“Spectrum software has always been protected to try to stop illegal copying,” Simon Goodwin wrote in CRASH at Christmas 1985. The trouble was the medium. A game on cassette could be copied with two tape recorders, and a game on floppy disk with the computer it ran on. So publishers looked for something about an original that a copy would not reproduce: a file the copying program could not see, a sound it would miss, a card in the box, or a mark on the disk that no ordinary drive could write.
Copy protection is the name for all of those tricks. None of them lasted long. Each one was answered by a new copying program, a cartridge or a cracker, and the magazines of the time record a second cost too: many schemes made loading slower, less reliable or more irritating for the people who had paid.
On tape
Goodwin’s article follows the Spectrum’s arms race step by step.
The first programs were saved as CODE, “partly to make them hard to copy with a normal SAVE command, and partly to give the impression that the program was written in machine code when in fact it was probably written in BASIC”. Copying tape to tape still worked, but each copy added hiss, so a program “could only go through two or three generations” before it would no longer load.
“At the start of 1983 the first ‘clone’ programs became available — programs to read any tape into memory and dump all of the data back onto cassette.” A cloned copy “was as good as the original”. Publishers first made their files fill the whole memory, which “crowded out” the cloners until they were rewritten to copy a 48K file. Next came the headerless file. The Spectrum’s ROM saves each file with a short header giving its name and size, and the cloners used that header to work out where to put the rest. A publisher’s own short loader could read a block with no header at all, and “without the header a simple clone program can’t copy the rest of the file”.
Other tricks hid information outside the files. Some tapes had a gap of silence that the program listened for, because cloners packed files together. One Dk’tronics program checked for a “tune” lasting a fraction of a second after the program, and “crashed (pretending there had been a loading error)” if it was missing.
Sinclair’s own answer, ROM cartridges for the Interface 2, failed: the cartridges cost more to make than tapes, took longer to manufacture and “were limited to a 16K capacity”. “Electronics was out,” Goodwin concluded: “tape scramblers, ‘dongles’, ROMs and so forth are expensive and hard to manufacture in bulk.”
Hyperloaders and Speedlock
The next step was to change the recording itself, “re-defining the tones used to represent each bit of information on the tape”. These hyperloaders, or turbo loaders, packed data more densely, so they loaded faster and ordinary copiers could not read them (see Fast Loaders). They had “a big weakness”, Goodwin wrote: “the densely-packed tape is more prone to the effects of duplication faults”, and some publishers “deliberately made their systems intolerant of uneven levels or background noise, in the hope of detecting tape-to-tape copies”, which gave hyperloaders “a bad name, both with retailers and customers”.
The best known on the Spectrum was Speedlock, from DJL Software and David Aubrey Jones, who told CRASH in 1987 that he and David Looker had combined two loaders they had been building separately. Ocean first used it on Daley Thompson’s Decathlon in 1984, and the letters page argued about it for months. A reader, Paul Rhodes, explained in June 1985 that Speedlock reset the Spectrum if it heard “a high level of ‘noise’ on the tape”, as a poor copy would produce, and “adds insult to injury by waiting until the program has finished loading before it crashes”. He called it “probably the best protected loader on the market”, but said a practised hacker could break into any Speedlocked program “in a couple of hours”.
In the box
If the tape could always be copied, the protection could be something that came with it. Jet Set Willy (Software Projects, 1984) would not start until the player typed a colour code from a card packed with the cassette. Personal Computer Games explained the idea, “it’s harder to copy the card than to copy the program”, and saw the drawback: “it’s easy to imagine people buying the game, losing the card, and getting very, very annoyed.” Goodwin listed more. Owners had to “go through the same ritual every time they want to load their copy”; the card was “a major obstacle for those with poor eyesight or grotty TV’s”; and “once the colours have been written as letters it takes less than 10 minutes to copy the whole chart”. Thor’s Giant’s Revenge used a card of its own in 1984, which CRASH found “so badly printed that it is hard to distinguish some of the colours”: cyan and green looked “almost identical”.
Lenslok
The most unusual answer used the television. Lenslok, “invented by a new firm called ASAP Developments”, was a strip of narrow plastic prisms in a holder. Looking through prisms can swap the columns of a picture around, so the program drew a pattern of dots that only made sense when the lens swapped its columns back. The player first stretched an on-screen guide to match the width of the lens holder, then held the lens to the screen and had ten seconds to type the two characters it revealed.
Lenslok arrived on the Spectrum version of Firebird’s Elite at the end of 1985, and went wrong at once. The first set-up instructions were wrong, and “the wrong lens was shipped with some copies of Elite — fortunately for all concerned, only five hundred copies of the game were involved”. It struggled with very small televisions and anti-glare filters. By March 1986 only three programs in the UK used it, and CRASH’s letters page had declared that “Lenslok looks all set to take over from turbo loaders as The Big Moan”. CRASH still thought it “the best anti-piracy device that the home computer market has seen so far”. Firebird did not rely on the lens alone: Elite also used headerless files.
Manuals and code wheels
As games grew, the manual became the key. A game asked for a word from a given page and paragraph of the manual, a question that a copier without the manual could not answer. Retro Gamer later named Microplay’s Carrier Command and MicroProse’s Formula One Grand Prix among the games that did it. In December 1991 ZZAP!64 welcomed the fact that SSI’s Gateway to the Savage Frontier asked in a sensible order (“page number, then line number, with word number last”) and only once: “the password is needed only the first time you start, instead of the previous random calls.”
