Exploring 80s Anti-Piracy DRM Copy Protection | feat. the dreaded Lenslok

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Today, join me whilst I explore and try out three different types of 1980s anti-piracy copy protection methods (similar to DRM), including the infamous Lenslok. The games I will be looking at, are: Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles on the Amstrad CPC, and Jet Set Willy, plus TT Racer on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
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Опубликовано:

28 сен 2024

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Комментарии : 600

@alanedwards8834 4 месяца назад

After 30+ years of playing Sid Meyer’s Railroad tycoon, I’ve NEARLY memorised all of the train images you need to identify on copy protection! 😊

@KujiGhost 4 месяца назад

I was just about to comment about Railroad Tycoon! My brother and I still take the piss out of each other for knowing how to distinguish a 4-4-0 Hamilton from a 4-6-2 Gresley! SImple copy protection broken by a random book on trains received as a Christmas present 😂😂

@narmale 3 месяца назад

i STILL play that game

@peter65zzfdfh 3 месяца назад

I had memorized all the questions for the original civilization back in the day. Willing to bet I have forgotten them in the last few decades though.

@djsting 3 месяца назад

Same!

@thestorytelleruk 3 месяца назад

Me and my dad were masters at copying those 'protection' methods. I typed or coloured everything in by hand, including Jet Set Willy and Monkey Island's wheel. My dad made a mould of the lenslok and cast his own with epoxy resin so we could use The Artist.

@gordonm2821 4 месяца назад

I remember cracking the colour code sheet for Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum whilst in college long after the game was released. I was teaching myself Z80 assembler at the time. You search memory for the text ‘Invalid code entered’ or whatever it was when wrong colour code entered and make a note of the memory location for the first letter. You then looked for the instruction that referenced that memory location and the preceding logic. e.g. the logic might be jump if result is zero, you then flipped the logic to jump if not zero by poking that revised instruction into the memory location. When you then ran the code with RANDOMIZE USR it would accept any colour code as valid.

@JCCyC 4 месяца назад

...EXCEPT the correct one!

@gordonm2821 4 месяца назад

@@JCCyC - Good point ;-)

@V3ntilator 3 месяца назад

I remember being perhaps the first to rip out TFMX music format from memory in 1991-92 using Action Replay III on Amiga. Unlike modules, TFMX were harder to rip since one song were in 2 files. 1 for Note sheet and 1 with all samples merged. It were easy to fix the sample length in Audiomaster III on AMIGA. I used Cygnus Text Editor on Amiga to find the start of note sheets. If i don't remember wrong, they all started with @@@@. When note sheets ended didn't matter. You just cut the file somewhere after 5K or something to be sure. lol. Eagleplayer on Amiga could still play them correctly.

@ScruffyLeadership 4 месяца назад

Jet Set Willy! Yay! My favourite pre-2000 game. I have an unopened copy of it on ZX Spectrum which I'm very proud of. 🙂

@scyphe 4 месяца назад

It's worth a nice penny as well.

@Metallifux5150 4 месяца назад

POKE 34499,201 still remember the code bypass poke.

@3DJapan 4 месяца назад

Not copy protection but when I was 18 or 19 I found an old copy of Leisure Suit Larry, which is an 18+ rated game. It had a series of questions to prove you're an adult. Many of which were about "recent" history and politics. The thing is, since I was an adult in the 90s, not the 80s, I didn't know the answers. I had to look them up in the encyclopedia.

@Davefromcanada411 4 месяца назад

A classic!

@ro63rto 4 месяца назад

And after all that research, it was a disappointment wasn't it 😂

@WhateverNullPointer 4 месяца назад

Couldn't you skip the questions by pressing ctrl-x or something like that?

@3DJapan 4 месяца назад

@@ro63rto I had fun with it but unfortunately I only had disk 1 of the game so once he leaves the bar at the beginning the game ended for me.

