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I was coding "Cabal" for the NES at Zippo (Rare's Manchester based software house) when Tiertex "poached" me to work for them to create some disk formats and copyprotection routines for US Gold.

When at Tiertex I programmed "Mercs" (Amiga/ST) as well as generalised protection routines for some games. I was "sent" to a course for programming the Trace machines - nice kit Z80 based disk controller from what I remember - still got all the Trace programming info somewhere with the Trace Certificate!

I did some formats for CBM64, Amiga, ST and various other machines popular at the time, most of it was just modifying the standard format for invalid clock/data codes etc. Most games were mastered at either Ablex near Ironbridge and Spool near Chester - Spool had Trace duplicators, but Ablex had some other brand and formats had to be re-coded just before mastering using the duplicators incompatible script language. This lead to restrictions in what could have been done easily on the Trace machines.

I programmed my own protection system for "SuperHero" - every track on all 3 disks was "data" long - only some with zero clock/data fun!
To create the long tracks "in the office" I made a switch on my Amiga to increase the system clock by just a notch, if you go too far the video really messes up. The protection on Superhero went overboard (I was on royalties) - there was even a final code checksum just before you would see the ending! Unfortunately, due to reasons too long to explain, SuperHero was never released.

All in all, writing disk formats was suprisingly interesting, a kind of battle...
Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against Pirates, Cracker, Hackers or whatever - I knew some and greeted most of them in the image Coding the protection schemes was just good fun, almost as much fun as being on the "other side"

Btw, the ST version of Mercs came out without ANY protection because it wasn't the final version, the version that was released was coded in only 2 weeks! I was not at work on the Monday when US Gold came over wanting to release the game early, they took the wrong disks!!! When told about it nobody seems to care. Pity as I had a really nice scroll in the proper version - the released version had a horrible horizontal scroll.

Ahh, memories...

-Anthony

Btw...

The best copy system I saw was the Flux copier for the Atari ST, it was made by the same team that did the Happy drive for the 8-bit Atari.
(I think it was Scott Adam's brother).

It could copy anything on either Amiga or ST.

-Anthony

DoubleDutch wrote:It could copy anything on either Amiga or ST.

Then it should be good for CAPS guys to know that, because that tool would be enough to maintain Amiga originals.

It was a piece of hardware with proprietry software. It could also be used with one of the mac emulators to read Apple Mac discs (the original format). Don't know where they could get one from...

Thanks for that DoubleDutch, very interesting stuff!

Personally, I do take rather a dim view of pirates/crackers. But I won't go into that here.

@Psychophanta:

If this device is what I think it is (an "analogue" based hardware copier), then unfortunately it (and all devices like this) are pretty useless for CAPS. See these links:

http://www.caps-project.org/articles.php?id=cycloneprob
http://www.caps-project.org/faq.php?question=cyclone

A proper, cheaply reproducable (built-it-yourself) mastering device would certainly be interesting. But this is a very different thing to a copier. But note that this would only help people remaster their disk images back to disk, and wouldn't help with preservation itself...

Nice thought though

No, this wasn't a cyclone or "clone" of cyclone...

I took the device apart, it wasn't a simple logic chip - it was a complex custom device. Th actual program would read the data into the actual ST - it could also read/decode GCR. The disk images were massive, much bigger than a normal disk image, I assume it was just the bit length of each bit - this would account for a massive increase in size.

The Cyclone and its clones all seemed to sync up the drives than copy direct from read head to write head, I may be wrong however.

Just looked at your links, yep Cyclone just synced 'em up. btw Cyclone could have been done in simple logic - without a computer involved at all.

-Anthony

Ah, nice thanks. In that case, yes, it might be of interest. However, as you probably realised, the fact that there are so few of them around (it seems) means that most people would not be able to make use of whatever we did with it anyway...