Re: 'People like to hate EA, I don't know why'

On Sun, 23 Mar 2025 11:20:26 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

It wasn't a very successful copy protection method. Apparently users
could, if they made enough attempts, accidentally get their copy
programs to duplicate the half-track, and even if they couldn't, the
routine that checked for the 'half track' it was easily patched out by
crackers.

They didn't do that to work around EA's BS. Nobody patched anything out.*

The pirate tool put a shim in, and then copied all the data that loaded
into RAM over 10-15 minutes and dumped it to a flat file, after prompting
for a destination disk. You could then read it straight into RAM from
that disk by executing the provided loader. That's right, the pirates
were so conscientious that they did a loader. The loader knew the
execution address because it knew where the RAM dump process had started
in the first place. It was probably in BASIC.

After that, on a straight 1541? Slow, but maybe 1-2 minutes instead of
10-15. With Epyx Fastload? It was up in seconds. Beat. Beat. There's
Archon or M.U.L.E. I just couldn't believe it. Thank god for piracy.

But to make that EA "Copy Protection" (CP) work legitimately, your drive
had to be in _perfect_ alignment, and unfortunately, the most common CP
was deliberate errors on the disc. Errors so severe that they, on
misread, they caused the drive head to make a loud banging noise as it
removed any residual magnetic particles. The 1541 went into diagnostic
and maintenance every time you tried to load a game, for the most severe
read error possible. The loader then handled the exception, satisfied
with the catastrophic failure, and branched to another track entirely.

And after a while, repeating this for every game you loaded took a
serious toll on your hardware. It was never designed by Commodore to be a
common occurance. It was a serious read problem.

Shit! You guys think Denuvo is bad? The "scene" *exists in the first
place* because C=64 CP was so gobsmackingly outrageous.

And EA? Their DRM, and pretty much *only* their DRM, didn't destroy your
hardware. Everybody else was loud banging noises. So GO EA!**

--
Zag

This is csipg.rpg - reality is off topic. ...G. Quinn ('08)
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* I tell this story from time to time; it is really 100% true. It never
gets old for me, but it may get old for you! (couplet footnote ftw!)

** Er... I mean... 10-20 minutes later. Then GO EA! Yes, it got as bad as
_20_ minutes for some games. I just Googled it.