[karmakaze]

My thoughts exactly. I spent a good amount of time learning about and cracking various schemes. It was never about distribution but about bragging rights and the different ways code was obfuscated. Most were disappointingly simple, others had more layers, very rarely found ones that needed special effort beyond say a person-day or two to solve.

[OnlyMortal]

Skate Or Die in the C64 was tricky as it had self modifying code for obfuscation. Took me a while to “debug” that.

The copy protection of Ocean games was much easier to crack. They had a “IsOkToRun” type of function which returned 1 in the A register.