@3DJapan 4 месяца назад

@@WhateverNullPointer if so it would have been easier but I don't remember seeing anything about that. I didn't have the box or manual, just a 5.25 floppy.

@riddlewrong 4 месяца назад

I definitely recall having to look up things like "page 9, line 23, word 4" in the instruction manuals of old pc games. There were also some games that had a piece of transparent red film that you would have to hold up to a red garbled page in the manual so that you could see the codes. They got pretty creative back in ye olden days.

@firlefonzflow 3 месяца назад

"The Legend of Kyrandia" for example. If I remeber correctly :)

@flyfishizationjones4940 3 месяца назад

Sierra games used to reference the manual pages. Imagine kids today getting a paper copy of a manual with a game. Or having to use a code wheel or whatever that lens thing was she was using. 😂 100% chance my son would be forced into a new hobby.

@Rich77UK 4 месяца назад

I remember lenslock on the sinclair 48k. As a 7 year old I had hell getting those damn things to work.

@joshcarter-com 4 месяца назад

Watching Kari fuss with lenslock made me thankful I never had to deal with it!

@teebodk3917 4 месяца назад

I had it on a music program. I think it may have been called "Music Studio" or "Music Creator Deluxe" from... Electronic Arts, possibly? I never got it right at first attempt, and often had to suffer the reload-routine due to too many wrong attempts. Utterly infuriating and thankfully I never encountered that system anywhere else.

@Rich77UK 4 месяца назад

@@teebodk3917 yes! I had this music program and elite mentioned by Kari. Both lenslocks were so bad I ended up rarely using them which was sad as both game and application were so good!

@LucidFlight 4 месяца назад

That Lenslok is a bit like a CAPTCHA challenge where you have to figure out the characters 😬

@6581punk 4 месяца назад

I've got a game with one myself. It soon died a death, 8-10 games I think. My game with it on is The Price of Magik by Level 9.

@K.Reimann 4 месяца назад

Oh no !! You are so wrong !! The difference is, that the lenslok always worked prop. 😂

@edgarwalk5637 4 месяца назад

Please choose the tiles with the cross walks.

@craigus1984 4 месяца назад

Appreciate the dedication of putting what must be a reasonably heavy photocopier onto your desk just for all of us to see. Another great video. Thanks Kari :) Also, not 80's, but Star Control for MS-DOS (1991) requested a special pass phrase that players found by using a three-ply code wheel, called "Professor Zorq's Instant Etiquette Analyzer". Was a really cool idea for copy protection.

@Niblonian88 4 месяца назад

The first Monkey Island game on the Amiga was protected by a wheel type deal with little holes in, worked pretty well from what I recall. Monkey Island - an absolute belter of a game. Shout out to the Critters shirt, very underated movies

@andydaniel3070 3 месяца назад

I remember a C64 game called Beach Head. It was somehow copy protected on the cassette itself. If you listened to the cassette in audio there was a short section of code, then a pause, then the main long code. If you copied the entire cassette then the copy wouldn't load. For some reason I decided to try copying just the main long code, leaving off the short section at the beginning, and that worked fine.

@asparagustrevor 4 месяца назад

That brown TMHT copy protection book brings back some annoying memories. Annoying because of the hard to read copy protection and annoying because of the game itself! The NES version is infamous due it its difficulty, but it had nothing on the C64 version. I remember Worms on the Amiga had a similar copy protection book too. Speaking of the Amiga, there was a game called Life & Death where you were a surgeon and it had an interesting copy protection method. The game box contained a phone book (plus rubber gloves & surgical mask!), and partway through the game you were told phone someone, so you had to look up their number in the phone book - the game wouldn't progress without this.

@realityrenderedstudi 3 месяца назад

Back in the old fun days I, had a similar problem, simple fix, I did a scan on the flatbed scanner and adjusted the color settings, lower or remove the offending color. It worked perfect.

@Coffeeology 3 месяца назад

Back in the day when my friends and I bought Wing Commander for the PC it came with a booklet like the one for TMNT that you showed. My friends and I each took a 4th of the book and hand copied the codes to share the game with each other.

