Well thanks Rob, but I knew that 😛 I meant, could he tell us how the original protection was supposed to work (the one that the duplicators could not copy). I guess the one that ended up being used on the master was quite limited compared to the intended one!
The FuzzBall protection seems to work as follows:
First its run before menu appears, it checks for protection track and returns a vale at $ 10000, which game then checks for. If it fails, game crashes.
Later, protection is run before level 13,31,38,50 and this time its not just a value it returns.
It seems to be generating a table for baddies, etc, located around $ 8b9e to around $ 9314.
Without the correct table, levels are more or less screwed up.
Nice story, I read something similar about "Deep Core" (by Ringo Star, protection by Conqueror)… makes you wonder how many good protections were ruined by lazy duplicators 🙂
Any chance you could write something for flashtro – either a tutorial or something about your Fuzzball protection and how it worked would be great to read!
Thanks for cracking my game back in the days old friends. Unfortunately, the duplicator plant could not handle the original protection. We’d failure on 3 out of 10 discs. Real protection had less than 400 bytes loader, custom sync/track length for every track, file table was blitter decoded based on progress throughout the game. Another failed ex-cracker copy protection I guess, and it would take some time for old-school loader crackers (no f-ing cartridges) to crack it.
I used to run High Crime, the VF WHQ in 1990.. Unfortunately, if you noticed, the number initially was shown in the crackto’s as 216-798-3154, but the actual number was 398 not 798.. Very frustrating, finally was sorted out though…
marco polo, he had someone who was at the army (belgian) overhere in cologne, he got the latest games for running this po box, same to the one in Amay… which were used over years by me and metallica!… ohwell i still remember all the mail sendings with all the nice disks of demos and shit like that were the people would get the latest games, cheers!
Well too bad no one followed up on your question there. I sure would like to know the answer as well.
Well thanks Rob, but I knew that 😛 I meant, could he tell us how the original protection was supposed to work (the one that the duplicators could not copy). I guess the one that ended up being used on the master was quite limited compared to the intended one!
The FuzzBall protection seems to work as follows:
First its run before menu appears, it checks for protection track and returns a vale at $ 10000, which game then checks for. If it fails, game crashes.
Later, protection is run before level 13,31,38,50 and this time its not just a value it returns.
It seems to be generating a table for baddies, etc, located around $ 8b9e to around $ 9314.
Without the correct table, levels are more or less screwed up.
Nice story, I read something similar about "Deep Core" (by Ringo Star, protection by Conqueror)… makes you wonder how many good protections were ruined by lazy duplicators 🙂
Any chance you could write something for flashtro – either a tutorial or something about your Fuzzball protection and how it worked would be great to read!
Thanks for cracking my game back in the days old friends. Unfortunately, the duplicator plant could not handle the original protection. We’d failure on 3 out of 10 discs. Real protection had less than 400 bytes loader, custom sync/track length for every track, file table was blitter decoded based on progress throughout the game. Another failed ex-cracker copy protection I guess, and it would take some time for old-school loader crackers (no f-ing cartridges) to crack it.
I used to run High Crime, the VF WHQ in 1990.. Unfortunately, if you noticed, the number initially was shown in the crackto’s as 216-798-3154, but the actual number was 398 not 798.. Very frustrating, finally was sorted out though…
marco polo, he had someone who was at the army (belgian) overhere in cologne, he got the latest games for running this po box, same to the one in Amay… which were used over years by me and metallica!… ohwell i still remember all the mail sendings with all the nice disks of demos and shit like that were the people would get the latest games, cheers!
The POBOX in Evere/Belgium — that’s close to where I work !?! Anyone know what was behind that one?
Marco Polo as the cracker is the best thing on that cracktro …
Anyway … VF rules … hey Rakim 😉
well… no problem with the design, it’s just missing music and some other effects 😉