Yes, I was a kid in those days. Didn’t know what copyright was. I used Locksmith, Nibbles Away, and several others. None of those worked on Ultima IV, so I broke the copy protection myself, using the boot tracing technique. I observed that Ultima IV’s DOS could read and write the standard format. So once I had it loaded into memory and stopped at a breakpoint, I called on it to read the boot disk, then swapped to standard DOS and wrote that data back out to a blank formatted disk. Worked beautifully. Didn’t have to modify the code at all, and the copy protection was all gone.
Then I amused myself hacking at the game. For fun, decided to change all the graphics, make it more colorful. Unfortunately, that accentuated the blockiness, and I decided the original graphics were better. Did the same to Moebius, and greatly improved its performance simply by interleaving the sectors of the disk with the battle code that it had to load every time you got into a fight, reducing the load time from 20 seconds to 5 seconds.
Yes, I was a kid in those days. Didn’t know what copyright was. I used Locksmith, Nibbles Away, and several others. None of those worked on Ultima IV, so I broke the copy protection myself, using the boot tracing technique. I observed that Ultima IV’s DOS could read and write the standard format. So once I had it loaded into memory and stopped at a breakpoint, I called on it to read the boot disk, then swapped to standard DOS and wrote that data back out to a blank formatted disk. Worked beautifully. Didn’t have to modify the code at all, and the copy protection was all gone.
Then I amused myself hacking at the game. For fun, decided to change all the graphics, make it more colorful. Unfortunately, that accentuated the blockiness, and I decided the original graphics were better. Did the same to Moebius, and greatly improved its performance simply by interleaving the sectors of the disk with the battle code that it had to load every time you got into a fight, reducing the load time from 20 seconds to 5 seconds.
That’s awesome. I had the mindset of a hacker, but I was too poor to own any computers so I just read about it from afar. lol