Re: Cracked Software

[!smentzer@ecom.net (Steve Mentzer)]

>
>     Anyhow.....One type of protection that always intrigued me was the
>EA protection........ya know the clickity clickity click sound that
>popped up every so often. Anyone know how they did that?  I'd love it
>when that happened...I'd buy up any EA game I could just to hear the
>different combinations of clicks they put in there.  There were also
>different type of clicks too....and if you were quick, you could swap
>disks quickly with another EA original disk with the same click and it
>would work.  Am I making sense??
>


I think I remember that form of protection. I believe it was called "nibble 
counting". It basically moved the heads back and forth real fast, performing an 
intermittent read. If the number of nibbles (everything on the DiskII was 
arranged as nibbles, 4 bytes), was vastly different than the ones coded into 
the program, the system would fail. In essence, they would perform a read 
immediately following the track change, and count the number of nibbles prior 
to the track start header ($D5 $AA $96 if I remember correctly).

Their rationale was that the disk copy wouldn't always synchronize the exact 
starting locations for each track on the disk. Therefore, the number of nibbles 
before the track start would be some funky number.

A side effect to all of this was that if your DiskII was not speed-aligned, 
sometimes the original disks would detect a false copy!

Later on, some programmers figured out how to synchronize tracks, and placed 
the logic in software like LockSmith and CopyIIPlus.

I was always able to copy most EA software with DiskMuncher 1.0. It seemed to 
work great! And it was FAST.

smentzer@ecom.net