@MikeBeeTV 3 месяца назад

I remember those red paper blue ink "copy" protections. They greatly underestimated the tenacity of a teenager with a ream of tracing paper and too much time.

@OctaBech 2 месяца назад

Phew, the LensLok part actually had me on the edge of my seat. 😅

@burgek1 4 месяца назад

I don't think I experienced the lens lock but definitely remember looking up codes in the manuals on my spectrum +2. I do vaguely remember you could load either a cracked version of the games or preload a crack before loading the game! Good memories!

@thereare4lights137 4 месяца назад

Dungeons and Dragons: Pool of Radiance for the Commodore 64 had those terrible code wheels. Three of them if I remember. Had that game as a teenager in the '80's and boy were those wheels annoying. I had the original game and disassembled the code wheels in order to make photocopies and create duplicates. Those were the days!

@amartin3893 4 месяца назад

Love the game play. Jet Set Willy. A game I never could complete, and I couldn't complete Manic Miner either without unlimited lives. That goddam power generator screen where the yellow beam took your air ... it was just too hard😠😠🤣🤣

@jipster2020 4 месяца назад

JSW was actually bugged and could not be completed without a cheat, so don't feel bad. I still have great memories of MM though. I know exactly the level you're talking about - it was a complete PITA. The level that I remember more than any other though (apart from the first level because I saw it SO often), was Eugene's Lair. The timer once once you got the last crystal before Eugene descended to block off the exit was very stressfull...

@lmcgregoruk 4 месяца назад

@@jipster2020 JSW was one of people's most favourite games, even though it was unwinnable in it's original state. Also didn't really matter that you had so many lives, if you ended up in a falling loop.

@Innesb 4 месяца назад

Laser Basic and Laser Compiler for the ZX Spectrum had manuals with green and blue pages respectively. I found the green one very difficult to read, because it was so dark, so I experimented with various settings on the photocopier. The first copy had an annoying grey background, but the copy of the copy resulted in almost perfect black on white. I was so annoyed at having to to jump though hoops to be able to use a product that I had paid for that I gave the first (grey) copy to a colleague and he paid for my photocopying costs. A good example of copy-protection backfiring on the publisher. I didn’t have a ZX Spectrum when I was at school, but I recall someone making a copy of the Jet Set Willy colour codes by writing out the colours as the respective digits. The resulting sheet was easily photocopied. I suspect the multi page version for the Amstrad would have similarly been overcome by a group of school boys who would rather spend an hour copying a page each, than forgo several week’s pocket money for a legitimate copy.

@6581punk 4 месяца назад

The Attic bug and some unreachable items meant you couldn't complete it. The Attic bug was where the arrow in the room was moved in memory but went a bit too far, overwriting some code.

@paranoidgenius9164 4 месяца назад

How come I get a sense of nostalgia when I watch your content?! You somehow take me back to when I was about 8 years old at the turn of the 90's, watching CITV, or Blue Peter presenters on television!😊 ❤️Kari, the nostalgia girl❤ I'm impressed with your enthusiasm & dedication in making your content, you are not braindead like a lot of your generation are, & I'm finding that I get excited whenever new content from you appears.

@aidanmac2002 4 месяца назад

I remember for Jet Set Willy, there were bugs in it so they printed "pokes" in magazines of the time to fix the issues which required them to explain how to bypass the DRM. Also for Lens Lock there was a way, again via a poke to reset the timer as the loading started so it always picked only one of two codes. Since you had 3 attempts you always got in.... Fun days and we learned a lot

@hotlavatube 3 месяца назад

In the US, some of the copyright protection tricks had pretty nifty props. The Monkey Island games from Lucasfilm had the spinning discs where you had to match up the pirate heads or voodoo ingredients. The Sierra games had pamphlets of airport ticket codes, police mugshots, Larry's little black book phone numbers, and so forth. Gold Rush came with an entire book, chronicling the history of the gold rush and you were forced to learn each time you started up the game. Some games had little funny scenes when you got the copyright protection wrong. Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders sent you to piracy jail. Gold Rush hanged you.

