Crazy Video Game DRM Prism, 1980’s Style
Written by enigmax on June 17, 2008These days, although DRM is almost universally hated, it’s not a new reaction - people have always hated it. We take a look at an innovative device designed to thwart 1980’s pirates and hope and pray that no-one reintroduces this one. Love it or hate it, it’s one of the most intrusive DRM systems ever seen.
The device is a few inches long, rectangular, with two folding hinges on either side supporting a specially engineered prism-like lens. At certain points in the game the user can go no further until he holds it over some strange on-screen blotches, which become miraculously readable when viewed through the special lenses of the device. Type in the now-visible code and the player can continue. Surely this is pushing way past the limits of acceptable DRM?
Thankfully, Lenslok isn’t the latest horrible idea in anti-piracy technology - in fact, it was first introduced more than 20 years ago. Developed by inventor John Frost, the device had a lens which carried around a dozen grooves which sent light though it at varying angles, ‘unscrambling’ seemingly random graphical blocks underneath it to reveal a secret ‘continue’ code. 
These days, DRM is often applied a little more stealthily but never has it been as complex for the legitimate user as it was with Lenslok.
Rather than explain the full process of using the Lenslok, here is a scan of the original instructions that came with the device:
The first game to use the Lenslok DRM was the ZX Spectrum version of the hugely successful wireframe-3D shoot ‘em up, ‘Elite‘. But of course, we’re talking about DRM here so yes, you guessed it, it caused lots of problems for the legitimate users. As each version of the Lenslok device was unique to the game it sought to protect, sending out the incorrect Lenslok device to around 500 buyers of ‘Elite’ wasn’t the best move made by the publisher, ‘Firebird‘. None of these people could play the game, but probably had an interesting experience for a few hours trying to work out how to use the prism. With no Internet forums to voice their anger, there were many complaints in the computer magazines of the day.
The final nail in the Lenslok coffin was its inability to work with anything other than a tiny portable TV, as the on-screen input window would otherwise be bigger than the device itself, rendering it useless.
Although Lenslok is now (thankfully) dead and buried, those people running a ZX Spectrum emulator might still come across its evil work when playing games such as ACE, Art Studio, Elite, Jewels of Darkness, Price of Magik, Tomahawk or TT Racer.
So, the choice is to either pick up a Lenslok off eBay for next to nothing, or run a digital emulation of it - a sure sign of the times.
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46 Responses
When will these assholes learn?
Collective knowledge should be free.
And yes, I have Gout in my left tit.
what the fuck? thats cool… no really it is. but then i’m really weird, i find etymology interesting. i bet those prism things are really collectible these days.
LOL, dude, i dont know if you are really cool or really old coz i dont even remember this sh!t! Guess i was the generation directly after this “lenslock” crap (Although i did play pong, i think i really entered around the Super mario era… still one of my all time favourites. Although pac-man and mario cant really compare to todays high def games, they still more than made up for it in fun to play… ok, guess i’m old too :) )
Cheers!
http://www.ezee.se
what’s next? DRM cyborg eyes?
This reminds me of my history classes. :S
elite was cracked and fully playable for free on ZX Spectrum short after release :)
“Lenslok is a trademark of A S A P Developments…” Yeah, really… if the name doesn’t mean, to play the games ASAP, then maybe to scare your customers away ASAP?
That’s a joke, I mean… how crazy was the world back then? Well, actually it isn’t much better now, but the “great inventions” of these earlier times, and Lenslok is a perfect example, were just crazy…
sure it was but how did you get a copy bac then? I had half a dozen friends with Spectrums and we pirated like crazy from each other but there was no internet to spread the stuff and no way to get the knowledge unless you knew someone in a scene or demo group
Man i really miss thoses POKEs :(
I had almost forgotten about this, nice to see that it has not been lost in the mists of time. They really were terrible devices and they never really gained a foothold.
Prior to this, discs and tapes had more subtle copy protection but almost inevitably somebody would figure out a way to crack it.
I seem to remember that ‘Ultimate Play The Game’ games had pretty decent software-only copy protection. Knight Lore, Alien 8 anybody?
