"Market" for old macs?

Chuck Guzis wrote: Replace "many" with "some" and I'd agree. There were some schemes that were simply evil in their cleverness and ingenuity. King's Quest 2 encrypted the main code with a cypher kept somewhere abnormal (like a 10th sector or 41st track, can't remember the exact one) that was transparently missed by DISKCOPY: you could make a copy without errors, but it wouldn't work... and the decryption routine was itself obfuscated with some clever self-modifying code, so you couldn't just dump the raw code and (U)nassemble it -- in fact, you couldn't do THAT EITHER because the game was a bootable program with it's own disk routines. Took three weeks to unravel that monster, starting with the only code you *could* look at: the 512-byte boot sector. By far the worst was another bootable game (Dunzhin: Warriors of Ras) that didn't use INT 13h BIOS services to read diskette sectors, but rather raw NEC FDC commands. Int 13h is easy to work with; raw NEC commands are not, and I'm no Guzis or Dunfield :-) But I agree with you that some DOS-based games were so trivial that they could be cracked with a hex editor and not a debugger. For example, replace INT 13h disk call opcodes (CD13) with NOP opcodes (9090) and the program would just "fall through" the protection routine... or finding a list of null-terminated manual code words and changing them to ALL nuls and then you could merely hit Enter at the password request. I'm giving away too much information about myself, aren't I? :-) The future of software protection is coming, and it's not pretty. Public-key assymetric encryption schemes are already in use; your software phones the mothership to authenticate. Joy. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/