@zombieman81 2 месяца назад

Had Lenslok on Tomahawk and Elite on ZX Spectrum and personally don't remember it being a problem. Elite always felt like the longest tape load I ever experienced.

@SEOdev 3 месяца назад

Oh man, I had turtles on my 128 way back when. I can't remember if i had it on tape or disk but wow, that takes me back.

@astrosteve 24 дня назад

At least on PC, some manufacturers did weird things to the disks so, if you copied them, the copied game somehow knew it was a copy and wouldn't work. Infiltrator is the only game I can remember offhand that just wouldn't work if you copied it. In terms of physical protection, there's also code wheels, which were quite popular for a while. Getting a specific word from random pages in the game manual was also popular. But one of my favorites was the original Leisure Suit Larry, which just asked questions it assumed kids wouldn't know the answer to. This was more of a "keep kids from playing the game" thing than copy protection, but still in the same spirit. (I was able to figure the answers out pretty quickly as a 13 year old, though.)

@thebaron9059 4 месяца назад

As someone who was there at the time, I can confirm that we did indeed hand copy the Jet Set Willy code chart, and I still have it!

@-D-A-V-E 4 месяца назад

Most memorable for me was The Secret of Monkey Island on the Amiga, a rotating code wheel from what I remember.

@Aspiring-Hobo 4 месяца назад

I had a copy, the copy worked

@defaultuser1447 4 месяца назад

Starflight had a code wheel as well. A few of the Infocom text games had some clues in various extras in the boxes.

@YesiPleb 4 месяца назад

F/A-18 Interceptor was like that as well.

@serloinz 4 месяца назад

@@YesiPleb that was the first and only game i ever 'cracked' using a hex editor.. i just searched for the codes in the .exe (can't even remember what the executables were called on the amiga..i don't even think there was an extension?!) and changed them all to zeros.. i was really surprised it worked haha

@hajom78 4 месяца назад

Oh, yes I remember that :)

@gmc6790 4 месяца назад

The ones i remember was the word lookup in the manual and the red screen flim. The film you put over your page and it would "reveal" the codes. The film was basically the same stuff from the cheap 70s 3-D glass.

@RokushoHasashi 3 месяца назад

The most memorable one for me was Dungeon Master. It had multiple checks embedded throughout the game. Those checks relied on “fuzzy” bits stored on the floppy disk. Those are bits that hover between a zero and a one. Sometimes, reading the bit will show a zero, and sometimes, it will show a one. I love your Critters Shirt, by the way ❤

@brianwolters7560 4 месяца назад

This is a great topic...I remember many of these methods, especially the ones you couldn't get around easily. Rocket Ranger and Star Trek 25th Anniversary come to mind as some of the most memorable.

@CMDRBlueeagle66 3 месяца назад

I remember all these protection methods 😊The Lenslok was a complete pain.

@crossmr 4 месяца назад

Code wheels were another one. Common with the Gold Box D&D games.

@Plethora.of.Pinatas 3 месяца назад

I love you just because you have a jellyfish phone on the wall lol I miss some of that plastic tech from late 80s and early 90s.

@fixumdude 4 месяца назад

Another great video. Really highlights the hoops we had to just through just to run a game back in the 80s and 90s.

@PeetHobby 3 месяца назад

Remember the dongles? Some games came with a dongle that you needed to plug into a port before you could play the game. So you couldn't play the game until you turned all the drawers upside down and found the dongle.

@grapefruit256-wu5ml 4 месяца назад

Really like the topics you bring up... 🎉

@DJKav 4 месяца назад

Rob Northern was the master of the Atari ST and Amiga disk protection, and custom floppy disk formats. Fun fact: he produced the disk format for the cover disk of the original ST/Amiga Format, before the split. Side A was for the Atari ST disk format, due to the early Atari ST's having single sided floppy disk drives. Side B was in the Amiga disk format, as all Amiga's had double sided floppy disk drives.

