Submitted by
S.Elliott on January 3, 2023 - 5:36pm
A recent discussion of a buggy crack for Lords of Conquest raised the issue of preserving the original bits from protected software.
So I'm exploring a different approach -- instead of patching games to bypass copy-protection code (ie: 'cracking') why not devise methods of satisfying the copy-protection checks without patching the code?
Submitted by
S.Elliott on December 6, 2022 - 3:10pm
This blogpost is a partial-transcript of a discussion from Apple2Infinitum on Slack, which was spawned from an even older Facebook thread. Since it isn't easy to view the old discussions on Slack and Facebook, I've copy-pasted the messages, pictures, and code blocks below...
Scott Elliott Sep 3rd 11:29:17 AM
Submitted by
S.Elliott on November 28, 2022 - 9:40pm
What is the distribution of raw nibble values of the bitstream a Disk ][ controller would read from an ordinary DOS diskette?
What values would arise from a copy-protected game disk? Or from a .DSK emulation of a diskette?
This little routine captures incoming nibbles and computes a moving-window histogram of their distribution. The data usually stablizes after about 8 calls because it applies a base-2 logarithmic decay to the values after each iteration.
