| Introduction | Tools | Techs | Links | Open-Media | Minions |
| General | Audio-CD | Analog | Consoles | Storage | Obsolete |
| Ebook | Concepts | Software | Transmission |
| Safedisc | Safedisc is one of the many protection systems devloped by Macrovision Corporation, infamous for their video protection. Safedisc is one of the leading software protection systems, and is espicially popular on games. I have three important pieces of information on this. A document of semi-technical specs from Macrovisions website, a set of more technical specs thanks to a hackers study, a tutorial full of really technical information and my own safedisc copying kit, with the various utilities and instructions needed to copy the games, as well as improve their performance while doing do. Its surprisingly popular for such an easily breakable system, perhaps because most other CD protections are even easier to break :-). A CD protected with SafeDisk will have the following files in the CD root directory:00000001.TMP CLCD16.DLL CLCD32.DLL CLOKSPL.EXE. GAME.EXE (replace game with the game title) GAME.ICD (replace game with the game title) Safedisc protected CDs can be defeated with Daemon tools (inc emulate), Gamejack, alcohol 120% and CloneCD. Results may depend on your hardware. If copying fails try emulateing and vice versa. |
| Starforce | A popular game protection system, and rapidly overtaking the well established safedisc as the leading game CD protetion. Ive never encountered it myself, but from what ive heard its quite nasty. Debugger-detection, heavy encryption, its paranoid. Even has a routine which checks for any suspicious loaded CD drivers thet may be an emulated CD drive. The system is intresting through. No ammount of raw copying work will copy a Starforce 3.x game. It actually requires messing with the disc during mastering, altering it in ways no CD writer can write. The only way to copy one of these is a game-specific cd-copy crack. Making one of those is complicated because of the many anti-debugger techniques and encryption, but it can be done and so the cracks can be found on the net. Also, some CD drive emulator programers are even now working on harder to detect drives, which will hopefully do it. Starforce 1 and 2 are a bit weaker, and can be copied (with a suitable drive) by Gamejack (3.01), cloneCD and Alcohol 120% (some by copying, some by emulateing, some by both, I have no more specific information). Starforce 1+2 cannot be defeated using CDR-win, Nero or blindwrite. Starforce 3 cannot be defeated by any copier. All can be defeated using a game specific crack. |
| Fade | A game protection sytem by Macrovision. Currently the only technical information available is vague from New Scientist, which reports it uses some kind of false errors. When the disc is copied, the errors are automaticially corrected by the writer. I dont know if a raw copy would defeat that, and if it doesn't a virtual drive would probably do it. Fade is best known however for what happens when a game is copied. In a normal protection system, the user simpley gets a "please insert game CD" message. Fade is more creative. The game slowly degenerates. The controls respond poorly, the physics slowly falls apart. Perhaps the bad guys get steadily tougher, or your ammo starts to vanish. This allows the pirated copies to act as advertisments. By the time the damage is apparent, the user is already enjoying the game. There have been a few one-off protections using princibles like that (Dune 2000 copies wont get past the first level). This is the first protection system designed to make unstable games though. Macrovision also produces the more established Safedisc system, so I expect the protection side is actually safedisc-based. The only game currently using fade is "operation flashpoint", through Codemasters is also planing on using it in a new snooker game. After a set number of shots, the gravity will be slowly lowered until the balls float off the table. |
| Computer games/PC software | Protected with any one of hundreds of competing protection schemes. Only the toughest havn't been easily broken, and those are so strong they have hardware compatability problems, such as some protected games locking up my CD-RW drive when I try to play them :-(.
Too many to describe them all now, will do them some other time, but you should find a raw copyier defeats nearly all of them. CloneCD is the most popular. Its shareware/cripleware. Illegal under the DMCA, but made by a german company. Serials can be found online, but there are usually version problems with serials so its often easier to use the shareware version. The only limit is a 2x maximum write. Linux also has its own raw copier, "cp /dev/cdrom /home/youruser/game.raw", through I havn't tested it with anything protected. You can mount the images easily as loopback filesystems. Here is a list of game protection technologys. Some games have been using very intresting responses to a copied dics. Raw copiers can defeat almost all forms of software protection, but they arn't much good if the player doesn't realise the game is protected until they have returned their borrowed CD. For example, Dune 2000 will play perfectly from a copied disc, until the end of level one. Then it returns to the start of level one, and will continue to do so until it gets the original disc back. It worked well. It caught me! Fortunatly for me dune 2000 only checks at the end of the first level, so I only had to reborrow the disc, complete level one, and save. Then continue using my copy. I also found this intresting fact while researching something completly non-related:
Codemasters' LMA Manager 2001 (PlayStation) - If the game detects that it isn't an original copy of itself, it won't just crash or lock up like most dodgy PS software. It'll let you play the game as normal for a few hours, and gradually your chosen team will get worse and worse, until you find your beloved Man Utd getting hammered by the likes of Chester City. Every week. This is very clever, and above all, thunderingly entertaining. Well done, Codemasters.http://www.gamebroth.co.uk/gth/atoc.htm
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| Battle.net eg. starcraft |