@TJWood 4 месяца назад

and also why so many Amiga games got cracked quickly as they used a lot of Rob's protections and people learnt the tricks employed.

@soddof7972 4 месяца назад

Elite would ask for words from certain pages of the manual.

@TsiolkovskySportingLocks 4 месяца назад

well those dark image copy protection were so easy to sort out when I was a school. We used to copy them out in break time and the sell them around our mates. But being colour blind i never played Jet Set Willy on principle.

@MegaClashcityrocker 4 месяца назад

Me and 4 friends just split up the work and transcribed our own individual sections of the JSW code sheet, took an hour each. We then had a sheet with letters rather than colours and sold copies of the sheets at school for 50p

@propersplitbrainme 3 месяца назад

Lenslok, what a palaver. As someone whose eyes don't focus in stereo, getting past the protection was almost like completing the game itself.

@ZX48K 4 месяца назад

As I kid was a bit wiser to the JSW colour code protection. Instead of using felt tips, I just created the grid using numbers, 1= Blue, 2 = Red, 3 = Magenta, 5 = Cyan, 6 = Yellow, 7 = White.

@mrgonk871 4 месяца назад

I remember copying jet set willy colour chart at school whilst in a French lesson using wax crayons just so I could play my copied version when I got home. I remember copying it using The Key tape copying software, which I also copied. The days of C90 cassettes full of speccy games. I only bought ultimate play the game games as I loved the box artwork. As for Lenslok, what a pain that was and it meant I had to buy my copy of Elite.

@mugenmark 4 месяца назад

I vaguely remember some games on the Amiga had a hardware plug in dongle thingy for copy protection. That LensLock looks insane! Fascinating trivia as ever. Thank you and keep up the top quality retro content 😊

@DJKav 4 месяца назад

Robocop 3 had a dongle that plugged into the mouse port, that you plugged the mouse into.

@6581punk 4 месяца назад

@@DJKav Which didn't fit the Amiga 600 :D

@brentsmith-d8h 4 месяца назад

I know there are some kinds of really expensive modern software that still uses a hardware USB key to access.

@6581punk 4 месяца назад

Magazines at the time printed the POKE commands needed to bypass the JSW copy protection check. Of course the best copy protection wheel was Dial A Pirate for Monkey Island.

@deanteasdale8261 4 месяца назад

Had that Turtles game! Had Totally forgotten 😄

@MiddleAgedSwedeGoesForAWalk 4 месяца назад

One of my first experiences of copy protection back then was when I bought a collection of games for the c64 (well, I guess it was probably actually my older siblings who bought it, don't really remember that well, but since I would've just been 8-9 years old at the time, I did not have much funds for buying games :) ). One of the games in the collection was Leaderboard Golf which required a dongle to play, there was just one problem, the box the games came in did not include any dongle. With what I know now, I'd probably look a bit closer at the box and the cassettes to see how "legit" it looked, but from my vague memory of it, it really did feel like an official collection, rather than something pirated. Considering how long ago it was, I don't even remember if we ever tried disputing it with where it was bought or not, I do know that in the end we never got it working, but since we had.. other options... for playing that specific game, it never felt like that big of a deal.

@dr.benway1892 4 месяца назад

I had a flashback when I saw that red TNMHT password book. My neighbour owned a legal copy (most of our games were pirates back then) of that game for C64 with the same copy protection.

@gravity9271 4 месяца назад

Just casually has a photocopier lying around for the first copy protection method. Love it 😂

@stoojinator 4 месяца назад

Its a multi function printer. Most people have them if they work from home.

@jfbeam 3 месяца назад

These days, who doesn't? (I've thrown several away!)

