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In the C64 piracy heyday of the mid 1980s, there was an urban legend of this anti-piracy tactic: At manufacturing/packaging time, some games' floppies had a physical hole punched in a far-away track where normal game usage would never ever send the drive head, so no problems.

Of course, pirates got a lot of mileage out of brute-force full-disk/bit copiers which would try to simply dupe every track on the disk, without regard for format or contents since this would successfully duplicate a handful of file-level tricks such as hidden or intentionally corrupted files that the game would look for. Anyways, the story goes ... if your bit-copying drive stepped out to that distant track ... whammo. <insert-expensive-mechanical-noise>

Or so the rumour goes. As brave teens, we doubted it and it never deterred anyone I knew. Interesting concept, though, if the topic is fiendish tricks.

2 comments

According to Jon Burton, something like this was actually done for the Amiga game Leander, although not with the intent to damage hardware: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qaq9vlfoGnA

Here's a photo of the disk: https://twitter.com/herrprofdr/status/959186835929878528

Debunked in this thread by Galahad ( an oldschool amiga cracker ) and Richard Aplin ( a dev ) : http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=89662

That Jon Burton guy isn't a reliable source of information.

I don't know about physical holes in the media, but a number of Apple // games had a few bad sectors sprinkled throughout the disk that would cause the 5.25" drives to make sort of a "BBRRRRNK" noise when copy programs hit them, and then ultimately the copy program would stop and show an error.

Copy //+ defeated this by letting you choose what game you were copying, and it had a list of sectors to avoid for each game. The good ol' days. This was back when calling stolen programs "warez" was still cool.

That's not quite how it works.

Bad sectors were expected by copiers like Locksmith or Copy//+. They were nothing special. The copiers tried to make sense of them by identifying the address and data markers, which were often altered (D5 AA 96, ...) but if they encountered an error, they would just signal it and move on.

The cracker then had to take over, e.g. analyze the raw content of the track or just start disassembling and find out how to read these malformed tracks (or sometimes, they contained specific bit patterns that didn't represent any data but were verified by the copy protection).

Source: I still crack Apple ][ games now and then for the fun of it.

Eeeenteresting. That makes more sense than going through the effort to jank physical media in a way that can be easily side-stepped.

Here's some of my old games: https://imgur.com/a/8Psom

I (re)bought most of them in the late 90s after chucking my games in the early 90s when I got tired of my Apple //e.

Still have my original Apple //e and a backup. Finally got that color monitor upgrade too!

Wow, are you me?

I actually have the Ultima VII games on my desktop as we speak.

I've restarted AutoDuel. The only issue is there was some glitch or easter egg in the game copy I originally had which gave me 850k in cash. Playing w/o a ton of cash is much harder.

Nice! Bards Tale 2 was boss.