Great to find this tutorial. I bought in the past the dongle version (with a hologram =) and it brought me to my mind a story. Back in 1991/1992 I heard there was a guy at my university,who broke this protection as well. Never met him in person. Pity Ocean laid this protection off for the future eventual games Personally, from today points of view, I find it very pity the game was cracked/released in such a short time.It probably made Ocean less focused on the Amiga..Spreading a version with, let’s say, 2 levels only would have been OK. Reminds… Read more »
Good spot, it is IPF 805. I’ve redone the PDF to include that detail and i’ve fixed part of the formatting 🙂 Will be live when Musashi gets around to it.
Excellent, nice to see a tutorial from you – I had to laugh when you got fed up explaining the same thing repeatedly, this is a recurring problem writing Amiga cracking tutorials 🙂 Maybe a little appendix about how the files were encrypted would have been interesting (but as you pointed out, not required for the crack)?
My main problem is that the repuation of the protection just didnt require the level of technical insight a tutorial would normally demand, it was just a really badly implemented protection, and just checking for two variables is enough to crack it, so I handled this one differently in that I provided the necessary information to crack it, without me having to do a 100 page opus on something I just dont rate AT ALL.
Jurassic Park was better protected than this and that used Copylock and PDOS ffs!!
Great to find this tutorial. I bought in the past the dongle version (with a hologram =) and it brought me to my mind a story. Back in 1991/1992 I heard there was a guy at my university,who broke this protection as well. Never met him in person. Pity Ocean laid this protection off for the future eventual games Personally, from today points of view, I find it very pity the game was cracked/released in such a short time.It probably made Ocean less focused on the Amiga..Spreading a version with, let’s say, 2 levels only would have been OK. Reminds… Read more »
Any insights on how the breakpoint detection mechanism works in this game?
I didn’t bother to look in all honesty, but detecting breakpoints in Action Replay is very easy.
whenever you use breakpoints in AR, it ALWAYS leaves code at address $40, developers obviously forgot to restore that address afterwards.
Simply clearing the byte at $40 when you takeover the system and then checking to see if anything gets put back in that address is all you need to do.
Very interesting read about the (in)famous RC3 dongle protection affair, thanks!
Thanks alot for your time and effort to do this.
Gr8 stuff, thanks!
Updated page PDF and download files
Do you mean IPF 805, instead of IPF 803, Can only find 805 version of RC3, IPF 803 seems to be a game called Whizz. Still cant wait to read this 🙂
Good spot, it is IPF 805. I’ve redone the PDF to include that detail and i’ve fixed part of the formatting 🙂 Will be live when Musashi gets around to it.
Excellent, nice to see a tutorial from you – I had to laugh when you got fed up explaining the same thing repeatedly, this is a recurring problem writing Amiga cracking tutorials 🙂 Maybe a little appendix about how the files were encrypted would have been interesting (but as you pointed out, not required for the crack)?
My main problem is that the repuation of the protection just didnt require the level of technical insight a tutorial would normally demand, it was just a really badly implemented protection, and just checking for two variables is enough to crack it, so I handled this one differently in that I provided the necessary information to crack it, without me having to do a 100 page opus on something I just dont rate AT ALL.
Jurassic Park was better protected than this and that used Copylock and PDOS ffs!!
Well done ! Thank you for the explanations.
Will resubmit another PDF later, its hasnt processed properly with some pictures missing or in the wrong order….sigh