=============================================================================  AMIGA Piracy ============================================================================= The last few months UGA has been preparing a new step into the PC market. Thanks to piracy and the fact that the AMIGA is pushed into the gamescorner many serious users will switch to the PC market. Currently several software developers are considering leaving the AMIGA market because there is no money to make with serious software. Just check out the magazines the coming time and you will see an increasement of developers switching to development for PC and consoles. We have been pushing and promoting the AMIGA for over 5 years now but it seems that we fight a lost battle. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am pushing harder than Commodore itself. Ofcourse the situation in Germany and the UK is different from the other European countries but if sales will go down further because of mass piracy the AMIGA will face the same situation as the ATARI ST does now. More and more computerdealers no longer stock ATARI titles and AMIGA will be next. The situation is even more horrible because every AMIGA owner can visit official meetings of local computerclubs (or should I say pirate clubs) and copy the latest software releases. Officially forbidden but Dutch police seems to be more busy with give traffic tickets and paying social visits to drugdealers. Even computerhacking is still no official crime overhere, American companies and military services can tell you all about it. Even more strange is the fact that when you would do the same with music you would face time in prison and high fines. We have a special squad for computercrimes but they seem to be powerless because the justice department is pulling the real strings. So the only thing they can do is warning people, collecting evidence and informing the local press. They sometimes bust a PC pirate board and that's all. Also there are strange things happening in the UK. Commercial programs from Germany and the USA are being offered as PD and no one seems to be bothered. Even respected magazines who say they refuse adverts of pirated software are printing big adverts for illegal copies of Red Sector demomaker, Tetracopier and more. We have send faxes to most of the magazines to inform so they know the facts. Again I will mention the titles on this list of piracted software. We have informed all Newsflash dealers about these titles so any further offer is plain piracy. Any complaints can be passed to F.A.S.T. For your information we give you the names of the programs which are copyrighted commercial products. Any sales of these products or ad- vertisements offering these products as PD will be seen as a direct violation of International Copyrights. This can lead to prosecution in UK courts by companies who lost money because of these sales. One UK magazine even placed RSI demomaker on their coverdisk. The following programs are copyrighted commercial products: - Oktalyzer (DM 99,--) (C) Media GmbH - Xcopy (DM 99,--) (C) Cachet Software - Tetra Copy (DM 59,--) (C) Media GmbH - Red Sector Demomaker (DM 69,--) (C) DATA Becker Vector Object editor (DM 29,80) ,, ,, Bobby Bob editor (DM 29,80) ,, ,, Vector Balls editor (DM 29,80) ,, ,, - Powerpacker V 3..4 (Fl 49,--) (C) UGA SOFTWARE Toxic Waste (Fl 15.00) ,, ,, UGA Powerfonts (Fl 15.00) ,, ,, - Talking Colouring Book - Math Wizard - Cubulus (C) Software 2000 And we are not the only company complaining about the sick AMIGA market. The last few months many small companies have gone bankrupt and many will follow. I really hope the AMIGA will survive this crisis but there is a risk that the 16 Bit scene will be in big problems because of lack of new serious software and the severe competition of big console pro- ducers like SEGA, Nintendo and Neo-geo who spend millions of dollars on promotion. Some people will say: but what about CDTV ?? Ofcourse you are right to think this is an interesting market for software developers. But there are some problems as well: - Bugs, ever seen a new program without any bugs or problems with different hardware configurations. What happens if this program is already put on CD?. Testing a program for a long period can be a solution but time is money in this business. - Before you can release a CD you need Commodore's approval so it can happen your CD will never be released. - For a small company producing a CDTV is mostly too expensive and the big developers will concentrate on CDTV games and not serious software because the games market is bigger. - Piracy, nothing is perfect. Even the first pirate copies are already available in compressed form using Quarterback. Just install them on a harddisk and you have a running pirate version of a CD game. Also there is no way to put tools on a CDTV because it will be even easier to convert them to diskformat and spread them in the scene. If the public will not support software developers by buying originals the result will be a same short of situation as now exists on the MSX and Atari ST market. And we all now that a computer without new software is worthless. There are enough people like ourselves who like to make the AMIGA a winner and a better image than just a gamesmachine but if there is no support of the public the machine will become history. UGA will continue developing fine products and our magazine but if the market will not get better we will spend more time on PC products and stop development of new tools and educational software. So it is up to you...... Because we are not the only company facing a huge pirate problem we include an article which was published in CTW and tells all about the piracy problems of Ocean. The article: Gary Bracey of Ocean Software seems to be fighting a lone battle to actually do something about the ridiculous level of piracy hitting 16-bit software sales. Last week saw the launch of RoboCop 3 on the Amiga. It is his, and possible the market's, last real hope. GARY WHITTA investigates. I can remember the old days. About five years ago, when I was nothing more than a mere slip of a lad, experiencing the untold joys