This game gets its own short entry because its the only system I haven't been able to break that isn't a serious inconvienience to users! Congratulations blizzard and battle.net... Unfortunatly your success in making an effective AND convienient key checker system is more than cancled by your response to the bnet project, who attempted to write their own servers using the battle.net protocol for users who were not satisfied with your own rather unreilable and laggy service. Yes, blizzard accused them of violateing the DMCA because they didn't impliment that key checker system. Even when bnet offered to impliment it blizzard refused to hand over the key checker tables needed. So bnet has been shut down. Proof that technical means alone are not enough to make a working DRM system, and that legal action is always bad publicity. For the technical side, this keychecker is surprisingly well done. Each copy sold includes a unique key as usual. The keycheck routine on the installer doesn't check very hard. If you keep entering random numbers it will work after a few minutes, or you can just fill the key dialog with threes for starcraft. The intresting bit starts when you try to play online. The real key checker is running at the battle.net servers, safe from hackers with debuggers. And this isn't the type of thing a keygen will defeat. There are two lists on the server: A whitelist contains a list of every key thats been issued. A blacklist contains keys which have been found on warez sites. It works quite well. Completly usless for single player pirates through. Intrestingly, the CD key is not used only for anti-piracy. It is also used as a unique identifier when banning cheaters from the battle.net service. Blizzard also set their lawyers on the game FreeCraft, claiming that because Blizzard had made "warcraft" and "starcraft" it has exclusive right to make games ending in craft. They won. Not the only case like that. The Easy group, running Easyjet and many other companies starting with Easy, are particually infamous for it, espicially when they went after a website titled "easypeazy". |
| Pontifex II | One of the few games which is intresting enough to get its own entry. Pontifex II is an excellent game which is of course available on p2p. However, the patch contains a list of warez keys, so it you try to patch a pirate download the game is disabled. Excellect work chronic, this is again one of the very few anti-piracy systems ive seen which doesn't inconvenience legitimate users. The objective of the game is to build a bridge. Each level gives you a new scenario. Different land, different materials, different vechicles. Using only the available materials and budget you must build a bridge which can transport the vechicles across the river. The bridge will then be tested using the games sophisticated physics engine as trains, cars and trucks travel across it. Its harder than it looks, on the larger levels just making a bridge capable of supporting its own weight is near imposible. Now ive explained it, time to promote it. I myself use pirate versions of both pontifex and pontifex II because I dont have the credit card nessicary to order it, and if I did I dont have the right currency. The least I can do for such as good game is give them some free promotion. Buy this game. Its certinly worth it. It took me nearly a week to complete the supplied levels on PF1, and I still cant complete PF2, but the free map extensions make it last far longer. There is a community of pontifex players who design more and more elaberate bridges. People even hold bridge design contests. Chronic Logic website. |
| Realarcade | Ive never used it, its some kind of classic game program. Ive been told the time limit on demos can be removed with a program called Real Arcade Alternative (Which I have.), and that this program can also run realarcade programs without the realarcade software installed. I dont know how, but this program should work. |
| Software DNA | Moved. |
| Windows XP and WPA | One of windows XPs less popular features is Windows Product Activation, a protection system microsoft designed to stop people copying windows cd, borrowing cds from work or reuseing their OEM editions on a new PC. As soon as it was announced predictions were made that it would be an awful inconvienience for real users but wouldn't even slow pirates down. The predictions are correct. The theory is simple enough. After instalation windows will work for 30 days. To remove the limit it must be "activated". Windows will generate a hardware key based on a number of system specs. The user contacts MS through phone or their website and gives them the hardware key and windows serial. They use them to produce an activation key. The user enters the activation key, and windows works. A sudden change in the hardware key, such as that caused when a hard drive is copied to another system, deactivates windows and the whole thing must be done again. Althrough this is annoying for legal users, pirates have devised several ways to avoid this mess. The simplist is to use windows XP corporate edition, which is exactly the same as XP pro but does not use product activation. WPA would get in the way of the mass-deployment and hard drive copying needed to get XP onto hundreds of workstations easily. As well as that two WPA cracks are circulateing the internet. One simply resets the 30 day limit ever time the system is booted (messy but effective). The other actually activates windows. I have used the second to use windows XP pro without problems for several months, through a friend has been unable to get it working for his XP home. Another popular technique was to copy some XP corporate files onto the install CD for another windows edition, which disabled WPA. |
| Microsoft Encarta | Microsofts world-famous encyclopedia, and perhaps the only decent piece of software they produce. Althrough the program itsself it not protected the images in it are. They display perfectly in the program, but if you attempt to print them or copy-paste them into another program a "copyright microsoft corp 19xx" notice is overlayed. Annoying. The notice appears on all encarta images, includeing long-past-copyright art and national flags. Since Encarta is used extensively by schools, this is rather annoying. The protection is trivial to bypass. Just run any screenshot program, or even just press the printscreen key, and use a normal image editing program to get the image. I use paint shop pro for both capture and editing, but any other good image editor should do it. Microsoft doesn't seem to have noticed its stolen our flag. I wonder if they know the US national anthem is actually a rewrite of an English drinking song? Did that conflict with the copyright law of the time? This is an excelent place to point people towards wikipedia, a free internet encyclopedia. Anyone can read it, and anyone can submit an entry it. A system is in place to let people point out any mistakes (althrough it has some very odd enteries - an entire section dedicated to star trek). Its a nice free alternative to encarta, and will be of great intrest to schools. Its also a lot larger than encarta, dispite the lack of pictures. |
| Mophun | Its a system for protecting games on mobile phones. Partially breakable like so. I know the game files are checksumed, but dont know if its just a simple checksum or a true hash function. Also, the mobile side will only run games that have been code-signed, so only licensed devlopers can make them (booo!!). The game files are of course handset-tied, and that cant be altered because of afforementioned hash, but the instructions contain a workaround for one service. Its made by Synergix. Devlopers tend to dislike the constrants of a code-signing system, but apparently handset giant Sony-Ericson is a big supporter and insists on the unwanted feature. |
| "Knights of Honor" by Black Sea Studios/Sunflower | Very few individual games get a mention of their own, usually
because they are either innovative, unusual or evil. This is an example of
the latter. This game ensures you cannot copy it by destroying the
computers ability to copy anything.
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