@IvanOoze1990 3 месяца назад

@@jfbeam You threw away laser printers?

@danimayb 3 месяца назад

What made you think she wouldn't have an all in one printer?

@chainreaction8977 4 месяца назад

Brilliant topic. I had a block-by-block copier that worked perfectly usually. I once tried to copy Beach Head II for a mate who rarely used his C64 and never tried better, more fun games. I decided to test the copy and was stunned to experience the OG blue-screen-of-death, but instead of being told my C64 was a useless piece of junk that crapped its self, I was politely made aware of the fact that the piece of crap was me all along... Fun times.

@ResoluteGryphon 4 месяца назад

Laura Bow: The Colonel's Bequest had a really neat themed copy protection. When you started the game, you were prompted with a fingerprint from one of the game's suspects.You had to use a red gel filter in the shape of a magnifying glass to find a matching fingerprint on a chart in the manual. 🔎

@tdrewman 3 месяца назад

My friend was a programmer . He would crack C-64 games. There were games that would ask you to look at the book at a certain page and give the answer in order to run the game. It was random of course. He would remove that passkey and the game would run. I loved it when he would put a trainer mode, so you would have unlimited lives..

@Progressive_Canadian 4 месяца назад

David Hasselhoff is peeking at me from behind her monitor. 🤣

@rog2224 4 месяца назад

From the 16 era - early versions of Shadow of the Comet (PC) had a weird loupe thing to identify constellations. On Hound of Shadow (Atari ST, Amiga, PC) , it was a train timetable spread across the manual.

@em00k 4 месяца назад

The key to getting lenslok to work is making sure your have the calibration spot on, a fraction out and the codes will be mangled. I had OCP Art Studio with lenslok and never had an issue, in fact after so many uses you get to recognise the patterns to the point where I could tell what the code was without the lenslok as it was never truly random.

@Davefromcanada411 4 месяца назад

So many memories of trying to create "Backup" copies of my of course legitimately purchased software

@johnm0jfe 4 месяца назад

As a pirate of the school yard JSW and Astronaut we wrote the codes out in abbreviation after all we was used to doing lines for the teacher in detention. The lens lock and book look up ones were way to easy to remove the code from and bypass . Hardest was when the flash or fast borders came out again if you understamd how its ceeated you can break it like sky rider or Eagles nest on the Atari ST . Was not was and pompay pirates had cracking crews all over the country and you sent the stripped compacted game to a PObox in Scotland in our case and then it would be squeesed onto a disk with 2 or 3 other games and circulated .

@HansHackfress 4 месяца назад

I expected there being something about Skool Daze when you wrote about doing lines ;)

@drdyna 4 месяца назад

The faery tale adventure on the Amiga back in the day had a map, and around the edge of the map had various sayings, like, "Hold fast to your creed" "summon the sight" and "Make haste but take heed" and when you started the game each time, it would ask you "Summon the _____" and you would have to supply the last word for whatever quote was randomly selected. There were about a dozen of them, but if you didn't have the map, you were kinda boned. Ah, pre-google copy protection.

@Slaintemaith 4 месяца назад

Microprose’s F-19 Stealth Fighter had you ID various aircraft types, which had a couple of interesting caveats: 1) If you knew what the aircraft was and recognized it, you were in! It also taught you what the various aircraft types looked like. (=

@rawcus918 3 месяца назад

There is an old sierra game called colonels bequest which has this red magnifying glass you have to look through onto red paper to see the copy protection.

@NeoMCHenry 4 месяца назад

Day of the Tentacle had a copy protection system in which you needed to enter the right ratio of oil and vinegar (or somehting like that). I remember getting a copy (non official) with a friend and we spent a while trying to figure that out. We lucked out and were able to play that night. What a fantastic game that is

@Haxmanzz 4 месяца назад

If I recall there were only about 20 different versions of the plan challenge that it could be. As a kid I tried different combinations until I cracked it. Took about 30-40 minutes. They removed this copy protection for the cd version... I guess they don't expect anyone would ever be able to copy a cd or the hard drive space to run it from the hd.

