Author: dave

I have written about the Sharp MZ-700 before: it was the first computer I ever used properly, I taught myself BASIC on it from the excellent manual and had my first experiments in Z80 machine…

A bit of different breaking of code protection this time. Many, many years ago my parents bought our first computer, a Sharp MZ-700. This was initially a disappointment to me as it had no decent…

A while back I wrote a blog post about breaking the Key module on RISC OS games from the 4th Dimension and how I went back to reminding myself how I did it many years…

A story was on the BBC Wales news site recently where a motorist was filmed passing dangerously closely to a cyclist, tried to contest it and ended up losing and paying a massive fine. One…

Okay, it’s been over a year since I wrote part 2; but I thought I may as well continue with the next step. I always said I was really good at procrastination! Anyway, we had…

I’ve recently been playing with the keyboards of some of my old 80s computers for no reasons other than trying to understand how they work. After a total failure with an Atari ST keyboard, I…

It’s time to start reversing another text adventure. For this one I wanted to go back to one I remember playing when I was a sprog: Stranded, published on the BBC Micro by Superior Software…

I left you last time with a decoded file protection module, now let’s dive in and find out what this insidious module actually does. Note when I say word here I mean 32-bit words. Module…

A discussion on Twitter lead to a bit of a reminiscence about breaking game copy protection on the Archimedes, in the good old days of yore. There was one copy protection system I used to…