how does pc game anti-piracy work

Marketcake

Marketcake

God of Leisure
Dec 6, 2009
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I dont know what the correct term is, but code built into the game to prevent copies from working that arent the original. i dont mean internet based, that is obvious, but more like where the game 'degrades' if you try to pirate it, or wont work at all.

i remember that game ages ago called operation flashpoint, and i dont think it was ever really successfully pirated, that was like 6 years ago.. there were a lot of people that said they did but it never ended up working. it was called 'fade technology' and like a few days after you installed a pirated copy it would start to make you miss a lot of shots, and shit would randomly kill you. i know games since then have used all sorts of algorithms and methods similar to this.. I guess im wondering from a more technological side of things, how thats possible. what does the system do that allows it to distinguish from an identical copy that is ripped from a cd bit for bit into a virtual copy?

This is the part where I wish I truly knew what was going on in the millions of layers inside in programs, not just whats on the surface :|
 


Bitch please. Everything is piratable. There's an algorithm that would keep the game stable with the right key, which means there's a way to activate it.
 
Rage9 said:
Bitch please. Everything is piratable. There's an algorithm that would keep the game stable with the right key, which means there's a way to activate it.
Click to expand...

yea thats for sure, I mean to me it wouldnt make sense if things werent piratable, thats what Im asking. Yet, there are still things that seem hard as fuck to pirate. Ie that game, or maybe BMD or something, although I think that was recently cracked. i was wonderin what goes on in the (software layer?) that makes this possible
 
The basic principal of most disk based protections is that data is written to a disk along with intentional errors or deformities that are measurable but almost impossible to duplicate. Data position measurement is the most recent technique that a burner can't duplicate because it works on the principal that a burner exhibits different unpredictable data positions than a stamped disk.

Once the code can determine if the disk is valid it can use this data to decrypt the game and run it. A good copy protection scheme will not only do a basic check at startup, but will provide unmeasurable changes to the game - such as messing with hit rates. These changes are extremely difficult to locate because there is no simple way to locate the code within the game that handles the routine. While the developer has say 50,000 lines of code to manage, the cracker has 1,000,000 lines of assembly to reverse.
 
Insomniac said:
The basic principal of most disk based protections is that data is written to a disk along with intentional errors or deformities that are measurable but almost impossible to duplicate. Data position measurement is the most recent technique that a burner can't duplicate because it works on the principal that a burner exhibits different unpredictable data positions than a stamped disk.

Once the code can determine if the disk is valid it can use this data to decrypt the game and run it. A good copy protection scheme will not only do a basic check at startup, but will provide unmeasurable changes to the game - such as messing with hit rates. These changes are extremely difficult to locate because there is no simple way to locate the code within the game that handles the routine. While the developer has say 50,000 lines of code to manage, the cracker has 1,000,000 lines of assembly to reverse.
Click to expand...

mind 'splosion O_O
 
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