@blueplanet9917 4 месяца назад

Love the video... and the Critters tee!

@martinljones9875 4 месяца назад

When I was a kid, we had a copied version of Jet Set Willy and the colour code sheet had been photocopied. This added an additional element to the game, trying to match the shade of grey to its corresponding colour! Unsurprisingly, it was hit and miss as to whether we actually got the game loaded.

@rockosgaminglogic 4 месяца назад

TSR Gold Box D&D... Pirates! ... Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders... lots of games used the manual or codewheels or colour-blindness type protections. You could scan that red code sheet in colour, then map image to binary greyscale and finally negative if necessary. Region chips were also a copy protection, like Nintendo used, since you could copy the data chip but the system would need its region chip disabled. There is a way around everything. Ultimately you crack the game so you can put any code in to unlock it. 💋

@MuhChicken 3 месяца назад

I had Lexi-Cross for IBM PC. If I recall it had an instruction book and you had to look for a certain word on a certain page just to play the game. That got old really quickly, so I didn't play very often. Otherwise it was a very fun game!

@amigang 4 месяца назад

Robocop 3 on the Amiga has to be up there for effort. It had a joystick dongle that would have to be plugged in to get the game to work. Ocean claimed it would take years to crack. As it was a cracking group broke it in a day.

@andreaskrallis9140 4 месяца назад

you did another great vid , defintly love you.

@MrBlitzNZ 4 месяца назад

A great video , very informative and entertaining! 👍

@stuartluscombe 4 месяца назад

I had the Turtles game on my Amiga 500 and to this day I still remember that entering 2 codes (something like 3859, 1506) made you invulnerable. It's the only way my 8yr old self was able to beat the game!

@Sr.DudeGuy 4 месяца назад

Love the shirt!

@ernieb3949 3 месяца назад

All you would have needed to defeat the first copy protection was a pencil, some paper, and a lot of patience.

@samcadwallader2899 4 месяца назад

Imagine having a 5" monochrome TV Radio you used as the only display for your 48K Spectrum (rubber key of course).You then go and spend nearly a tenner on Elite to find you can't use the Lenslok as whatever you do it won't work. Cue a lifetime of software piracy when you realised a cracked copy allowed you to play it every time without fail..

@MrYossarianuk 4 месяца назад

Check out the 'Secret Decoder Wheel' for Rocket Ranger on the Amiga - the most innovative copy protection system I remember (also check the intro of the Amiga version of the game - its still amazing)

@kiddcapri1711 4 месяца назад

I can't believe I forgot all about lens lock. It was another frustration after having to load tye game 3-7 time's.

@7Utopia7 4 месяца назад

Robocop 3 on the Amiga came with a security dongle.

@tsangarisjohn 4 месяца назад

My brother and I would buy, then copy both DOS and Atari ST games, sell them to friends and other kids at school. We found a place that would sell us pirated games straight from Amsterdam. The good ol days.. 😂

@CobraFat2000 4 месяца назад

And there I thought some weird questions about the speeds of some threaded vehicles from Dune 2 manual I had to go and retrieve from the shelf were a hassle.

@PaulReed 3 месяца назад

I remember the TMHT manual. I had a Spectrum and remember trying to read the codes when my eyes were a lot better than they are now. Game companies in the past and still now with anti-piracy measures that make it a more miserable experience for people that buy their games.

@keithjackson1180 4 месяца назад

The late 80s and early 90s brought the code wheels as well as looking up the name of some image on a page in the manual. At least some games tried to get creative with it. With one game where you had to perform surgery, you would get a message to call a particular doctor in a particular are and you would use the code wheel to figure out what extension to call. I also remember attempts at cracking some of them. Not so that I could copy them, but so that I wouldn't have to go dig out my manual whenever I wanted to play it. I think that the only game I was successful on was X-Wing by Lucas Arts.