I remember those, some sort of fast loader i think. The one i could never copy was Invasion of the Body Snatchas, a defender-like shoot em up. It was recorded in bursts if my old brain doesnt deceive me
Imagine something like this for every different song you had on an ipod. “You are about to play Coldplay - Viva la Vida. Please find one of your thousands of individual lensloks and enter the code.” I would lol at that.
Only a retard would bring something like that back.. soo lensloks here we come.
http://rycon.baywords.com
That’s really excellent.
I remember a neighbor having one of these when I was growing up. IIRC the game was something where you were a spy collecting fragments of a shredded secret document and then you had to assemble it.
The Zool Spinning wheel DRM on Acorn/Risc-OS was epic
http://i31.tinypic.com/i41pv6.jpg
> The Zool Spinning wheel DRM on Acorn/Risc-OS was epic
I dont get it, how was it used?
The images on the instructions remind me of something from one of the Dharma stations in Lost
This goes along with all those crazy clear red cards that “mysteriously” expose some code.
Stone Age Games LoL
If someone give me for free, i ain’t gonna take it for FREE ! ! !
and if you got it wrong you had to reload. 5 minutes of your life wasted over some plastic crappy device. It took me maybe half an hour of reloading and playing with this thing just to get to fly a wireframe apache…
“hope and pray that no-one reintroduces this one”
Why would it bother anybody? These days it would be cracked in seconds!!!!
i remember on the nintendo a game called star tropics had something kinda similar. about halfwa y through the game you ahd to dip this piece of paper that came with the game in water to read a code to enter into the subs computer to be able to do somethign to advance. i remember thinking what if i lost this or what if i didnt have thsi i wouldnt be able to continue. luckily it turns out the code is the same for every copy but still you cant advance without the code(now online). funny article though i just want one because.
Someone would end up completely removing the lenslok code from the game.
@#6
Back in the day files were shared the old fashioned way…..exchanging floppy discs through the mail. So next time you want to complain about how long a download is taking, it’s light speed compared to the early days of warez. :P
F*ck me! I remember using Lenslock(tm) on Speccy games! Jeez, if you were lucky you would get it right, inside three attempts, else *blip*, restart and another 10 min wait to reload!
What about that bloody awful colour grid on Jet Set Willy on the speccy?!
Best protection scheme I saw was that one Rocket Ranger, the wheel for the rocket fuel load, only took about 20 mins to write it all out in a spreadsheet, but still nice idea which sort of protected the game but also added to the fun!
Wow, an interesting trip back in time.
I hope torrentfreak publishes more of these articles, which prove even more, that history, unfortunately, moves in circles.
I remember the lenslock device that came with out copy of elite. I wasn’t previously aware that each lens device was unique. The greatest problem for it as a form of DRM was that you could just read the code off the screen with a little practice. My Brother and I would frequently have to do that when we couldn’t find the device.
It effectively just displaces a handful of the pixels in a monotype low res font. There aren’t that many characters and they are all pretty distinctive shapes so you can learn them quite quickly.
I still have one of these! Came with The Graphic Adventure Creator.
worked perfectly!
Never had any lenslock games.
The worst I had was a Marble Madness clone that required a dongle to play the full game. As terrible as DRM is who doesn’t love saying dongle?
Surprised it never made a resurgence with the popularity of USB.
I recall playing others requiring entering a word from some page of the manual. Of course you’d dutifully look up the 17th word in the third paragraph on page 63 and then the damned thing wouldn’t work because they’d arsed up in printing the manual.
When I was a kid we used to just use a tape-to-tape and copy the games. Speedloaders made this harder though, but then I got a Multiface and a saturday job in a computer shop… You kids won’t remember but shops back then weren’t like Game or whatever, they were often dead seedy, just like the one I worked at. Piracy was dead easy then; just stick the Multiface in, load the first game, save it off and repeat until all the games released that week were copied by the time I went home. And got a few quid for working in the shop…
‘Back in the day files were shared the old fashioned way…..exchanging floppy discs through the mail. So next time you want to complain about how long a download is taking, it’s light speed compared to the early days of warez. :P’
Aye, but when I got into the C64 trading scene disks were sent and received daily so there was a fair bit of throughput.
