"I'd always have buddies over at my place in Arizona," said 21-year-old Toronto Maple Leafs center Auston Matthews, a huge gamer who was born Sept. 17, 1997, about four years after the game's release. "There are so many different games, thousands of different games on this system I got. There are fighting games and all this other different kind of stuff, but I kind of like NHL '94 because it's pretty simple and I was good at it. I typically won."
An MIT graduate who started in the business by creating handheld electronic games, Lesser had just finished working on the 1993 version of "John Madden Football" when he got the offer to program NHL '94 for Sega Genesis, the first version of the game to be developed. (It also was later released for the Super Nintendo and Sega CD systems, but Lesser said he wrote the game specifically for Genesis.)
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"Modern sports games are very fast. And there is a lot of eye candy in between the action. NHL '94 had a hard-playing feel with hard checks and action, but it had an even pace. You didn't get lost in all those other things."
"Everything about it was great. You had certain moves you kind of knew would work," the 38-year-old said. "The behind-the-net wraparound always seemed to work. There were some phenomenal players in the game. Pittsburgh was obviously a powerhouse. The music was good. I think everyone still remembers the jingle, and for me, it was that age around 14, a prime age for video games. I wasn't much of a gamer, but that game was an all-time classic.
"You could break the glass with the slap shot, the fan would run down to the glass, hats would come on the ice for hat tricks. There was no loading time. You could rip out like 10-15 games in a half hour."
"No using the default move," said Parros, head of the NHL Department of Player Safety. "We used to have tournaments at my house before every one of our high school games. I continued the tradition while in college at Princeton, although we didn't play before games, usually having a tournament in our spare time."
"I'm very proud of it," he said. "I'm down in the annals of history, whether it's being on the ice or in video games. I like that aspect. Whoever it was at EA who gave me the [great] rating in '94, you've left me something to be proud of for eternity.
Ocal, the tournament announcer, considers himself a super fan of the game. When he went to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto last year and saw the toys and games section, he noticed what he considered a big omission. That prompted him to buy a copy of NHL '94 and submit it with a handwritten note to the Hall's archives staff listing 10 reasons why it should have a presence in the Hall. The game was recently put on display there.
In May 2014, NHL '94 was ranked second on ESPN's list of the greatest sports video games of all time, behind "Tecmo Super Bowl." (For its part, EA Sports included an NHL '94 anniversary mode in "NHL 14.")
"All of these young superstars that are coming in and taking the League by storm haven't really known a day without video games," said Andy Agostini, who is responsible for creating the ratings. "You go back to 1994 and not many of them were born yet. So they've grown up with the games. Every time we run into them and we chat with them on social media, they let us know what they dislike about their ratings. It's always in good fun."
Software cracking (known as "breaking" mostly in the 1980s[1]) is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software (software cracker), especially copy protection features (including protection against the manipulation of software, serial number, hardware key, date checks and disc check) or software annoyances like nag screens and adware.
A crack refers to the means of achieving, for example a stolen serial number or a tool that performs that act of cracking.[2] Some of these tools are called keygen, patch, loader, or no-disc crack. A keygen is a handmade product serial number generator that often offers the ability to generate working serial numbers in your own name. A patch is a small computer program that modifies the machine code of another program. This has the advantage for a cracker to not include a large executable in a release when only a few bytes are changed.[3] A loader modifies the startup flow of a program and does not remove the protection but circumvents it.[4][5] A well-known example of a loader is a trainer used to cheat in games.[6] Fairlight pointed out in one of their .nfo files that these type of cracks are not allowed for warez scene game releases.[7][4][8] A nukewar has shown that the protection may not kick in at any point for it to be a valid crack.[9]
Software cracking is closely related to reverse engineering because the process of attacking a copy protection technology, is similar to the process of reverse engineering.[10] The distribution of cracked copies is illegal in most countries. There have been lawsuits over cracking software.[11] It might be legal to use cracked software in certain circumstances.[12] Educational resources for reverse engineering and software cracking are, however, legal and available in the form of Crackme programs.