@kev1n726 4 месяца назад

A school friend gave me a copy of Jet Set Willy for the ZX. Along with it someone had written out the colours as numbers 1-4 on a small piece of paper. Oddly he didn't want the game back so I had this and the codes too. Another time I was given Elite to try. I couldn't understand what to do with the Lenslok so I never managed to start or play it.

@viperdemonz-jenkins 4 месяца назад

look at all those fond memories in that room.

@rustybroomhandle 4 месяца назад

Yay, Lenslok (throws stuff at screen)

@misterprecocious2491 4 месяца назад

Good job it was a glass CRT screen because throwing something at a modern screen would ruin it.

@dwp6x9e42 4 месяца назад

The good old days of using Disk Doctor 64 to fix broken software that had a missing instruction book or code wheel. Usually you would just need to find the if than else implemented as goto or jump statements and replace the address of the fail jump with the pass jump address. The cost of one video game $20, teaching yourself assembly at the age of 15 priceless.

@k001daddy 4 месяца назад

I would love to see a video on disk based copy protection.

@snackplaylove 4 месяца назад

I have the Turtles on CPC, and a lot of F’n LensLok adventure games which were harder than the LensLok itself!

@AG-cg7lk 4 месяца назад

My first computer was a Commodore 64. I had a freeze frame cartridge, to make, ahem, personal backups and save games.

@Hanseshadow 3 месяца назад

I could hex edit and take out passwords without a problem in the 80's. I'd just replace all the passwords with 00 (8 bit). So, all the passwords are erased and then I could copy everything for all my friends. Actually, I had some copies come back to me from other cities. :)

@racrickey 3 месяца назад

You have the best shirt I have seen in long time!

@firlefonzflow 3 месяца назад

Reminds me to the Leisure Suit Larry 1 Age Questions ""Tiptoe Through the Tulips" was recorded by?" "Calvin Klein is?" "Does a pair of queens beat 3 deuces?" ...

@smithy8046 4 месяца назад

Ahh I remember Jet Set Willy! one of my 1st games, There was another game called Skool Daze, which had copy protection on the tape.. I tried many times to copy it lol

@jsnsk101 4 месяца назад

lenslok took about 3 seconds to use back in the day. it was easier if you didnt make the calibration screen fit the lens if i remember correctly, but i had a 12 inch tv

@yisus8120 4 месяца назад

00:01 Exploring 80s Anti-Piracy Copy Protection Methods 01:05 Copying protection worked in 80s games 02:12 Introduction to another type of copy protection 03:16 Anti-Piracy DRM using color code lookup chart 04:27 Copying 80s copy protection required creativity 05:34 Calibrating Lenslok for CRT TV 06:43 Entering the code for Lenslok DRM 08:09 Lenslok copy protection had usability issues

@SmegHain 4 месяца назад

These copy protections were easily defeated by copy carts such as Action replay (Pre cracking scene stuff)

@jeff845 4 месяца назад

Cool video! Critters rocks! 🤘

@ygstuff4898 4 месяца назад

On my Coco2, one of the copy-protection schemes was a -corrupted sector- on the original diskette. If the diskette was copied, or just the file was copied to another diskette, the game would not find the corrupted sector. A devious scheme.

@paulwilson1555 4 месяца назад

The Jet set willy code sheet, was very easy to copy, piece of paper and just use a number code instead, as each colour is either number 1, 2, 3 or 4..... No coloured pens required

@DigitalDiabloUK 4 месяца назад

Kari: "I 3d printed my own jet set willy " People not aware of 80s game history: 😮😮😮 😂😂 Very interesting update. Hopefully another video will explore defeating copy protection. It was the NES CIC chip which I fell foul of.

@Dok-Ivano 19 дней назад

😍CRITTERS❣... I never imagined finding a girl with whom I could talk about everything and who would understand me... I was Born in 80´s and I have a double degree in electronics and computer science... From Spain greetings.