few techniques from a programming standpoint or wandering off at tangents.

 

Even before emulators, there was ways to view memory with an hex editor or memory monitor programs.

Indeed, that's why no protection system in unbreakable and i've seen a talented C64 cracker break all manner of protected tape and disk fastloaders using nothing more than a monitor he typed in from a magazine; the best that the games industry could offer usually didn't hold up for more than an hour or two against a teenager with DisMon.

[VladR]

Does that mean I was right?

Why the rhetorical queries

 

i've seen a talented C64 cracker break all manner of protected tape and disk fastloaders using nothing more than a monitor he typed in from a magazine; the best that the games industry could offer usually didn't hold up for more than an hour or two against a teenager with DisMon.

Typing in the monitor seems a bit extreme (typing alone must have taken, like, 3-4 hours), I was able to modify (for infinite lives and such) lots of games just using the default monitor (forgot the name) that you quickly load off tape. As long as the game you modify fits in the remaining memory (and many games were just 16 KB anyway) after monitor is loaded, that's all that's needed...

[Bryan]

I'm sorry, but you can't protect software running on a nearly 40 year old, reverse engineered platform unless you're going to put all the execution hardware in the cartridge and just use the computer as a dumb display device. If there were tens of thousands of dollars at stake I could see making some kind of effort, but people devoted untold resources to copy protection back in the day and their games were still pirated within the first week. Today, there are people who will invest in a physical copy and those who won't. You can't move people from one camp to the other.

[flashjazzcat]

You can't move people from one camp to the other by employing copy protection, but you can probably move people to the "will invest" camp by not employing copy protection. Anyone who wants to run the software in emulation, for a start. One can also encourage donations for free-to-download software, since the A8 community is a generous and supportive one, I find. As someone who considered A8 shareware to be pushing the bounds of credulity in the mid-nineties, I can attest to the "donationware" model being a fairly sane approach in 2017 (akin to voluntary financing models for online content creators and such like).

 

To be quite frank, a preoccupation with copy protection when it comes to A8 software suggests to me an implicit over-valuation of the material under consideration. I may be wrong in projecting that, but when software algorithms and testing strategies are also shrouded in secrecy, it smacks of hype. Imagine, for a moment, that a developer invested inordinate amounts of time and energy in IP protection, only to discover that no-one wanted to pirate the software. Conversely, if the software is of such quality that it is widely coveted, revenue from legitimate sales (or from donations or registration fees) should amply counterbalance income lost to piracy.

Edited September 21, 2017 by flashjazzcat

[drac030]

Someone in this thread already said that the protection schemes might work, not so as anti-piracy protection, but as anti-tamper protection. An author may want to prevent someone else from patching the original code.

 

I personally find the outcome of this a bit frustrating: a program, which is protected in this way, contains a trivial bug, which could be patched easily, the protection however prevents that, so you first would have to spend enormous time to crack the program just to correct one byte in the code. Now the real question is: is the program worth spending the time, or the more reasonable decision is rather to delete the program and forget about it?

[+remowilliams]

Today, there are people who will invest in a physical copy and those who won't. You can't move people from one camp to the other.

 

You can't move people from one camp to the other by employing copy protection, but you can probably move people to the "will invest" camp by not employing copy protection.

 

 

One thing I can tell you definitively - you can move someone from the can't wait to support an author/release to the will not support at all camp...

[TMR]

Typing in the monitor seems a bit extreme (typing alone must have taken, like, 3-4 hours)

Yes but it was a very good monitor with disassembler, written by John Twiddy who'd later go on to write the Expert Cartridge software (which had an even better monitor included) and Cyberload, one of the more nastily protected tape fastloading schemes. That was my go to monitor for debugging until the Action Replay 6 cartridge came along...