Code wheels worked the same way with card discs that turned against each other. The Secret of Monkey Island came with a “Dial-A-Pirate”: the game showed a pirate’s face, and the player lined up the wheel to find the year he was hanged. AtariUser said in 1991 that the scheme “should give a chuckle”. A code wheel could be photocopied in all its positions, so some publishers printed their codes to defeat the photocopier. Retro Gamer recalled the code sheet for the original DOS release of SimCity on “shiny red paper”, and Worms on the Amiga with “black gloss text printed on black matt paper”. PC Review found the code wheel for U.S. Gold’s Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game in 1992 “printed on jet-black cardboard” with “even blacker figures”, hard to read “under a bright light” and “next to impossible” to photocopy.
Some games made a wrong answer part of the game. According to Retro Gamer, SimCity let a player with the wrong code carry on but sent disasters against the city, and Starflight let the ship leave port with the wrong code and then had police ships “pull you over for software piracy”.
On disk
Disks offered more places to hide. George Trepal set out the Commodore 64 methods in Ahoy! in October 1985. “Virtually all copy protection takes advantage of the fact that the drive and computer hate anything abnormal. Normal copy programs won’t copy errors because — well, because they’re errors and are therefore WRONG!” A protected disk carried a deliberate error in a part of the disk the program did not use. The program asked the 1541 drive for it, and if the drive reported an error, the disk was an original. Trepal listed the other tricks in use: extra tracks beyond the standard 35, data between the tracks (“half-tracking”), two tracks with the same number, a track with its sync mark removed, extra sectors hidden after the last one and tracks recorded at a different bit density. Bits written at half strength, which would read differently each time, were still “a technique that has been proposed”.
The tricks had a cost. Reading an error sector could make the drive knock its head against the end stop, “a great deal of head banging, which can indeed cause head misalignment. All programs copy protected with block reads work to send your drive to the repair shop.” And by 1985 “simple errors were adequate protection two years ago, but now there are dozens of copy programs on the market that copy them.”
Those copy programs became a trade of their own. Nibble copiers read and wrote a whole track at a time instead of a block at a time, which Trepal thought made them “harder to protect against”. For protection that “cannot be duplicated by a Commodore disk drive”, there were parameter copiers, sold with the headline “ARE YOU CAUGHT UP IN THE COPY PROTECTION ARMS RACE?” Ahoy! reviewed Kracker Jax in January 1987. Its three volumes held 82, 104 and 101 standard “parameters”, each a small program for one particular game, made from “a detailed set of instructions which when properly applied simply neutralize or modify the program’s copy protection”. Named protection systems appeared in the advertising: in 1988 the Renegade copier for the C64 was sold as “Capable of Archiving RapidLok Protection”.
Copylock on the Amiga and ST
On the 16-bit machines one name dominated. Rob Northen had protected software at Acorn from 1984 and set up on his own in 1987. His Copylock system, first used on the Atari ST, relied on a difference between reading and writing: drives “are quite tolerant of reading data at varying bitcells”, he explained later, but “will always write data at a constant bitcell”. A Copylock disk carried a track that a drive could read but not write, so a copy made on an ordinary drive failed the check. In March 1992 he told the German magazine Amiga Joker that between three and four hundred games used his protection, which he had changed regularly, through twelve versions and about a hundred updates. His later count was around 500 Amiga games between 1988 and 1996, most of them from 1989 to 1992.
What it cost the buyer
The magazines recorded the problems as they happened: hyperloaders that failed on legitimate tapes, a colour card that was hard to read on a poor television, a lens shipped for the wrong game, drives knocked out of alignment, and code sheets that could not be read in artificial light. Protection also got in the way of new hardware. Ahoy! noted in 1987 that “original copy protected programs cannot be transferred to hard disk drives”; CRASH pointed out that Elite’s headerless files would leave Microdrive owners resorting “to subterfuge to get their games to load onto Microdrive”.
Later history
Protection moved with the media. On PC CD-ROMs, Macrovision’s SafeDisc and Sony DADC’s SecuROM both appeared in 1998, checking for a signature added to the disc when it was made. Microsoft withdrew support for SafeDisc from earlier versions of Windows in a 2015 update.
Sources
- Simon Goodwin, Tech Tips, CRASH issue 24 (Christmas Special 1985, dated January 1986), pp. 152-153: the history of Spectrum tape protection, Jet Set Willy’s card, hyperloaders and Lenslok.
- Paul Rhodes, letter, CRASH issue 17, June 1985, p. 57: Speedlock.
- Richard Eddy, profile of David Aubrey Jones, CRASH issue 44, September 1987: the origin of Speedlock and its first use.
- Personal Computer Games issue 6, May 1984: Jet Set Willy review.
- CRASH issue 9, October 1984: Giant’s Revenge review.
- CRASH issue 25, February 1986: Lloyd Mangram’s Forum (“The Big Moan”). Issue 26, March 1986, pp. 9-10: the Lenslok report.
- George Trepal, “Copy Protection: The Guarded Secrets”, Ahoy! issue 22, October 1985, pp. 59-60.
- Review of Kracker Jax, Ahoy! issue 37, January 1987, pp. 67-68.
- Computer Mart, Kracker Jax advertisement, COMPUTE!’s Gazette, December 1986.
- Renegade advertisement, Ahoy! issue 54, June 1988.
- ZZAP!64 issue 79, December 1991: Gateway to the Savage Frontier review.
- AtariUser, August 1991: The Secret of Monkey Island review.
- PC Review issue 9, July 1992: Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game review.
- Retro Gamer issue 3, 2004: feature on software piracy and copy protection (manual look-ups, code wheels, SimCity, Worms, Starflight).
- Dr. Freak, interview with Rob Northen, Amiga Joker, March 1992.
- Codetapper, “An interview with Rob Northen” (web, secondary): http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/rob-northen/
- Wikipedia, “SafeDisc” and “SecuROM” (web, secondary): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SafeDisc and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecuROM