Rob Northen never wrote a game, but for about five years a large share of Amiga and Atari ST games would not load without his code. His Copylock protection system was on around 500 commercial Amiga games between 1988 and 1996, by his own count, among them Lemmings, Populous, Speedball 2 and Sensible Soccer. In 1992 the German magazine Amiga Joker introduced him as “the undisputed king of the protected diskette”. He also wrote the ProPack compressor that many games used to squeeze their data, and the disk formats that let every ST owner read ST Format’s cover disks.
Fast facts
- Known for: Copylock, his disk protection for the Atari ST (from 1987) and Amiga.
- Earlier work: disc protection for Acornsoft’s BBC Micro games from 1984, including Elite.
- Companies: Copylock Software, then Rob Northen Computing (the name Amiga Joker gave in 1992, and Amiga Action in 1995).
- Other products: ProPack compression, the PDOS disk format, Amiga disk-loading routines, cover-disk formats, CD32 loaders and CD-ROM mastering.
- Best customers: Ocean and Domark, by his account.
From British Aerospace to Acornsoft
Northen told the Amiga site Codetapper that after leaving school at 18 he spent a year as a technical clerk at British Aerospace in Weybridge, Surrey, writing short programs for its IBM mainframes. One of the first was a fake login screen that saved other people’s passwords to a file before handing them back to the real one; “it fooled quite a few people!” He studied computer science at what was then South Bank Polytechnic in London, bought an Apple II Europlus for £475 in his first year, and while still a student (1981 to 1983) wrote printer drivers and a menu-driven 68000 assembler for the Apple II for Simon Computers of Croydon. Fitting it into a small ROM, he said, taught him “a lot about writing tight efficient code”.
In 1984 he joined Acornsoft, the software arm of Acorn Computers. There he wrote a new disc protection system to replace one written by Jez San, which in Northen’s account used illegal 6502 opcodes that the 65C02 due in later BBC machines would not support. One of the first games to use his protection was David Braben and Ian Bell’s Elite. “I remember them being very protective of their code in Elite,” he said, “particularly the maths routines.”
He left Acornsoft after six months, in 1985, but kept protecting its disc games part-time. When Acorn replaced the BBC Micro’s Intel 8271 disc controller with the Western Digital 1770, its new Advanced Disc Filing System could not run the older disc games, so Northen wrote a version of the old DFS for the 1770 and sold it to Acorn. He set up Copylock Software around the same time, and over 1985 and 1986 wrote BBC ROM products including Advanced Disk Toolkit and Advanced Disk Investigator, which included, among other things, a protected-disk copier.
Copylock
The first system sold under the Copylock name was for the Atari ST in 1987, with an Amiga version soon after; the same 68000 code served both. Its disk had one sector written with a different bit timing, which an ordinary drive could read but not write, and its encrypted check code returned a serial number that programmers were told to fold into their game’s data rather than test directly. The Copylock entry explains how it worked and how it was mastered.
Northen told Amiga Joker in March 1992 that three to four hundred games used it, through twelve versions and about a hundred updates, and that he offered programmers service “round the clock”. His list of Amiga customers later ran from Ocean, Domark, U.S. Gold, MicroProse, Psygnosis, Electronic Arts, Bullfrog, DMA Design and Team 17 to Hewson, System 3 and Audiogenic. He said he “was never involved in the actual production of the game itself”: publishers sent him a finished master, or he posted keydisks for the programmers to build in themselves. His name sometimes appeared with a game’s credits: Amiga Power’s review of Team 17’s Body Blows in 1993 lists him among its authors.
He described it as a contest. “It was undoubtedly the challenge that was the motivating force behind Copylock,” he said. “The better the protection the greater the challenge. It’s just a matter of time.” To test it he hid his telephone number inside the encryption, probably on the ST R-Type. In 1992 he told Amiga Joker that crackers had rung him at night for weeks to report their progress, which he thought “rather childish”; years later he remembered a single early-morning call from a German hacker. Of crackers in general he said: “We’ve all got to start somewhere. Breaking into a program can teach you a hell of a lot about programming.”
