Original non-cracked versions of demos

[galibert]

Do you people know where I can find the original, still-protected versions of the classic demos? Like syntax terror and punish your machine with the bus error stack frame, mindbomb with the screen-synchronized trace decrypt, etc? Breaking the protections for the sake of the emulators is nice, but I'd rather have my emulator handle them correctly...

OG.

[orionfuzion]

Do you people know where I can find the original, still-protected versions of the classic demos? Like syntax terror and punish your machine with the bus error stack frame, mindbomb with the screen-synchronized trace decrypt, etc? Breaking the protections for the sake of the emulators is nice, but I'd rather have my emulator handle them correctly...

OG.

You can find some of them on Atarimania:
http://www.atarimania.com/pgemainsoft.a ... D&system=S

-- Orion

[ijor]

Hi Olivier,

I'm not sure there is a centralized location that preserves the original version of demos, or non commercial software for that matter. And I agree it is a pity. But you will probably find most of them on older demos collection that were compiled before demos were patched. Lotek Style collection comes to mind. Should be available on line.

Then you also have demos with disk copy protection, like the famous Union Demo. These are not included in old collections because at the time there was no suitable file image format for copy protected disks. There are very, very, few demos with disk copy protection.

Breaking the protections for the sake of the emulators is nice, but I'd rather have my emulator handle them correctly...

Some demos were not patched for emulators but for actual hardware compatibility reasons. Some demos, i.e., originally required specific wake states to run correctly. For running the original version of those demos your emulator might need to implement wake state support.

[spiny]

demozoo.org should have them all, and if it doesn't post which ones are missing and we'll get them added

[ijor]

demozoo.org should have them all, and if it doesn't post which ones are missing and we'll get them added

You probably have most demos there, and surely all the well known ones. But do you have all the versions, patched and not, of each demo? And if so, do you identify them properly? Otherwise how we could know which is the original, unmodified, version? This is the point here.

[thomas3]

I didn't realise that the most circulated versions of old demos had been cracked?

Leonard's fix of the Cuddly Demos aside.

I presume this is because old emulators couldn't handle synced decryption etc. Interesting though. It's a loss not to have the original "protections" readily downloadable, if this is the case.

[terence]

transbeauce 2 demo featured a part of the shon shu shi protection, i discovered that lately.
i read all the writings about the shon shu shi protection and crack by Orion and i just found out that the protection that mcoder gave me for the transbeauce 2 was the Zarathustra part without the sync code made by Altair

and of course the transbeauce 2 demo has to be cracked to run on emulator in 2022.

[ijor]

and of course the transbeauce 2 demo has to be cracked to run on emulator in 2022.

Are you sure it still nowadays needs to be cracked? Do you have a link to the original version? Or there is typo there, and you didn't really mean 2022?

I didn't realise that the most circulated versions of old demos had been cracked?
...
I presume this is because old emulators couldn't handle synced decryption etc. Interesting though. It's a loss not to have the original "protections" readily downloadable, if this is the case.

I don't know if most, but certainly this is the case with many demos. And yes, we should have all the original, unmodified, versions available somewhere

[spiny]

demozoo.org should have them all, and if it doesn't post which ones are missing and we'll get them added

You probably have most demos there, and surely all the well known ones. But do you have all the versions, patched and not, of each demo? And if so, do you identify them properly? Otherwise how we could know which is the original, unmodified, version? This is the point here.

how would I know if it's a cracked version or not? are the cracked versions tagged like cracked games?

I'm well aware that anythihng on a 'demo compil' will be filed etc, but a disk image of say ''syntax terror' on demozoo is very likly to be the original that was swapped back in the day. https://demozoo.org/productions/1883/

[orionfuzion]

demozoo.org should have them all, and if it doesn't post which ones are missing and we'll get them added

You probably have most demos there, and surely all the well known ones. But do you have all the versions, patched and not, of each demo? And if so, do you identify them properly? Otherwise how we could know which is the original, unmodified, version? This is the point here.

how would I know if it's a cracked version or not? are the cracked versions tagged like cracked games?

I'm well aware that anythihng on a 'demo compil' will be filed etc, but a disk image of say ''syntax terror' on demozoo is very likly to be the original that was swapped back in the day. https://demozoo.org/productions/1883/

That's why I pointed to Atarimania in my previous answer, because it is known to host only original versions.
http://www.atarimania.com/pgemainsoft.a ... D&system=S

This is true for the games and I expected it to be the case for the demos too...
I've checked the Union Demo and it is provided in STX format, meaning that it is most probably the original version (with the special format).

It's worth asking to Marakatti (memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=1874) who should know if the demos on Atarimania are the original versions.


-- Orion

[thomas3]

transbeauce 2 demo featured a part of the shon shu shi protection, i discovered that lately.
i read all the writings about the shon shu shi protection and crack by Orion and i just found out that the protection that mcoder gave me for the transbeauce 2 was the Zarathustra part without the sync code made by Altair

and of course the transbeauce 2 demo has to be cracked to run on emulator in 2022.

Super interesting.
I'd love more of a write up from some old pro about the process of and tech behind putting together an old style track-loading, no FAT, protected demo. These techniques will be lost otherwise.

I may have dreamt this, but I'm sure I read an article by Leonard touching on some of these technicalities, but I now can't find it.

[npomarede]

and of course the transbeauce 2 demo has to be cracked to run on emulator in 2022.

