Atari-Forum

For those who are interested in copy-protections, I've documented the one used in Audio Sculpture and Son Shu Si. This protection is just amazing and it deserves that you take a look at it. It was developed by the greatest hackers of the ST era! It's in the top 5 of the nastiest protections! ;) The ...

shoggoth wrote: Behavior is the same on all "full" 68k-CPUs, 68060 included. It fails on the Coldfire, however (the CF doesn't work-align the stack when pushing/popping bytes).

Thx!

move.b (a0)+,d1 ; read 16bits offset, little endian, unaligned move.b (a0)+,-(a7) By curiosity I've checked if this behavior of the stack pointer (" A7 is decremented by two to maintain a word-aligned stack ") exists on all 680x0 processors. 680x0 User's Manuals describe this behavior for the 68000...

IPL means Initial Program Load (not lock) as indicated in the hex picture seen a page ago. Well, both are valid. Frederic himself wrote "IPL, yes i remember, for "Initial Program Lock", a joke made with "Initial program Load" a name that Pascal Truong had found..." Audio-Sculpture protection was wr...

Cyprian wrote: which UPX do you use?

You probably missed this post: http://www.atari-forum.com/viewtopic.ph ... 25#p371256

Orion

Hi guys, I've analyzed the copy-protection of Audio Sculpture 1.5 and focused on how protected tracks and sectors are verified. I've written scripts (a chain of breakpoint actions) that allow to "crack" the copy-protection under Hatari: The original copy of AS 1.5 (AudioSculpture1-5.STX) has been du...

I don't remember seeing protected dumps of No Buddies Land or Son Shu Shi . Do you have the original disks or copy protected images? If so, could you please post them, thanks. I don't have original disks/images of these 2 games. However, 2/3 of the protection code is still present in the cracked ve...

Yes please How do you know protections are similar? I think I did an inteligent stx file comparator (used to check Aufit stx output) Zip files attached. This protection has been used on all software released by Expose Software: Audio Sculpture (all versions), No Buddies Land and Son Shu Shi. I trac...

Jean, I have Audio Sculpture v1.2 and v1.3 in STX format. Protection is almost the same: the software part has only subtle differences and I guess the hardware part is the same. I probably found the images on the net (I don't remember where) and I can provide them if you are interested. Orion/Sebast...

Bonjour Jean, Do you know the protection used on Audio Sculpture? (STX available here: http://defence-force.org/download/atari/AudioSculpture1-5.zip) The author (for the physical part) is Altaïr/VMAX (also author of the Atomik packer). He described the principle of this protection here: http://www.a...

By masking interrupts it is possible to have a deterministic behavior. Based on that trick, one could write a small protection scheme that works on a real HW but fails on emulators.

Fascinating!
Thanks for this clear and detailed explanation.
I guess no emulator handles this correctly?

Mr Nours wrote:Thanks Orion, i just tested patched upx an depack routine within or mjj demo system. Works fine!

-- Orion

Good to see you in person Mr Nours! Congratz for your first place in the OLDSCHOOL DEMO category

-- Orion

Here is my nrv2b unpacking routine (which works with files packed as data using my upx patch): ; ; UPX unpacking macros ; ADDBITS macro add.b d0,d0 ; sets Z, C and X endm ; Get 1 byte, then get 1 bit into both C and X. FILLBITS macro ; Note: we shift the X flag through, ; thus must init d0.b with $8...

There was a small hiccup with the DNS. Depending on your DNS it should be fine now. Hi ggn, dbug website is up, but what about the team? :) I came back in 2016 and therefore I missed all the fun you had working on games adaptations... It seems everybody stopped around 2012, is there any reason for ...

WOW... I just switched from Atomik 3.5 to UPX nrv2b for the packing of my next crack/fileversion (2 floppies), I got the same compression ratio but UPX decrunches at the speed of light

Hi mates, Please find attached a patch (zipped) that enables the packing of raw data files using the UPX compression program. Thus there is no more need to insert a fake PRG header to fool UPX for compressing data files. Apply the patch to the source directory of the latest UPX version (3.95). Run m...

ripupx.s removes the dummy PRG header. I modified the code to support latest UPX versions and -small etc for Closure. I dislike Hakim's approach which is to add a fake PRG header before the actual data in order to fool UPX, because that fake PRG header is packed together with the data and it may be...

I'm currently trying to modify the UPX compression program to enable the packing of data files. Did someone already work on that? Try https://github.com/ggnkua/Atari_ST_Sources/tree/master/ASM/Various/Hakim/UPX Yep, I saw the corresponding post on this forum (15 years ago !). But I don't like the a...

Orion, You can grab arj mode 7 packer and unpacker with source and windows binaries from the other orion_'s (with underscore!) website: http://onorisoft.free.fr/jag/bjlpak.zip As for cranker, I'm sure that last time I tried, I built it with standard cli tools and gcc, it worked first time. Thx mate...

Apart from the 4k binary Cyprian tried, has anyone done any other tests regarding pack ratio? I'm still favouring ARJ mode 4 and 7 for max pack ratio, but this looks like a great alternative for when depack speed is crucial. Regarding packing ratio, if you're looking for best ratio ever, use shrink...

orionfuzion wrote:Hi everybody,

I jump on this thread to ask if someone has the ARJ mode7 unpack routine in ASM?

Thx,

Orion

Finally found in the ARJ Beta v9.97B package on demozoo: https://demozoo.org/productions/133652/

Hi everybody,

I jump on this thread to ask if someone has the ARJ mode7 unpack routine in ASM?

Thx,

Orion

The purpose of this comeback is to 1) have some fun & nostalgia and 2) document the techniques used to crack/file/pack... games on Atari ST. For each new crack, I will release the full sources with detailed explanations. For Safari Guns, it's available here: https://github.com/orionfuzion/newcracks...