LensLok - Early 80's Anti-Piracy that frustrated | MVG 

It's great to be back. Have an awesome 2021 ❤️

First 2 looked like "5o", and "76" pretty clearly to me. That said resetting the system after 3 tries is crazy.

"it's one of the most frustrating and just annoying versions of copy protection that ever graced video games" at least it doesn't install any rootkits

If they integrated it into a game, like a "secret message decipher" or "alien language translation device" instead of at the beginning, only for certain tasks, it might have been novel and engaging instead of frustrtating.

Had no idea this was a thing. So interesting.

I remember Jet Set Willy's colour code. Colours could easily be swapped for their word equivalent, and I copied the whole chart Red = R, etc. It wasn't rocket science, just tedious, and briefly made me king of the nerds.

lenslock: Remarkably clearly "76" mvg: "That looks like a T.G. Nope, not that one either!"

Oh my god that "Your Computer" magazine cover which says "ARE YOU GUILTY OF STEALING £100,000,000?" with a picture of a little kid in jail is priceless

i loved that dive into the debugger

A DRM scheme that made the game unplayable for a lot of paying customers, while pirates made off with the superior version. Glad to see that some things never change.

The code says: You won't be playing Elite today.

I wonder if MVG has ever gone to a cookout, someone asked him what went on, and he answered "Steaks were made."

50, 76, rd. Though it was made harder with your hand moving so much. Edit 5o, not 50. I saw the smaller 'o' but was thinking numbers. :)

I remember when the companies started including brown-on-slightly-lighter-brown docs in the games to try to defeat photocopying. Unfortunately, it also defeated my eyeballs, which meant I had to go and download the cracked versions off the local BBSes anyway even when I'd bought the game.

To Quote Clint From LGR: " Also each game title came with a diffrent set of prisms and sometimes the wrong LensLok is shipped with the wrong game."

Imagine trying to use that with a 10-15 year- old crt, with all sorts of chromatic and aspect aberrations, because that's what many people were using at the time.

The world's first CAPTCHA. It's JUST as horrible as you'd think. ;) I'm pretty certain you could create a decoding stencil for the lens lock. Once you know what the letters are, it's pretty easy to read it. I'm sure you could train yourself to read the code with a friend's lens lock, and then go home and play the pirated version without too much difficulty.

RU-vid autoplay is doing a good job, I left the room to feed my cat & came back to this beauty.

DRM: more harmful to the end user than pirates

"Now kids, I'm gonna teach you how to bypass copy protection. Next up, trainers and cracktros. Also, no way I know Z80, do like everyone else and read the f--- manual." And that is the kind of credibility that ensures this channel is always filled with awesome content.

"I know enough to be dangerous" -Modern Vintage Gamer 2021

I can remember this on the Spectrum, Harrier Jump Jet. My friends dad created LensLok and showed me and my friend the early versions. And yes, it was as painful as this shows back then.

9:56 "I know Z80 assembly language and I know enough to be dangerous." Dangerous... Elite Dangerous 8-)

One of my favorite games was Tomahawk on the CPC 464; a cassette based system. At the time I had no idea software piracy was a thing but in looking for a solution to the annoyance of LensLok I soon discovered it! Funny how 'anti-piracy' measures invariably become self defeating; I went from someone who didn't know it existed and was happy to buy my games to someone who so resented being messed about I'd go out of my way to find cracked copies of games.

One of the hobbies I've gotten back into recently is reverse engineering old Spectrum games. Lenslok in particular... I even had the disassembly open when I spotted this video. If you're using an emulator, memory address 0xC799 holds the code in ASCII and it's therefore trivial to get it right every time.

This brings back so many painful memories! I remember showing my friend Elite at his place. They had a huge old TV that was so big you couldn't get the calibration lines close enough for the LENSLOK to work. I used to leave my speccy running for days with Elite loaded so I didn't have to go through that hell again.

For a second I thought it said the early 80s anti piracy that frustrated MVG.

Your „TG“ looked as a „76“ to me. 🤣

Denuvo 2022 drm: please insert your first-born into slot

Had the LensLok version of Elite on the Spectrum, it seemed to work better on the 14” type colour portable CRT tellies than the larger family TVs. It *was* frustrating, but to be fair it was a rare occurrence to fail all 3 goes and have to reload. Happy New Year MVG, great to see you back.

At the Dunovo HQ: O M G this lenslock thing is amazing we must implement it immediately.

When anti-piracy is more frustrating to legitimate customers than it is to actual software pirates. . . . . . . Oh wait, that's pretty much every anti-piracy ever created.

I would have pirated the game EVEN if I owned the original, just to avoid this awfulness.

