In 1979, Microsoft released ‘Adventure’ an interactive text adventure game that was a port of Colossal Cave Adventure – a mainframe adventure game released in 1976. Microsoft Adventure would contain the first known method of Copy Protection on its disk. In this episode we take a look at the Anti Piracy measure put in place and how it was defeated.
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#MicrosoftAdventure #AntiPiracy #1979
Would someone make this story its own text adventure game?
The old school attempts at DRM are primitive now but were quite acceptable when you think of average consumers who aren’t necessarily hackers or modders/coders/foundation of coding that they learned how to edit.Of course you could pay someone to mod for you but obviously not everyone thought of that nor were sure about it.
Do I hear pc-98 touhou music?
For some reason youtube unsubscribed me from this channel….
Someone know song name at the begining of video ? 🙂
i know org. is Loader.mod tune1 by Accel but that remix is ?
$29.95 in 1979 is $111 in 2021. geez imagine paying $111 for a text game
I think it is very fitting that an Aussie was one of the first ever video game pirates. We always managed to break records years ago whenever a new game of thrones episode came out with everyone torrenting it.
"Only $29.95"
the disk drive raper 🙂
Wow! I owned a new Trash 80 back in the day! I could NOT wait for the C64 to come out!!
Cant say i am surpeised that its MS that made the first ever DRM system
I really enjoy your channel, interesting theme, and your clear pronunciation is so good understandable so as a non native speaker i have no problem
That old Microsoft logo is so sick.
While this is a very early example of copy protection on disk, there were others cracked earlier than this on tape. I remember the Sublogic Flight Simulator for the TRS-80 which had a two part loader. The first was a simple “read from the tape until you reach the end and then jump to a specified start execution point” style loop which read the second lot of data from the tape. The kicker was it loaded backwards in memory and the program itself overwrote the initial loader loop and contained a jump to the real start of execution. I thought it was quite clever for the time. I, and I’m sure many others, cracked this during the early 80’s. I’m also fairly confident that Kim Watt, who released a copy program specifically for Microsoft Adventure, may have predated Nick’s attempt.
Fun fact i had a pirated copy of this game
Imagine being such a boss you can be like "oh hell yes I can single-handedly port this game from one architecture into assembly for a different architecture."
The irony of anti-piracy implemented in essentially a private pirated copy of a public domain software.
Music is great in this episode.
Bloody crack heads
uuuh yeah dat intro muzak!
copy protection is different than drm i think
is it me or do i hear pc98 touhou music in the background at 4:08?
"This game fills an entire diskette" Made me smile…
Hey man, love your videos! Very informative. With that said, I think you would really benefit from a script editor/proof reader.
The way you phrase stuff sometimes can be ambiguous or confusing. For example "He wanted to make a backup of the game and failed because he loved the game so much and never wanted to lose the original." Would be better said "He loved the game some much he tried to make a backup of it, but failed."
The way you said it could sound like his love of the game is the reason he failed to copy it.
I've noticed lots of little things like that in many of your videos, and I think getting a proof reader could bump the quality of your videos to the next level.
Keep up the good work MVG 💪
Awesome!
My mom would play this at my dad's office. She beat it with full points. Took many visits. She made a map of it all. I could not get that far in the game. Rogue was more my thing.
trust microsoft to start copy protection lol
Thanks for nothing, Bill Gates.
My has Flight Simulator evolved since the first version.
Hey, don't copy that (5.25") floppy!
The same year Microsoft did this, disk software for the Atari home computer range was introducing its own copy protection. It was the same basic principle; use non-standard disk formatting that regular Atari hardware could read but not write, and then include routines that checked to ensure that the weird formatting existed before allowing the software to boot.
If you didn't have the skill to actually get into the code, see what was going on and then patch out the routines that checked for the protection, the disks were literally uncopyable. At least for a while; eventually, a few companies came out with products that would copy any non-standard disk formats, but they were expensive because they were a combination of software (the copy program) and hardware (plug-in chips or daughterboards for the disk drives, which replaced their factory operating systems and provided the hardware ability to write non-standard formats).
The most powerful disk duplicator for the Atari 8-bits was called the Happy Drive Enhancement, and it cost $250 in the early 80s – that was serious money back then.
mind blowing as each of your videos)
Game needed "fast" random access….. floppy to the rescue!!!
This is very interesting
Write byte by byte simple direct access to drive
Dat touhou ost tho
Can you imagine going to so much trouble to circumvent the copy protection on a text game
can we talk about mvg's eyebrows..
very swag video aside, he has some very cool greying patterns in his left (right on his side maybe?) eyebrow
Great video, reminds me of the C64 and Disk Dr days. Going sector by sector, reading the contents to find back doors or copy protection schemes.
I kinda wanna play this game now, wonder if i could somehow download it to my pc
In 1978 I worked for Petsoft software for the Commodore Pet we had a game called Microchess on tape and it had a very simple copy protection the title of the program allowed 16 visible characters what they did was hide an alphabetic character after the 16 characters at position 20 so if you just tried to save it and you missed out the hidden letter it just did not work. I suppose that must have been one of the first easily beaten protections.
Never commented , but love your channel. I’ve been into this stuff since the 80’s. To see someone who has contributed to the mods and hacks we used is awesome. Thank you.
We, humanity, are still living in the so-called Microsoft Adventure
really great level of detail here. Everything you need to know is covered and there's no fluff, nor are important steps skipped. excellent work!
"Microsoft Adventure" sounds like a game playing as an employee in an office making awesome documents such as Word, Powerpoint, and emails.
The PC version was similar, but played with the sectors instead. It formatted the first track with 13 sectors, numbered 1-9, 12, 33, and 44. The rest of the tracks were 12 sectors numbered 101-112. Sectors 1, 33, and 44 on track 1 were 512 bytes, the rest were 256. Sector 105 on the other tracks was 512 bytes and the rest 256. 105 also contains the main program, split down the tracks in reverse order.
The PC version is also nice because it maintains an in-memory cache of game sectors so that it doesn't need to access the disk every time you enter a command.
It seems that people forgot that Microsoft was one of the early pioneers of DRM
That old Microsoft logo is dope
looks like another IBM technology given to Microsoft to define the personal computer market
Imagine porting a game you don't have the rights to and having the gall to add copy protection to protect "your" work.