of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. A friend of mine showed me a pirated copy of Jet Set Willy which had come into his posession. Though there was nothing startling about the fact that it was pirated, what amazed me at the time was the colour chart that came with it. Some silly sod had gone to the trouble of copying by hand the entire mammoth protection sheet with nothing more than a sheet of graph paper and a set of felt tip pens. THOUSANDS of little coloured squares reproduced perfectly and painstakingly - no doubt over a number of days. And all for the sake of not paying 5.50. Its that particular memory that I always recall whenever somebody announces a "pirate proof" new security device for their software - and it leaves me feeling somewhat cynical. Don't get me wrong. There's no doubting the ingenuity of some of the more recent efforts - multi-layer code wheels and unphotocopiable paper being two of my personal favourites - but I can't help thinking that no matter how clever you are, the pirates will always wheedle their way around the problem. It's probably true to say that documentation related security like code-wheels and manual word-checkers are never going to snuff out the piracy problem, because the little sods are just too determined to go down without a fight that way. The only way to win, it would seem, is with as system that - at least theoretically - should make it IMPOSSIBLE to play anything but a genuine copy. Its always been a tricky business - ask anyone who remembers the ill-fated lenslock - but Oceans latest brave effort might just be the one to do the trick. The "dongle" that comes with RoboCop 3 is supposedly impossible to fake - or at least enough to make actually buying a real one a more realistic option. Plugging into the back of the spare joystick port, it interacts with the software and simply wont let the game run if it isnt plugged in. It's by no means the first time such a device has been tried - they've been favourites with the PC publishers for quite a while - but its certainly the first time a major leisure publisher has made such a concerted effort to stamp out the piracy problem. Oceans jovial software director Gary Bracey has been the driving force behind the scheme - but he's by no means happy that he's been forced to resort to such measures. "I think it's a very sad indictment of the industry today that we have to do something like this to protect our sales, he says. Considering that the price of these dongles is about a quid a throw, Bracey has a right to be miserable. "It's an expensive venture, but we're absorbing the price so that the consumer doesn't have to pay any more. We're hoping that the lack of pirated versions will offset the cost of bundling the dongle with the game". Confident though he is, Bracey admits that no matter how sophisticated a dongle or other device may be, the hardened cracking crews will find a way around it eventually. The whole point of the excercise is simply to buy time by holding off the hackers during the crucial first couple of months while the game is new and "hot". Hopefully, by the time Doctor Blitter and Finland Freaks have programmed their way around the dongle, it will be too late for the pirated version to damage the game's sales. So far as Ocean is concerned thats only a theory, but for the geezers who actually invented the thing, there are hard facts that support the case. Ex QuickSilva impresarios John Hollis and Nick Lambert bundled a prototype dongle with an ST MIDI sequencer package they produced back in 1988 - and to this day, Lambert claims its the only Atari music package never to have been hacked. The pair claim that the dongle they have now produced for Ocean under their new company name of Worx-4-me is a far more sophisticated affair. "When we were researching how we would do this dongle ", Lambert explains, "We took a look at some other software packages that had used similar devices. One piece of software we looked at used a dongle that slotted into the cartridge port, and the part of the software that controlled the device was very clever stuff. The problem was that it was put in such an obvious place that anyone who knows anything about the Atari could just go straight to that piece of code and cut it out. It's like putting ultra-high security locks on your door and then leaving the key on a string outside." To get around this problem, Hollis has developed a system whereby the protection code that interacts with the dongle is woven intricately into the rest of the program. Because it's coiled around various vital parts of the game code like a cancer, its very difficult to cut out without damaging the actual game program. WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE ? Early results like these can only be good news for the games industry, although the price of these devices - no matter how effective they may be - means that many companies are likely to sit back and wait to see how products like Robocop 3 perform before they take the plunge themselves. But nobody will be watching more avidly than Ocean which is naturally keen to see if the dongle turns out to be as uncrackable as it is supposed to be. Of course, any pirated copies that do make their way back to Ocean are liable to be a great help. When analysed it will allow Hollis and Lambert to refine their code, stamp out any loopholes, and make future dongles even tougher to crack. The hope is that, if the Worx-4-me dongle becomes an industry standard, the security wont have to be added to the main program as an afterthought, as was the case with RoboCop 3 - programmers will be able to protect their games even as they are writing them, with security so tortuously coded in that it will be nigh-on impossible to hack out short of completely re-writing the game. Of course, it's all still theory and it won't be until well after christmas that Ocean can get definite feedback on RoboCoq 3's performance, and the industry decides whether to commit or not. =============================================================================  AMIGA Piracy =============================================================================