Re: Single-load games - cracking for fun?

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

On Dec 23, 10:08 am, lyricalnanoha
<lyricalnan...@usotsuki.hoshinet.org> wrote:
> I'm wondering if anyone's ever imaged any single-load games in their
> original format.  I'd like to try to crack them myself for practice.
>
> (Also, wondering about whether it might be trivial to dike the disk
> accesses out of Moon Patrol?  I found a .nib of that on Asimov and there
> was a note saying it occasionally did protection checks by scanning two
> tracks, but that it didn't actually use the data except for refreshing the
> display.  I suppose that could be hacked around fairly easily if so?)
>
> -uso.

I did a quick hack of a single load game years ago with a wildcard --
but I recently sold the card on eBay a few months back. That was
supposedly the best way to break a single-load game back in the day.

If you can break to the monitor with either a reset or interrupt hook,
then you can dump out the contents of ram to a tape for later
investigation.  Even better if you can dump out the register
contents!  Alternatively you may be able to spit the ram contents over
to a PC via the serial port by pressing "2 ctrl-P return" and then
have the monitor list memory contents from a starting address.  Should
be trivial to rebuild the monitor dump into a binary file on a pc.