To play the Spectrum version of Elite at Christmas 1985, you first had to hold a small piece of plastic against the television, close one eye, and read two letters out of a jumble of dots before ten seconds ran out. The plastic was Lenslok, a copy-protection system that put the key to a program in the box instead of on the tape. Its makers, ASAP Developments, said it would let buyers make back-up copies while stopping pirates, because a copy was useless without the lens. CRASH called it “the best anti-piracy device that the home computer market has seen so far”. Many of its readers disagreed.
The name was spelled Lenslok, without a “c”, in the makers’ own material and in most of the press. Reviewers sometimes wrote “Lenslock”, as CRASH did in its Elite review.
A lens for every game
Sinclair User announced the system in October 1985 as “a two-part system. The first part is a machine code routine which produces a code on screen which must be typed in before the software can be used. The second part is a lens which arrives with the program.” Each program had its own lens: “It cannot be used with another game, even with one produced by the same company.” ASAP expected “a large number of other games” to use it that Christmas. Acorn User reported the next month that it “could be used on BBC and Electron software”, at a cost to the publisher “expected to be under 20p”.
Simon Goodwin explained the optics in CRASH’s Christmas Special, using diagrams from ASAP’s brochure. A Lenslok was a row of narrow prisms moulded in one piece from polystyrene, “like parts for model kits”. Looking through a prism shifts what you see, so a row of them swaps the vertical columns of the picture behind in a fixed order. The program drew two characters with their columns already shuffled, so that the lens’s swaps put them back in place and the letters appeared; “if you’ve not got the lens all you see is a jumble of dots”. Two characters were harder to guess than one, and “the columns which make up the two characters can be inter-mingled”. With “millions of possible ‘scrambling’ patterns”, every program could have its own: “It’s no good trying to use the lens supplied with Elite to get started with Digital Integration’s Tomahawk”. A few thousand lenses cost “less than 20p each”, and each came in a holder that fitted inside a cassette box.
The hard part was the television. “Display units vary enormously,” Goodwin wrote: “the rich and famous have crystal clear monitors, some people have old 26 inch tellies, some use black and white portables and so on.” The lens only worked if the scrambled pattern was the same physical size on every screen. So the program began with a set-up display: the player widened or narrowed a pattern until it matched the lens holder, and could check the result by reading the letters “OK” through the lens. From that setting the program worked out how wide to draw each column. Then came the real code, with ten seconds to type it and three tries before the computer reset and the game had to be loaded again.
Goodwin found the lens worked best with the pattern set “rather wider than the lens holder”. It also asked a lot of the player: the lenses “don’t work unless you look directly into them, so you can’t use them properly if your TV is on the floor or on a high shelf. They don’t work if you’ve got both eyes open, and they have to be lined up quite carefully to avoid distortion of the image.”
Elite
Firebird’s Elite, converted for the Spectrum by Torus, was the launch title. CRASH reviewed it in November 1985, gave it 92%, and said it would “go down in history as the first major piece of software to be supplied with the Lenslock protection device”. One of its reviewers already had a complaint: “you could spend hours trying to suss out the thing”.
The buyers had the same trouble. Sinclair User reported in January 1986 that “within days of release the company received phone calls from furious games players who were unable to use it”. Firebird admitted its instructions contained “ambiguities” and printed new ones. Phil Pratt of Firebird explained that “expectant games players rushed home, whacked in the cassette, and were disappointed to find that they had to get through a brand new protection system.” In the same issue a reader described three grown men who had spent about an hour getting the game going and asked: “Is Firebird in league with opticians all over the land?”
CRASH’s letters page for February opened with Lloyd Mangram’s verdict that “Lenslok looks all set to take over from turbo loaders as The Big Moan”. One reader had tried for four hours, then taken the game back to the shop, “and it took them three hours to get the code”. Two others wrote: “Elite is the best game either of us have ever played. Lenslok is the most infuriating thing we have ever come across.”
In March CRASH set out what had gone wrong. The launch had “suffered from not one, but two mishaps”. First, either the set-up code was wrong or “at the very least, the first set of instructions that came with Elite didn’t describe the set up procedure accurately”; the amended instructions asked for “a 5mm gap” between the on-screen lines and the ends of the lens holder, and CRASH’s own copy only worked with the display set “considerably wider than the lensholder”. Second, “the wrong lens was shipped with some copies of Elite — fortunately for all concerned, only five hundred copies of the game were involved”. Each lens was a unique key, the magazine pointed out, so “this is rather like a hotel checking a guest in and issuing the wrong key.” Your Sinclair later got the details from Tony Beckwith at Firebird. Each lens had a clear tab stamped A or B; a B lens was “the Lenslok for another game”, and Firebird replaced it with a working one and “a piece of software for your trouble”.