On the Apple II, the operating system directly controls the step motor that moves the floppy drive head, and also directly interprets the raw data, called nibbles, read from each track to identify the data sectors. This allowed complex disk-based software copy protection, by storing data on half tracks (0, 1, 2.5, 3.5, 5, 6...), quarter tracks (0, 1, 2.25, 3.75, 5, 6...), and any combination thereof. In addition, tracks did not need to be perfect rings, but could be sectioned so that sectors could be staggered across overlapping offset tracks, the most extreme version being known as spiral tracking. It was also discovered that many floppy drives did not have a fixed upper limit to head movement, and it was sometimes possible to write an additional 36th track above the normal 35 tracks. The standard Apple II copy programs could not read such protected floppy disks, since the standard DOS assumed that all disks had a uniform 35-track, 13- or 16-sector layout. Special nibble-copy programs such as Locksmith and Copy II Plus could sometimes duplicate these disks by using a reference library of known protection methods; when protected programs were cracked they would be completely stripped of the copy protection system, and transferred onto a standard format disk that any normal Apple II copy program could read.
On Atari 8-bit computers, the most common protection method was via "bad sectors". These were sectors on the disk that were intentionally unreadable by the disk drive. The software would look for these sectors when the program was loading and would stop loading if an error code was not returned when accessing these sectors. Special copy programs were available that would copy the disk and remember any bad sectors. The user could then use an application to spin the drive by constantly reading a single sector and display the drive RPM. With the disk drive top removed a small screwdriver could be used to slow the drive RPM below a certain point. Once the drive was slowed down the application could then go and write "bad sectors" where needed. When done the drive RPM was sped up back to normal and an uncracked copy was made. Of course cracking the software to expect good sectors made for readily copied disks without the need to meddle with the disk drive. As time went on more sophisticated methods were developed, but almost all involved some form of malformed disk data, such as a sector that might return different data on separate accesses due to bad data alignment. Products became available (from companies such as Happy Computers) which replaced the controller BIOS in Atari's "smart" drives. These upgraded drives allowed the user to make exact copies of the original program with copy protections in place on the new disk.
On the Commodore 64, several methods were used to protect software. For software distributed on ROM cartridges, subroutines were included which attempted to write over the program code. If the software was on ROM, nothing would happen, but if the software had been moved to RAM, the software would be disabled. Because of the operation of Commodore floppy drives, one write protection scheme would cause the floppy drive head to bang against the end of its rail, which could cause the drive head to become misaligned. In some cases, cracked versions of software were desirable to avoid this result. A misaligned drive head was rare usually fixing itself by smashing against the rail stops. Another brutal protection scheme was grinding from track 1 to 40 and back a few times.
Most of the early software crackers were computer hobbyists who often formed groups that competed against each other in the cracking and spreading of software. Breaking a new copy protection scheme as quickly as possible was often regarded as an opportunity to demonstrate one's technical superiority rather than a possibility of money-making. Software crackers usually did not benefit materially from their actions and their motivation was the challenge itself of removing the protection.[14] Some low skilled hobbyists would take already cracked software and edit various unencrypted strings of text in it to change messages a game would tell a game player, often something considered vulgar. Uploading the altered copies on file sharing networks provided a source of laughs for adult users. The cracker groups of the 1980s started to advertise themselves and their skills by attaching animated screens known as crack intros in the software programs they cracked and released.[15] Once the technical competition had expanded from the challenges of cracking to the challenges of creating visually stunning intros, the foundations for a new subculture known as demoscene were established. Demoscene started to separate itself from the illegal "warez scene" during the 1990s and is now regarded as a completely different subculture. Many software crackers have later grown into extremely capable software reverse engineers; the deep knowledge of assembly required in order to crack protections enables them to reverse engineer drivers in order to port them from binary-only drivers for Windows to drivers with source code for Linux and other free operating systems. Also because music and game intro was such an integral part of gaming the music format and graphics became very popular when hardware became affordable for the home user. 2ff7e9595c
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