pouët.net

Nice tune. But the overall feeling is quite odd.

Small story, for those of you interested in...
Here Hybrid lacked of skills, they gave up... The game could not be cracked by the Swedes... Saying it is uncrackable, they tried to save some time by disouraging the competition (the trick very well known, and unfair from the other side) and still try to be the first, continuing in cracking it.

While we may read in the info by Hybrid, from 9h40am, june, 12th 1993:


the dudes at Razor1911 european division (ofcourse), at 7h33am, on June, 12th 1993 (european time) had the following news, written by Randall Flagg:



Yes, BUT guess what? True, the race were not over =)! Scene fellows from the mighty The Dream Team, more precisely DR Detergent /TDT had already cracked the game on June, 11th 1993 at 13h48. On emay read in their NFOfile:



The issue is where it was cracked to find out the proper geographical time shift.

To see what the competition was all about, one must read another crew's NFO to find out. This time it was Genesis*Project PC division, a parto of legendary C=64 group, who were standing proudly. On June, 12th 1993 at 19h03, Snacky of G*P wrote:



Althou the time says it all, it was the FINAL, not bugging release.
Knowing Snacky's skills, noone will even doubt about it, even comparing the cracking time saying that Razor1911 was first, followed by the others.
But please do not forget that crackers were play-testing this game thus checking the protection. It was a game were using a quite sophisticated protecion which activated itself while playing and going further into the plot.That important fact hre does shroud the release time.

Thus we may conclude that G*P won fully the competition. Why not, but there is one issue.. Why in the G*P's crack-file "GENESIS.GP" (the crack consiste of two small files: "DOTTCRGP.COM" and the mentionned one) one may read:



Perheps it is nothing, or... is it?

The only one help may be that Snacky was a VERY honorable and respectable C=64 cracker, who apparently has never ever stolen any crack It would took him more time than cracking a gamy by himself. ;)

ok one...

Nothing unfair at all here, any "cracker" who believes that something is "uncrackable" definitely doesn't deserve to be called cracker.

And they should have known that interpreter based protections are a bit harder than your average "one nop here, one jmp there" protections as DOTT wasn't the first Lucasfilm/arts game ever anyway!

"Nothing unfair"... Should I write LAME to make it more understandanble, I see...

I agree with:

I will agree in 1oo% if someone crack original C64 Rubicon's protection by Snacky.

Hey.. all i can say is that it was fun to crack!

Welcome aboard Randall ;)! Any information to add about it?

<3

sim: thanks for the story, loved reading every word of it! :)

prod: well, looks like some 1985-c64-cracktro...

Snacky was a member aof both G*P and Razor back then...

4cool story

I can add that I also changed the text where Dr Fred triggers the protection asking for the super battery ingredients (ascii text was xored as per Lucasfilm games by a single byte, could be 0x69h iirc). The crack would completely wipe that scene, letting the gamer pass thru without prompting for anything. But it also did that in case one later would look at the battery plans. Not a big deal. If im not wrong, other 2-3 groups came out with a crack, some even 2-3 days after, and got nuked pretty much everywhere. Razor version is the only one that you can still find around, even on torrent :).

nice!