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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Brrrr-BEEP! Brrrr-BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEadnauseam…

=]

Thanks in advance!

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 ;-)

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…

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.

worked perfectly!

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.