AmigaActive (1665/1728)

From:John Marchant
Date:29 Jun 2001 at 20:18:48
Subject:Re: Dongles

Hi Sean. In a message on 29-Jun-01 14:40:32, you wrote:

>I haven't ever actually USED a dongle, but I remember reading about
>them in the old C64 magazines.

They were fairly common in the days of the Commodore 'PET' and
other pre-Amiga computers. I never met one on the C64 but I'm
willing to believe they were used on it.

>I THINK a dongle is a piece of hardware that you attach to your
>computer to get a certain piece of software to work. It's nothing more

Yes.

>than an anti-piracy thing. I think on the C64 you'd put the dongle in
>the cart port. I'm guessing you'd put an Amiga dongle in the game port
>or maybe the floppy port...don't know. :\

Right. Well there were various types, and the type I was familiar
with was a little cartridge about 2 by 1 inches. This plugged into
the external floppy drive port on the Commodore 8032 (I think that
was the model number). Inside was a device of some kind (they
varied) which could be interrogated by the software to be
protected. If there was no or wrong response, the software qould
not run.

I worked in a small software house around 1980, coding accounting
software for early Commodore computers. There was no compiler
available at that time, and we wrote in Basic - all too easy to
copy. So I was asked to design a dongle. Inside was a shift
register chip, and a small piece of Veroboard individually coded by
drilling a unique pattern of holes. We supplied a printed list to the
dongle manufacturer, showing acceptable hole patterns. The
accounting aoftware would 'clock' the shift register to obtain 8
bits, and compare them with a number (secretly) embedded in the
program: and this was done using a very short machine-code routine.

The dongles worked well, but they were understandably unpopular:
and later we introduced 4 levels of software protection against
piracy - on the basis that a pirate might figure out 3 levels but
after that would consider it not worth further effort. One method
of 'punishment' we considered was a command said to overheat & burn
out the processor chip, but we decided that this might cause us to
be sued for damages. Also we were not keen on testing that this
worked :-)

John



John Marchant ('Gnome'). Bedford UK. gnome@putnoe.u-net.com
Amiga 4000/40, A3000/30, A500. PC

The purpose of the State is to serve its people
not the people to serve the State.
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