This was used in many games, like: – Roadrunner – OutRun from Sega – Music Construction Set – Metrocross from Epyx – Skyfox – The Bards Tale – Pinball Wizard It varies with the checksum in $24.w/$26.w (the trace vector) and for Skyfox with the sector numbers that are tested. Track 79 has 12 sectors … Continue reading Atari ST Protection: HLS
Another track length protection. Track 78 has to be at least 100 bytes shorter than Track 79. On my disk Track 78 was 5988 bytes, while 79 was 6285 bytes. The content of the track is not important for the protection, just the length. Therefore the track was recorded with ~240kbit/s instead of the normal … Continue reading Atari ST Protection: Gauntlet II
Track 79: shorter than 6100 bytes (and longer than 4996 bytes), that is not possible to be written with a standard drive. Pretty standard. ; allocate screen buffer 0x0d452: 0x2f3c 0x0000 0x9000 MOVE.L #0x9000,-(A7) 0x0d458: 0x3f3c 0x0048 MOVE.W #0x48,-(A7) 0x0d45c: 0x4e41 TRAP #0x1 0x0d45e: 0x6700 0xfa8e BEQ *-0x570 [0xCEEE] 0x0d462: 0x5c8f ADDQ.L #6,A7 0x0d464: 0x2d40 … Continue reading Atari ST Protection: Garfield
Another simple one: it reads track 0 and searches between byte \(18 and $97 (128 bytes) for $A1,$FE,\)??,$??,$01, which is the sector header of sector 1. I don’t really see the value of this protection?
The protection is also simple: track 81, sector 20 has to contain at least 71 times ‘JAKE’ at the beginning. It then reads sector 1 in track 5, which has to have a CRC error in the data block (the FDC status has bit 3 set, but not bit 4). Interesting, but not as interesting … Continue reading Atari ST Protection: Brataccas
The boot sector starts quite interesting: copying code to address 8 and executing it there. The format of the disk is different, but not special: sector 1 in the track is 512 bytes long, sector 2–6 are each 1024 bytes long. 5632 bytes per track out of possible 6250 bytes, pretty good capacity on a … Continue reading Atari ST Protection: Turrican
This seems quick and simple: Byte 30 in Track 79 has to be either 0x00 or 0xFF. Maximum of 10 tries to figure that out… However I can’t test it, because it doesn’t seem to run in STeem.
This protection is in track 20, it searches for $13,$07,$F7,$19,$87,$F7 right AFTER the CRC of sector 9, especially the $F7 is nasty, because the FDC normally writes a two byte CRC when receiving a $F7 with the write track command. Because of a bad implementation these bytes could be written inside sector 9 and it … Continue reading Atari ST Protection: The Sentry or The Sentinel
This is an earlier version of CopylockST from Rob Northen from 29/09/88, it doesn’t use timing variations but three tests: Track 79: has to be shorter than 6027 bytes, that is not possible to be written with a standard drive. Track 0: The GAP 3a of Sector 1 (after the address mark) has to be … Continue reading Atari ST Protection: Arkanoid/CopylockST
Files in this format have the extension “.stx”, probably for “ST – eXtended”. This description is valid for files created with PASTI 0.4b BETA. 0x.. is a hex offset to the beginning of the structure .b = a single byte .w = a 16-bit word (little endian!) .l = a 32-bit word (little endian!) A … Continue reading Atari ST Protection: PASTI file format
