Paul sez, "torrentfreak.com has an excellent post describing what must be one of the first DRM devices evar. the Lenslok is a foldable optical lens that was required to decipher scambled unlock codes in early 1980's video games. from the torrentfreak post:"
The first game to use the Lenslok DRM was the ZX Spectrum version of the hugely successful wireframe-3D shoot ‘em up, ‘Elite‘. But of course, we’re talking about DRM here so yes, you guessed it, it caused lots of problems for the legitimate users. As each version of the Lenslok device was unique to the game it sought to protect, sending out the incorrect Lenslok device to around 500 buyers of ‘Elite’ wasn’t the best move made by the publisher, ‘Firebird‘. None of these people could play the game, but probably had an interesting experience for a few hours trying to work out how to use the prism. With no Internet forums to voice their anger, there were many complaints in the computer magazines of the day.
The final nail in the Lenslok coffin was its inability to work with anything other than a tiny portable TV, as the on-screen input window would otherwise be bigger than the device itself, rendering it useless.
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Elite (I still have my Speccy copy, complete with Lenslok and novella) allowed you to scale the image up and down to fit the lenslok (the text was very low res so it could be quite small and still readable). It was a monumental pain in the ass to use though I will agree!
Sounds like Analog Rights Management.
My first brush with RM (not strictly D-rm,though) was from the same era, c. 1983/4 I think. A friend and I decided on the basis of a couple of longish Sinclair Basic programs, and a lot of copying and swapping of dubbed tapes of games (Speccy software came on compact cassettes) about that we would write some computer games. We saved our pocket money (we were about 14 or 15) and bought a Forth-based dev environment called White Lightning. The manual was printed on dark green paper - we worked out why when we tried photocopying it so we could both read it at the same time...
Actually come to think of it games companies started writing their own DRM by hacking the Spectrum's IO. eg. a file on tape came in two chunks, a header (with size, memory location etc) and the main data. Each chunk of data was proceeded by a couple of seconds of a tone at a certain frequency (a sort of audio carrier wave I suppose.) So games started appearing with no lead tones, or with headerless blocks - the game would load a short loader program which overrode the built-in IO. However with a bit of fiddling about these were trivial to circumvent...
Strangely enough we never did write a game. I now work in infosec, though, and am a card-carrying EFF and FSF member (and I try NEVER infringe copyright, as copyright is all that protects Free software. No p2p musical cornucopia for me... :)
Copy-Protection DRM (or ARM in this case) broken then... broken now.
"inability to work with anything other than a tiny portable TV, as the on-screen input window would otherwise be bigger than the device itself"
that's not true, the first step of using the lenslok was to adjust the size of the on-screen image until the edges lined up with the plastic legs of the lenslok
although I could still never read the code properly afterwards
Oh My! I remember that!
Rush of memories!
Wow, Lenslok, White Lightening - it's all coming back to me now. I got White Lightening for my birthday & indeed not only did the tiny black lettering on dark green paper make it impossible to copy, but impossible to read also. Don't think I ever got around to writing a game either.
Every game around that era seemed to come with a new weird and wonderful form of copy protection - I seem to remember plenty of cardboard wheels where you had to line up the windows in a certain fashion and enter the code produced.
There should be (and probably is) a museum dedicated to this stuff.
I remember playing a lot of Amiga games back in the late 80's and some of them came with 'Code Wheels' which were 2-3 laminated circles of paper stacked together with slits cut on them. To be able to use or proceed further in some games, you had to rotate the different wheels to align to something specified in the game, and then it would give you the proper code.
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-Trevor
Took me an hour to defeat lenslok. Just figured out what vertical slices were displaced to where and made a paper border to put up to the screen.
Hee, i've still got my copy of Elite up in the loft somewhere. Awesome game when you could get pastb the lenslock malarky.
Crazy days... the guy at my school with a dual cassette deck was king (big ol' Amstrad monstrosity). Someone copied Jet Set Willy for me and included a photocopy of the access codes sheet. He hadn't twigged a black and white copy of the codes was somewhat less than useless (the codes were sequences of colours...)
Lenslok wasn't the first Spectrum DRM. The year before Elite came out on the Speccy, Jet Set Willy was released with a "code card". You were given a grid reference and had to enter the colour at that ref - card can be seen here: http://www.retroscene.co.uk/prodimages/spectrum/m/jet_set_willy.jpg
I remember another method that had red text on a red background, which couldn't be read unless you placed a polarising viewer it. Can't recall which game that was though.
More common was "enter the Nth word on page M of the manual".
I had one of these for a game on my Acorn BBC 'beeb' B 32k. It was more or less impossible to read even with the right size screen... didn't bother playing for long.
Luckily Elite -- first game I ever bought -- had no copy protection on the beeb.
Actually, there was DRM before that. Back in 1978-79, there were TRS-80 games that had special loaders on the cassette tape that would then handle data encoded in a way that was difficult to copy without a special cassette deck. If I recall correctly, the TRS-80 "Haunted House" adventure did that.
Of course, to defeat it, one *could have* monitored the wave form with an oscilloscope to see the signal and filter the line so it could be copied. Or one *could have* just disassembled the loader and tweaked the code. But that would have been violating the Terms and Conditions, even then :)
@imipak: Flashback! I remember saving my pocket money to buy White Lightning for the C64, which needed a language replacement much more than the spectrum did. The manual was printed black on red to thwart the photocopyistas, which was to all intents and purposes illegible.
I never learnt forth courtesy of that manual. I guess black-on-green wasn't aggresive enough for the c64 market; only black-on-red would cut it.
re Elite on the Beeb, certainly the Floppy version did have DRM, occasionaly you would get asked the Nth word on the Nth word of the Novella, if memory serves me correctly! In our school the enterprising indivduals would give you a FREE copy of JSW but you would then have to buy a copy of the Code sheet which had had the colours replaced with letters (R,B,G,Y) on a sheet twice the size of the little insert