Work-In-Progress Reports for April 2004

29 April 2004

Crack Down: As far as we could see, that game Crack Down was one of the games that were facing oblivion because all copies were apparently badly duplicated and the last level did not work. We found out what the problem was. Basically the last data bit was bad due to a bad trace script or driver, it happens when no gap is written after last block so the next byte may collide with the encoding and bitshifting occurs as a result. (more)

24 April 2004

A game with errors becomes useful: An unmodified copy of the game F17 Challenge had been alluding us for some time, since it writes hiscores to its own disk. Today a contributor submitted a version where unfortunately the second disk had 10 destroyed tracks, however, it is probably due to this that the hiscore track is unmodified. A game with bad disks comes in handy once again...

13 April 2004

The Most Stupid Protection Award...: ...Goes to Raider. It only works if the size of a track that's read is even. However, since the unformatted (or overlapping) part of a track is read differently by each drive this cannot be forecast even if the track reads back on a mastering device as good. Not surprisingly, the contributor who submitted the game could not get it to work. Fortunately we understood what it is trying to achieve. (more)