Are you sure it still nowadays needs to be cracked? Do you have a link to the original version? Or there is typo there, and you didn't really mean 2022?

I'm quite sure it runs under Hatari since quite a long time, something around 2008, but my notes at that time are not very precise.
The protection sure uses a lot of undocumented 68000 stuffs, such as stack content after some exception 2/3 and undefined bits that contain part of the faulty opcode for example It took some time to make it work

[npomarede]

I don't know if most, but certainly this is the case with many demos. And yes, we should have all the original, unmodified, versions available somewhere

I still have the floppies with all the ST demos I used to watch, so I'm quite sure this disk are the "original" version (at least not cracked). I could dump some of them, but it takes some time.
As for not modified, some demos had some kind of guest book part where you could save your name and leave a message, so such floppies will of course have different content after being swapped over several users.

Nicolas

[ijor]

I still have the floppies with all the ST demos I used to watch, so I'm quite sure this disk are the "original" version (at least not cracked). I could dump some of them, but it takes some time.

I think that would be a wonderful initiative.

That's why I pointed to Atarimania in my previous answer, because it is known to host only original versions.
http://www.atarimania.com/pgemainsoft.a ... D&system=S
This is true for the games and I expected it to be the case for the demos too...

I don't think that this logic applies for demos. They didn't have a reliable way to identify original demo versions.

I've checked the Union Demo and it is provided in STX format, meaning that it is most probably the original version (with the special format).

Yes, those demos with the actual disk copy protection intact are likely unmodified. But again, there are very few demos with disk copy protection.

[npomarede]

I still have the floppies with all the ST demos I used to watch, so I'm quite sure this disk are the "original" version (at least not cracked). I could dump some of them, but it takes some time.

I think that would be a wonderful initiative.

As modern PC don't have floppy drive an even no floppy controler at all, I first need to find my kryoflux board, which is somewhere in a unpacked box since I moved to another house

Nicolas

[ijor]

As modern PC don't have floppy drive an even no floppy controler at all, I first need to find my kryoflux board, which is somewhere in a unpacked box since I moved to another house

Well, if you have no drive then the Kryoflux will not help Or perhaps you mean that you have a drive together the Kryoflux board?

Note that almost all demos have no disk copy protection and they are not published duplicated disks. There is no real need to perform a low level dump in this case. A simple MSA/ST image create on an original ST should be fine.

[npomarede]

As modern PC don't have floppy drive an even no floppy controler at all, I first need to find my kryoflux board, which is somewhere in a unpacked box since I moved to another house

Well, if you have no drive then the Kryoflux will not help Or perhaps you mean that you have a drive together the Kryoflux board?

I mean I have no PC with a built-in drive, but I still have a stand alone drive that works with my KF board. Just need to find it along with the board

Note that almost all demos have no disk copy protection and they are not published duplicated disks. There is no real need to perform a low level dump in this case. A simple MSA/ST image create on an original ST should be fine.

Yes I'm aware. Apart from the Union Demo there were only a few demos with special formatting and built-in copier, can't remember the name at the moment (but the authors certainly thought it would be cool to do like the Union Demo ).

Although MSA/ST are very simplistic formats, maybe MSA would be a little better, because it has a "real" header to store each track separately in the floppy image, while ST format can be ambiguous sometimes because you only know the total file size of the dump and you need to transform this into number of tracks, number of sectors and number of sides, but that's really a small difference between MSA and ST
Nicolas

[spiny]

Which demos need imaging? I'm still not sure where the cofusion about 'fixed for emulator versions' comes from.

[npomarede]

Which demos need imaging? I'm still not sure where the cofusion about 'fixed for emulator versions' comes from.

I think we don't really know which ones ; certainly not that much, but for example there were some fixed versions by Leonard a long time ago to make them work with his SainT emulator. Problem is that some of these patched versions were archived in pouet.net or demozoo.org or maybe atarimaia without telling if it's the patched version or the original one.
So, unless we dump all demos from still existing floppies from thoses times we can never be sure floppy images are not pached (especially since most of the time such patched demos don't display anything at boot to differentiate them)

Nicolas

[ijor]

Which demos need imaging? I'm still not sure where the cofusion about 'fixed for emulator versions' comes from.

As Nicolas said, we don't know exactly which demos were patched, and which images correspond to the original version and which not. That's the whole point.

Some demos were cracked because, until recently, the protection couldn't be run under emulation. Other demos were patched because they break under certain wakeups, etc.

[npomarede]

Which demos need imaging? I'm still not sure where the cofusion about 'fixed for emulator versions' comes from.

As Nicolas said, we don't know exactly which demos were patched, and which images correspond to the original version and which not. That's the whole point.

Some demos were cracked because, until recently, the protection couldn't be run under emulation. Other demos were patched because they break under certain wakeups, etc.

As an another example, I think there was also a patched version of the Cuddly demo to make it work with STE (because the boot loader relied on some specific TOS values, different with STE's TOS). This one would be different because it was really patched in the '90s, not for emulators

[dlfrsilver]

I have already uploaded quite a long time ago the Union Demo in Kryoflux format.

[npomarede]

I have already uploaded quite a long time ago the Union Demo in Kryoflux format.

Yes Union Demo is not a problem, due to its protection and its special format (5 1024 bytes sectors + 1 512 sector) this demo can only be archived in STX format for example, so it's quite unlikely it could be modified for an emulator.