Copy Protection Cracking Resources for the PC Compatibles

The Apple II series had a magazine called Computist, which was dedicated to showing users how to crack their programs' disk based copy protection. Virtually every game seemed to have a crack. I do not know whether PC users were so lucky. What written resources were available for the home IBM PC compatible user wanting to copy his or her programs freely?

(Sorry if this is the wrong forum, most disk based (as opposed to document based) copy protection seemed to be for PC/XT/AT based software. Please move if appropriate.)

A sizable cottage business at one time. Lots of different schemes for copy protection--and about as many methods for cracking them.

A good start might be to obtain an old copy of CopyWrite, as well as a CopyIIPC deluxe option board.

ISTR that when the IBM PS/2 came out, Lotus hadn't released a 3.5" version of 1-2-3, so IBM (cough-ahem) admitted to using a crack to demo the boxes. Not that they were advocating that people do that, mind you...

there are also a handful of software driven crack programs:
nevlock, nevlock universal, cracksmith, rawcopy, crock

Lots of tutorials were written, particularly by one "buckaroo bonzai" and there were occasional on-line magazines that showed various protection breakers.


I learned x86 assembly language by cracking games, using buckaroo's guide. That later turned into a career as a BIOS developer. Funny how things like that can work out...

hargle said:

Lots of tutorials were written, particularly by one "buckaroo bonzai" and there were occasional on-line magazines that showed various protection breakers.

Click to expand...

Still have those? I can't find my copies and a google search turned up empty (except for that evil scribd.com site)

Update: Never mind, found them all (and more) at the place I should have most obviously looked the first time: http://www.textfiles.com/piracy/CRACKING/