Let’s Hack… Fly Spy!
In the early days of Hacking, it was rare a protection system would be as memorable as the one created by Richard Aplin, Author of Fly Spy published by Mastertronic. Havking was always a trade of ideas and new techniques. In this post I'll cover off how to transfer FlySpy to disk that you can follow along.
Diagnostic Command is it Bugged?
Back in the 80's I created a Disk Protection system, exploiting a potential bug in the Firmware of the µPD765A Disk Controller. Looking into this more with todays tools, it seems that the disk record and this specific command isn't implemented as per the specification. Is it my misunderstanding or is there a bug that's gone unnoticed?
µPD765A Disc Controller – Primer
The µPD765A was a prevalent Floppy Disk Controller for many a home computer in the 80's. The Amstrad CPC was no exception. This is a primer for Writing Z80 assembler to access the controller direct. that I'll use for later articles on old school hacking. Want to know more?
DiscSys – XOR
DiscSys was a commonly used Disk Protection format in the 80s for the Amstrad CPC. For a protection system it was very basic, relying on modifying track and sector information to non standard formats to prevent copying with the supplied tools. Though it was very trivial to bypass the protection system and copy the disk anyway. Whilst reminiscing about the past, I discovered a small flaw with implementation in the game XOR, here's what I found...
Speedlock 1987
Speedlock '87 was a prolific Tape Protection System and Turbo Load for the Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum. In this post I look at the protection system and how to hack to it using the same tools available to me in 1987 as a young teenager.
MegaVault Hack – Part 2 – Creating a Loader
Following on from the Back to Basics article, in Part 2 I'll show how to create a custom loader for MegaVault that we hacked. Additionally we'll create an old-school magazine style type-in for cheating on original hardware and cassette.
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