Elite went into the charts at number one and stayed there for only two weeks. Your Sinclair wondered: “Could this have had anything to do with initial Lenslok problems?”
Other programs
Lenslok did not go away after Elite, though fewer publishers took it up than ASAP had hoped. By March 1986 CRASH counted only three programs in the UK that used it. The titles in the magazines of 1986 include:
- Tomahawk (Digital Integration, Spectrum). Its set-up had a “self-teaching tutor mode”, and managing director David Marshall told Sinclair User he had tried it on “an awful lot of people, including my mother-in-law, who’s never loaded a game in her life”. ASAP adopted Digital Integration’s instructions and tutor mode as standard. CRASH reported “very few problems”.
- TT Racer (Digital Integration). Digital Integration said it would use Lenslok on all its future games, and TT Racer came with a “Lenslok pack” in October 1986.
- The Music System (Rainbird, Commodore 64). ZZAP!64: “It is protected by a Lenslok device, about which the least said the better…. The disks themselves can, however, be copied.”
- The Art Studio (Rainbird, Spectrum). A Sinclair User reader with a 23-inch television could not make the set-up pattern small enough, “and so I have not even managed to run this program once”.
- The Graphic Adventure Creator (Incentive). Advertised with “GAC incorporates the Lenslok system”; Amstrad Action’s reviewer “had to reload it twice”.
- The Price of Magik and The Jewels of Darkness (Level 9). Level 9 printed each lens with the name of its game, to avoid another wrong-lens mix-up, and asked for the code during play as well as at the start. ZZAP!64’s reviewer read that “the dreaded Lenslok system flashes up at intervals throughout the game”, but it never did while he played. The Atari XL and XE version was “Lenslok protected” too.
- Supercharge (Digital Precision, Sinclair QL). Your Sinclair’s reviewer liked the BASIC compiler, which would have been easy to use “if there wasn’t a Lenslok”.
Not every reader struggled. “Long live Lenslok,” wrote a thirteen-year-old in Sinclair User, who had had no trouble. But publishers were cautious. In January 1986 Firebird told Sinclair User it was unsure whether it would use the system again, and an American Commodore magazine reviewing Elite that spring noted that “the newest Firebird games come without LENSLOK”.
What it protected
ASAP never claimed Lenslok was unbreakable. At the launch it admitted that “like any protection device, it is not 100 per cent secure”; the weak point, Sinclair User noted, was “the coding system buried in the software”. The lens checked that the player owned the lens, not that the tape or disk was an original, which is why ZZAP!64 could say that The Music System’s disks could still be copied. Sinclair User also saw the risk to buyers from the start: “Back-up copies of software will prove useless if the appropriate lens is not available.”
Looking back in 2004, Retro Gamer judged that “only Telecomsoft and a handful of others signed up”, and that Lenslok was “notoriously difficult to use at the best of times”.
Sources
- Sinclair User issue 43, October 1985: news item “Children of the Lens”.
- Acorn User issue 40, November 1985: “Program piracy: an optical answer?”
- CRASH issue 22, November 1985, pp. 28–30: Elite review (Firebird, conversion by Torus, 92%).
- Simon Goodwin, Tech Tips, CRASH issue 24 (Christmas Special 1985, dated January 1986), pp. 152–154: how Lenslok works, set-up, costs, and ASAP Developments’ address in Holborn Viaduct, London.
- Sinclair User issue 46, January 1986: news on Elite’s instructions and Tomahawk; letter from Gerry Hunt, p. 14.
- ZZAP!64 issue 9, January 1986, p. 38: The Music System review.
- Amtix issue 3, January 1986: Graphic Adventure Creator advertisement.
- CRASH issue 25, February 1986: Lloyd Mangram’s letters pages.
- CRASH issue 26, March 1986, pp. 9–10: the Lenslok news report.
- Sinclair User issue 48, March 1986: letters on The Art Studio, Tomahawk and Lenslok.
- Amstrad Action issue 7, April 1986: Graphic Adventure Creator review.
- The Guide to Computer Living vol. 3 no. 2, May 1986: Elite review (Commodore 64, US).
- Your Sinclair issue 6, June 1986: letters and Firebird’s reply on the A and B lenses; Level 9 news; chart page; Supercharge review.
- ZZAP!64 issue 15, July 1986, pp. 69–70: The Price of Magik review.
- Your Commodore, July 1986: Level 9 and Lenslok.
- Atari User vol. 2 no. 5, September 1986: The Price of Magik.
- CRASH issue 33, October 1986: TT Racer news.
- Computer Gamer issue 20, 1986: The Jewels of Darkness and TT Racer reviews.
- Retro Gamer issue 3, 2004, p. 53: feature on software piracy and copy protection.