I used it so many times loading Elite on my Spectrum in '85 that it really wasn't a chore. You very quickly realised hold it still and aligned on the screen, and if you could read OK then the code was easy to read too. The key was just holding it still and aligned. Might dig it out again for old times sake later.

Not a minute ago I was thinking about when you were gonna upload your 4th jan video, nice timing and awesome video as usual :)

In my opinion the color check still is the best copy protection, especially if it's part of the game. I remember Gobliins 2 for example, you had to mix color based magic potions to obtain the correct result, and it used a paper color wheel included in the box to do so. It was made fun instead of annoying, and as a kid I liked it.

7:38 That's *obviously* "76". You're supposed to close one eye, you know. Also, first one was "5o".

I had no idea that this was even a thing. I love learning about stuff like this. What a great video to start off 2021.

That was really interesting, anti-piracy methods from the 80s always fascinate me...

This stuff is insanely interesting, I always get super excited when I see your videos pop up in my recommended section!

Wasn't expecting this :) not so much "mistakes were made" as "assumptions were made", ie. that everyone used a 14" curved CRT.

Dimitris, happy new year! In the mid 80's and early 90's I got really good at removing copy protection on the BBC Micro and the Acorn Archimedes. There were some evil things people did to floppy disks but the BBC Micro version of Elite was one of the hardest to copy/crack. Usually we would hack the checks out of the game, and be done with it, and then not even care about what they had done to the physical disk. For Elite it was not only really hard to copy the disk but it was equally hard to crack the assembly code to remove the protection checks. It wasn't really encrypted, in the modern sense, but it was very well obfuscated, it was multilevel and very clever in how it worked, it was ultimately a variant of XOR obfuscation but the key was dynamic and generated in a way that was hard to follow - all this takes is time and tools. Elite was one of the first games that would play if it knew it was cracked but it wouldn't play properly and you would never know because the game was so big, the player would already have put hours and hours in before they realized they weren't getting anywhere. There were a lot of cracked versions that didn't actually work and to this day I'm not sure I ever fully cracked it, it didn't matter because I did ultimately copy the disk. Why was it so hard to copy? In addition to a few other more typical disk protection tricks, the Elite disk simply had an unformatted track, literally unformatted, nothing at all on it. The code would do all sorts of hardware track and sector reads on the track it expected was unformatted, it had specific code for Intel 8271 and WD1770/1772 which were the two disk controllers available for the BBC. If it detected anything that looked like a track or sector it would trigger the protection. The protection was effective because you can't unformat a track, even back then 5 1/4 floppies would come pre-formatted for PCs, sure the BBC wouldn't use them them because it was the wrong files sytem, you would have reformat in DFS format, bit the physical disk was still formatted - the sector/track read code would detect something where there wasn't supposed to be anything at all. Once this became known it became a little easier to write code that would copy the original assuming you had access to an unformatted disk, to do this you had to deal with all the other more typical disk protections, but you had to start with a truly unformatted, never used, disk. The reason it works is the disk controllers can't unformat a track and they can only write legal tracks with legal sectors - there were some tricks you could do to change this by clever timing and writing to shadow registers, especially on the 8271, even so the end result was still a fairly legal looking track. The way we figured out how to copy it was to write a track with a single sector that was 4K long which is the longest sector an 8271 disk controller can write. Why did this work when you just wrote a legal track? It works because the physical track on the disk was only 3500 bytes long. Therefore it would start by writing a legal track header, and a legal sector header, it would also have legal gaps and therefore it would initially look like a legal, but weird, track. Because it's writing a 4K sector on a physical track that can only hold 3500 bytes, the physical disk would do a whole rotation and write over the sector and track header that it just laid down. BOOM, an unformatted track!!!! At least unformatted enough, the MFM flux encoding on the disk was legal but there was no sector or track headers and the disk controllers couldn't find anything-it worked flawlessly. BBC floppy disks are constant angular velocity, so even if they put the protection track on an outer track, it wouldn't have made any difference. A few years later, it all became moot, because of the Amiga. It didn't have a disk controller, it was all done in software, it could read and write raw bit patterns to the disk, no care in the world if it was legal or not, therefore could quite easily unformat the track. The Amiga became a key tool in copying Archimedes disks. EDIT: I guess it was FM aka single density modulation on a BBC Micro disk, not MFM - my memory is fuzzy trying to go back 35 years.

Man that gives me a nostalgic shudder. I had Tommahawk by Digital Integration on the Spectrum with Lenslok. It was... annoying. I still remember getting a Multiface One and using it to make a save of the game after the protection had been passed. I ended up doing that with all my protected games because the anti-piracy measures at the time were an utter pain in the arse. EDIT: watching the video now, yep, had Elite too on the Spectrum... I really hated Lenslok.