Cover disks, compression and CDs
Northen’s disk formats reached readers who never bought a protected game. From early 1990 ST Format’s cover disks used a format of his that single-sided ST drives could read on one side and double-sided drives on both. “The man they call Rob Northen (for that is his name)” was credited in April 1990 for giving everyone Conqueror, Pipe Mania and the art package Canvas. He explained the next revision himself: “the sector skew every 10th track was slightly out, so I decided to do a new format”. By 1991 the magazine was calling him its “favourite techno-genius”, and “a world-famous unknown genius living in Surrey”. He told Amiga Joker in 1992 that he had developed dual- and tri-format disks that put a program for the Amiga, ST and PC on one disk, and was working on a data compression system. Amiga Action’s masthead in 1995 credited its cover disks to Rob Northen Computing.
That compression system became ProPack. Its files, usually known by their “RNC” header, turn up in games well beyond the Amiga: the Sega fan site SMS Power documents RNC as “a widely-used compression format for many systems in the 80s and 90s”, used in Master System and Game Gear games such as The Lion King and Mortal Kombat, and the Mega Drive game 3 Ninjas Kick Back (1994) credits “Compression Software: Rob Northen”. Northen also sold PDOS, an extended Amiga disk format, and his own Amiga disk routines; his list of Copylock games notes that other games used these without Copylock.
When Commodore launched the CD32, most Amiga games still loaded with their own disk routines or with his. Northen decided to write CD32 loaders; he said Commodore in Britain and America “refused to help in any way, so I hacked the OS and wrote my own.” The German magazine PC Player described its CD-ROM utility CDT, written for the company’s own work mastering CD-ROMs and then released as shareware.
Afterwards
“I never actually ‘quit’ the Amiga,” Northen said, “the work just dried up when publishers stopped releasing the games.” By 1994 and 1995 new releases were few, and publishers putting old games on compilations were sending them to him to have the protection removed. When Codetapper interviewed him, he said copy protection was over for him; he was still working for himself, trading financial futures with his own technical analysis systems. Retro Gamer reprinted part of that interview in 2004.
Sources
- Dr. Freak, “Exklusiv-Interview mit Rob Northen”, Amiga Joker, March 1992: 1984 at Acorn and Rob Northen Computing in 1987; three to four hundred games; twelve versions and about 100 updates; service; the telephone calls; dual- and tri-format disks; a packing system.
- ST Format issue 7, February 1990; issue 9, April 1990 (“The man they call Rob Northen”; Conqueror, Pipe Mania, Canvas); issue 14, September 1990 (the sector skew); issue 20, March 1991 (“favourite techno-genius”); issue 23, June 1991 (“unknown genius living in Surrey”): cover disk pages.
- Amiga Power issue 24, April 1993: Body Blows review, authors’ credits.
- PC Player (Germany), November 1994: CDT utility from Rob Northen Computing.
- Amiga Action issue 68, March 1995, and issue 71, June 1995, mastheads: “Disks: Rob Northen Computing”.
- “Rob Northen lifts the lid on his ‘Copylock’ system”, Retro Gamer issue 3, 2004, software piracy feature (Acornsoft, Jez San’s protection, Elite, Copylock Software, the Copylock method, about 500 Amiga games, the telephone number; “Thanks to Codetapper”).
- Codetapper, “An interview with Rob Northen” (web, secondary): British Aerospace; South Bank; the Apple II and Simon Computers; Acornsoft and the 1770 DFS; BBC ROM products; Copylock Software; the customers; crackers; ProPack, PDOS and the disk routines; the CD32 loaders; the end of the Amiga work; trading futures; the list of Copylock games (including Lemmings, Populous, Speedball 2, Sensible Soccer, Body Blows). http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/rob-northen/
- SMS Power, “Compression” (web, secondary): Rob Northen Compression (RNC) and games that use it. https://www.smspower.org/Development/Compression
- Sega Retro, “3 Ninjas Kick Back” (web, secondary): production credits from the game (“Compression Software: Rob Northen”). https://segaretro.org/3_Ninjas_Kick_Back