Defeating Copy Protection with a #2 Pencil

For as long as there have been personal computers, personal computer owners have been making illegal copies of software, and software companies have been trying to deter them from doing so. Throughout the past three decades, there have been four major categories of copy protection. Three of those include asking people nicely not to copy your software, software-based protection (something within the program or on the media itself that physically prevents the user from making copies), and hardware-based protection or dongles (something that physically plugs into the computer and is required to be present for the program to run).

The fourth type of copy protection, which used to be fairly common, was what I used to call pack-in protection. In this type of protection, the pack-in consisted of something physically included within the box, like a manual, map, or codewheel. When the game was run, it would ask the user to refer to one of those items and answer a question. If the user got the question wrong, games would typically do one of two things. The nicer ones would refuse to run. The more diabolical ones would alter the game in some fashion, making gameplay either extremely difficult or impossible. For example, the manual in Police Quest explained “proper police procedure” for driving a car. Without completing a specific set of actions before driving your police vehicle, you would be killed. The only way to learn that procedure was to read the manual.

The most common type of pack-in copy protection was the manual check. The manual check asked the user to provide a specific word from the manual. “What is the third word on line five of page seven?” The user then had a few chances to guess the word. The second most common type of pack-in copy protection was the code wheel. Code wheels involved two paper discs fastened in the middle so that the top one could rotate over the bottom one. With a code wheel, a program would provide you with two pieces of information, one from the bottom wheel and one from the top; when the two bits were aligned, a third piece of information would be revealed. This is the information that would be entered back into the program.

Manual-based copy protection could be defeated pretty easily using some pretty low tech methods. The first involved getting someone with good typing skills (and no social life) to simply type in the manual. The manual, in plain text format, would be circulated alongside the game. With that file, finding a specific word from a specific line on a specific page was a piece of cake. If you couldn’t talk anyone into that, then perhaps you could talk one of your parents into photocopying the manual at his or her place of work.

Copying codewheels, on the other hand, became a bit of a cat and mouse game between developers and pirates. Many of the early codewheels used removable brads to attach the two paper discs together. By removing the disc you could easily separate the two wheels and get mom or dad (or the local librarian) to copy the two pieces of paper for you. Cut out the disks, reattach them with another paper brad, and presto — instant codewheel! This technique didn’t work for long. Quickly, removable brads were replaced by affixed ones. This meant not only did you have to find somebody who had paid money for the game, but you had to now also talk them into letting them destroy their codewheel. Unlikely, but it happened. Before long, game makers began making their codewheels even more difficult to copy. I remember one that was covered in light blue ink on colored paper (which was really difficult for most Xerox copiers to duplicate back then), with colored answers that had to be revealed by looking through the codewheel through a red piece of plastic film. Eventually pirates decided simply typing in every question and answer on the wheel was a simpler solution, so that’s what they began to do. All the possible combinations on the wheel would be typed into a text file and included with the game.

The last generation of codewheels began using non-ASCII characters. Pools of Radiance, for example, used “runes” on its codewheel. There was no easy way to type these runes into a plain text file. The Secret of Monkey Island included a codewheel that involved lining up pirates’ faces. These codewheels could only be duplicated with the use of one piece of equipment:

a number two pencil.

While cleaning out some drawers out in the garage earlier today I found a folder of old Commodore papers. In that folder was my old Pools of Radiance codewheel, which I had complete drawn by hand using a pencil. A friend of mine had bought the game and, with no other way to make a copy of it, I spent a couple of afternoon periods coping each rune onto striped loose leaf paper, and marking where the cutouts would go. While the homemade codewheel resembles something an eight grader made by hand, that’s because it is. And it worked. Never underestimate the simplest solutions.

Years of complaints from legitimate game owners who felt they were being hassled combined with the influx of home computer scanners (which made copying codewheels trivial) finally put an end to this type of copy protection. All hail the number 2 pencil.