So the captcha was basically invented way back in the 80s :)

5:00 "go ask your mother" on the shelf don't tell me you didnt frame the video like that on purpose to give us this message 😎

Oh I remember copying the Jet Set Willy chart and painstakingly colouring it in by hand with felt tip pens! We didn't have scanners and coloured home printers back then it wasnt as easy to copy as you would think! ;D

MVG makes Monday morning something to look forward too! @MVG

Just thinking about all the frustrated parents back in the 1980s trying to get the LensLok to work for their kids.

9:58 You mean, you know enough to be Elite: Dangerous?

I never had an issue with the lens lock , I held it still!! It was almost impossible for the avergae 13 yr old to get cracked games in 1985, and back then waiting 10 mins for a game to load was no big deal. You have some funny ideas about what the home comp scene was like in the UK in the 80's.

Back when I was a kid, the "whats the first word on page 3 second paragraph" copyprotection was popular. I managed to figure out that the game I loved stored that word at a particular memory address. So after getting the question, immediately get it wrong, load up a memory viewer, and navigate to that address. Boom. Theres the answer. After about 5 minutes of the game plucking through its list of "random" questions, you can have a healthy list of "P1, para2 = the" answers. Game manual be damned. Just wish I could remember what game it was.

Loving the direction the channel is going

"enough to be dangerous" Yeah, i got that impression a long time ago.

7:38 I read the numbers '7' and '6' there. I remember this thing. I knew someone whose vision was not that great and thus using this was nigh impossible; in their frustration it got snapped in half. I do not blame them at all. In fact, I hope they got a refund.

Watching those lenslok attempts were painful.

So great to get an insight into the beginning of piracy and copy protection

11:45 C is the carry flag, not the “condition” flag...

Your videos are always so well put together and informative! Thanks for everything

Plot twist: Trying to read the letters was the actual game

Makes me shiver to remember the arsing about you had to do with that thing. Brrrr!

I had a Sinclair Spectrum ZX. But I'm not sure I'd call computers of that era 'cheap'...

The first lenslok I ever encountered was with The OCP Art Studio by Silverbird software, which was connected to Firebire but these were more of a premium brand. I found it impossible to use the lenslok, luckily I had a friend who had a freeze cartridge who took a snapshot of the program once we got passed it. I also remember the Jetset Willy and Manic Miner protection. Thanks for taking a look at these forms of protection, there were other forms that you are probably aware of, such as the manual check, page number paragraph word. Happy New Year and it's great to see you back.

happy new year MVG, here's hoping it'll be better than 2020 ! I remember this lenslok stuff that was sooooooo annoying you always had to have the right light, the right angle, the right screen... still the most annoying for me was those red codes sheet with black writing to avoid being copied because as a colorblind it was a pain to be able to decipher them ! That said LensLok was still a brilliant idea for protection/cost efficiency, was just a pain to use for the end-user and in the end very easy to crack (i usually would use cracked game of a legal copy game i had purchased to remove the pain as soon as the crack was available)

Missed your videos every monday, glad to see you back man

I thought that when you were using the debugger, you were going to look for the String LensLok was comparing the user input to. Nope. :D

I know why that time limit was in place. 30 seconds might sound stupid, but a pirate could simply decode all 62 characters (10 numbers, 26 letters and 26 capital letters) and include a decoding table with all copies. The thinking was, withth unlimited time, you would be able to just look the scrambled character up in that table, and input the correct answer without a lens. 30 second rule made that much more difficult, since it only gave you 15 seconds per character to find that particular blob of pixels in the table.

So this is the precursor to captchas / TOPT

The way you used that lenslock was like how people in infomercials use the old products before the brand new product is revealed

This would have frustrated the hell out of me if I'd have been around in 1985! Great vid and welcome back MVG

I had to use this when launching Graphical Adventure Creator on the Amstrad CPC464. It’s really interesting to watch the demonstration of you using the lens because when I had to use this on the Amstrrad, this clearly had a physical monitor size which was the same for all CPCs. I never had to calibrate the lens size on the Amstrad and therefore never suffered the problems that other systems had if they were connected to a television. It’s very interesting to see the problems that other people had reported using the LensLok system, i.e. Having the wrong lens for the respective software. Funny looking back on it now, but I can understand the frustration that people had suffered with this copy protection.

"I know enough to be dangerous" sounds like something you would tell your older sibling :D

I love these older bits of history so much! Thank you MVG !!