The top boys dialled BBS on their 300 baud modems though…
Obligatory:
FUCK THE RIAA!
FUCK THE MPAA!
FUCK DRM!
I had a Lenslokk not on a game but on Rainbird Art Studio. Was really annoying when you couldn’t get into the very software you owned, because Lenslokk was so bad, especially on a application you’d be using frequently!
Also weirdly Elite 48K had Lenslokk, but 128K version didn’t, but worked on a 48K spectrum if you had a copy of the manual ;-)
Still searching for info on that “Zool Spinning wheel DRM on Acorn”, can someone post a link or something, am raelly curious to know how it worked..
Thanks in advance!
Not quite correct, I dug my Speccie out of the loft a little while ago and the lenselok (with Elite) worked perfectly on my (at the time) 32″ Sony TV (a couple of keys could be used to scale the scrambled text to the correct size), and (just for the record) this was very far from the first physical DRM, go back a few years to Buzzard Bait on the Dragon 32, that had a physical dongle you needed to put in one of the joystick ports during loading or it would accuse you of being a pirate and refuse to launch…
I still have a LensLok too… Came with some Rainbird software for the C64 actually. The Advanced Music System I think, with a MIDI cartridge and everything. I made some astoundingly horrible music that way…
Ahh the memories - JSW colour grid LMAO!
Brrrr-BEEP! Brrrr-BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEadnauseam…
=]
DRM (new) RIAA Style:
1. Must buy a $14.99 CD.
2. Must have obtained a “CD Unlocker” (prices may very from $250,000+ because for each person that downloads the music illegally, we lose $250,000 [obviously])
3. Plug “CD Unlocker” into headphones.
4. You get up to 30 seconds of playing time!
5. Repeat by buying the above products to listen to the next 30 seconds of the song.
Wow, imagine lenslock Pong:
Ping |. |
Pong | .|
Ping |. |
Continue code: ||l,|.|;:|1l|’
Fail | |.
Too slow, try again?
but seriously, what makes them think this will really work. Basically its no different from the current day serial number, only much more annoying, and even more potentially problematic (don’t loose the litte piece of shit or you’re screwed). All you gotta do to get around it is utilize modern day keygens to use the generated number as a code to simulate the visual aspects. Hell, I bet you could probably make a Photoshop action that decodes this or something.
An old Electronic Arts Game for the
Commodore 64/128 and other platforms
of the time (mainly Atari 400/800 &
Apple II) called Demonstalkers that
came out in 1987 had a blue disc
called Arthur’s Magical Cypher.
Every five levels of this Gauntlet-
like game you had to enter a code
based on what combinations were given
by the game. Get it wrong and the
game would end, of course.
niniff.com/?YIT
I had one of these for a speccy game - and it didnt come on part way through like the instructins say, it came on at the beginning and i have managed to play the game it was with twice i think, it was that bad (used to get it out every few months “for another go” lol)
Oh aye i forgot - another one i had was some coloured sheets that you had to put over some coloured blocks on the screen & would make a code appear - that at least had the advantage of getting used to the colours and being able to work it out after a few go’s
That lenslok was a joke, cracked in a few minutes with the right tools. At the time I was even dissappointed how easy it was to circumvent.
This article was a sad trip down memory lane for me. I had purchased a copy of Tomahawk for my beloved 48K ZX Spectrum, but I was unable to play the game due to not being able to decipher the codes with this goddamed contraption - I hope it’s inventor and anyone else who seeks to foist DRM on us die a thousand deaths, each one more awful than the last.
Apart from the above though I have always had a high regard for the 8 bit programmers and what they were able to cram into 48 Kilobytes of RAM.
@34
The game would give you a picture of zool in a certain pose, you line up that pose on your wheel and the holes underneath would reveal a code for you to key in to start the game. Its two pieces of card held together in the centre so they can rotate. The top layer has some holes cut into it. Other games had them too, see one of the monkey islands.
You might be able to find out more, they were called code wheels, and we used to call it copy protection back in the day, not DRM!
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