 

Someone in this thread already said that the protection schemes might work, not so as anti-piracy protection, but as anti-tamper protection. An author may want to prevent someone else from patching the original code.

i mentioned that amongst others and yes, it's very doable; the routine behind that little demo i released earlier in the thread can basically be repurposed as anti-tamper protection and i've considered doing it in the past on C64 code at least, just to give the crackers something to do! =-)

 

I personally find the outcome of this a bit frustrating: a program, which is protected in this way, contains a trivial bug, which could be patched easily, the protection however prevents that, so you first would have to spend enormous time to crack the program just to correct one byte in the code. Now the real question is: is the program worth spending the time, or the more reasonable decision is rather to delete the program and forget about it?

S'hard to say generally, but if fixing the bug has already been considered to be worthwhile then yes, to my mind at least it's also worth going that extra mile.

 

As for the question we seem to have moved onto about using copy protection these days... it was only ever meant to slow down the pirating of software rather than prevent it because the sales window for a game was a few weeks to a couple of months after it was launched, we don't have that model any more and games can continue to sell for months or even years after being published so protection isn't really fit for task now. i don't disagree with the idea that anyone publishing a game has every right to protect it, but most make the decision not to.

 

On a slightly tangential note, i can think of one fairly recent game that was being sold on disk via eBay; the website for it is long gone along with the contact details of the seller and i know only one person who owns the thing, but is so anti-piracy that he wouldn't upload a copy to the interwebs. i'm just hoping the disk has been imaged because there's a chance it'll get lost otherwise...

[carlsson]

I understood the original intent of this thread was not to protect your software from being pirated, but that once someone pirated it, you would have a software way to point your middle finger at the pirate and tell them to **** off. The OP also seemed to want to try to damage hardware for anyone trying to break into his program, which goes far beyond copy protection. Except for cases when you can change inputs to outputs and possibly tie signals to cause a short circuit, I've learned that in general you can't destroy hardware through software but possibly there are exceptions to this rule.

 

Most of the posts in this thread have been a combination of trying to reduce the discussion to sane levels, and I'll admit some ridicule for not willing to listen to advice and experience. It is true that many great breakthroughs in science comes from trying to disprove the given truths about a matter, but I didn't find the OP taking on scientific methods to try to prove his theories.

[Irgendwer]

Except for cases when you can change inputs to outputs and possibly tie signals to cause a short circuit, I've learned that in general you can't destroy hardware through software but possibly there are exceptions to this rule.

 

Yes:

[peteym5]

Copy protection deters not prevents. Many do support homebrew games these days, and most will buy the game. many companies for technical support require proof of purchase. If you pirated the software and it does not work, good luck getting support. I know it will not be expensive to do something to a cartridge that will make software not run without it. I once considered a cartridge design that combines math co-processing and bank switching. Have fast multiply, divide, trigonometry, etc. But I get faster results with table driven routines.

 

Password protection and hiding it in memory is not difficult with encryption and compression routines. Even make it difficult to find with a memory monitor program. I am very sure I can come up with something that can keep a pirate busy for awhile. I considered registration and activation codes or do something that requires them to have the manual with them at one point. But it wont be too long before someone posts the answers up on Atariage.

[Madi]

Password protection and hiding it in memory is not difficult with encryption and compression routines. Even make it difficult to find with a memory monitor program. I am very sure I can come up with something that can keep a pirate busy for awhile. I considered registration and activation codes or do something that requires them to have the manual with them at one point. But it wont be too long before someone posts the answers up on Atariage.

 

What you program is yours. You have the right to protect it form unauthorized people in any way you feel suitable.

BUT

I believe that you have gone too far by accusing Atariage community members of being traitors and thieves.

Why do you have that tendency to intimidate peoples? Stop it please.

madi

Edited September 22, 2017 by Madi

[Irgendwer]

If you pirated the software and it does not work, good luck getting support.

 

Ah, now I understand: The issues with your software are by design. Now that's really clever!

 

Edit:

I've found a new design of a cartridge case for you to prevent pirating:

 

BTW:

Is there a follow-up story to "Screwing with pirates" like "Nailing with Knights" or something?

Edited September 22, 2017 by Irgendwer