You should do a new series of copy protections and how they were bypass. (Systems don't count and not mistakes were made, only and any software)

Always love your stuff! All the best for 2021

can't be the only one mildly disappointed that you didn't show how someone from the 80s would have bipassed the security.

The intro music is halfway between The Exorcist and Kikstart II. I love it.

It's nice to have a new video that involves DRM's!

Infocom had the brilliant idea to include premiums, aka physical props, in their games; like a newspaper with one of the Zork games that was supposedly printed from the fictitious Great Underground Empire with clues and codes to let you run the game. The best, utterly best, was Atari's Alternate Reality where if it was a pirated game, it would introduce "Agents" in the game, indestructible enemies that would track you down and destroy you

I can only imagine that the protection would be more difficult to bypass in the ‘80s, without the benefit of modern emulators and debuggers.. not impossible, but certainly not as easy..

this is so cool to know as a person whos first console was ps1 I would like to see more videos about even older consoles i never had

I just hand drew and coloured my version of the Jet Set Willy code card back in the day :) Took ages

always awesome to see some of your content.. i'm 34 and i'm am at AWE that how gaming and digital history that we have ... welcome to 2021 and lets keep gaming for safety and fun

Wow, I got my first computer during the second half of the 80's, and I thought I had seen pretty much all kinds of copy protections (hardware dongles, words from the manual, weird "wheels", unconventional disk formats or intentional bad sectors, then later Safedisc and Securom, ...), but I had never seen this one. Seems as annoying as some of its successors :-)

When you hold it up to see the "OK" you need to make sure you're not moving it after that, you keep pulling it away from the monitor and just guessing/hovering it back in the general area, but if you just firmly hold it in place from the OK step onwards then it will always be lined up and the subsequent letters will be easier to see.

it realy does seem like copy protection thats a) not intrusive to the expierence either due to performance or technical issues or just a massive pain or impossible for poeple to actually use and B) actually effective to where its not trivial to get crack it is basicly non existant.

I had this with OCP Art Studio on the Spectrum, and never really had a problem with it. Once you get the OK message, don't take the lens off the sceen, just keep it in exactly the same place, and don't move your line of sight from the position where the OK was most legible - this will make it a lot easier to see the required code.

It's really good to know that game publishers decided *never again* to implement crappy copy protection that does little to nothing to stop pirates and only serves to punish consumers for doing the right thing and purchasing the game... LOL

Happy new year MVG! Thanks for the fun retro lookback.

i see "76" mvg: "TG"

I Still have that copy of Jet Set Willy 2. I remember my friend copying the colour chart in a couple of lessons Maths and technology when we were at school in the late 80's. He did the squares all the colours the whole thing. Took him several hours. Then it rained on the way home and when he pulled it out of his bag it was ruined!

me: 76 76 76 Him: T and E? me: ahhhhhhhhhh

I still have my lenslok and the box of ZX Spectrum Elite. I met the designer of the lenslok - he gave us all his unconditional apology! :)

5o, 76, rd. It's not THAT hard to read at all.

I don't recall what the system was called, but a floppy-disk protection scheme in the 1980's-1990's was kind of fun. It required the use of a 'fractional' floppy drive to write special tracks using values that were less than 'one' but more than 'zero'. Reading the same tracks many times would give different results, owing to the intermediate values on the disk. If the software read the tracks and always got the same data, it was a copy. Worn disks would be falsely rejected as a copy, so the tech vanished.

The code said "Drink more ovaltine"

I once cracked a bit of Java software written by my programming tutor at the time. I was amazed how easy it was; in that case none of the method names etc were obfuscated. It had a dialog that prompted user for a serial number or whatever. Running the code through JAD Java Decompiler and pausing while it waited for the answer I could clearly see there was a method called “bool isValidUser()” or whatever, so changed that to return true, et voila. I then shrunk the code so that it would be marginally harder to crack and took up a fraction of the space. All in, went from never having contemplated cracking anything to researching the tools & successful execution in the space of a few minutes. All good fun.

You’re making it out to be harder than it is, you need to align the center line with the center line, and not wobble your hand around like me before my first coffee. The characters actually read just fine when you do that, and can be clearly visible in your vid too for the brief moment when you happen to align the center lines correctly.

I remember back in the day my dad purchased The Art Studio for a C64 on tape. This program also had lenslok protection, but for some reason the dealer didn't supply the plastic lens. Not knowing any better, we always guess our way through. Somehow we managed to get into the program after the thirs or fourth loading attempt.

Lovely to hear you talking about the Spectrum MVG... I'm a bit of a fan.

Wow I have never hear about this type of copy protection. Amazing video.