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Comment by rstupek | Hacker News Reader

Some of them were actually pretty elaborate. There were manuals which were printed in specific colors so that you couldn't photocopy them to give to a friend

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The Amiga game Alien Breed 3D came with this code booklet, printed in black-on-black: http://i.imgur.com/ok4mYSk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Y9w0M7S.jpg

I bought Sim City for my Mac Plus back in 1990 and it's code sheet was really-really dark purple printed on really dark purple.

It was a sad day when I lost that sheet.

I have both sides of said purple sheet scanned, actually. The original sheet is in rather sad shape though, so the scans need to be vectorized, etc.

The early Computer RPG games, Pool of Radiance etc. had two methods: a "code wheel" where you had to align some dwarvish and elvish runes that looked like this: http://www.oldgames.sk/docs/codewheel/pool-of-radiance/

And a journal -- instead of the game show a very long description or showing a picture, it would tell you to look in your journal to entry 123 to see what happened or show you the map you would see. The journal is in the yellow pages here: http://www.c64sets.com/pool_radiance.html

Oh yes, I even laboriously copied out a Pool of Radiance code wheel onto a piece of cardboard I'd cut out from a cereal box. Not because I was industrious, but because I was such a lazy kid to have so much spare time.

My favorite was Electronic Arts' code-wheel, where you had to rotate three paper circles on a central axis to discover the needed codes based on three random words that sound sort of like something from the game world.

One of my friends hand copied the wheel for me for a particular game to help me play a copy. It wasn't a very good transcription... http://www.intric8.com/files/legacy.jpg

Yeah, they had that on the FA-18 Interceptor simulator for Amiga as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RdE1L9jCic

I have an original monkey island dial a pirate wheel somewhere, loved that copy protection

When I was a kid I had the Graphic Adventure Creator for the Amstrad CPC which used the Lenslok anti piracy system.

Lenslok was a kind of prism thing inside a plastic holder that you held against the screen in order to read an otherwise garbled code which you then typed in. It often took me dozens of attempts to log in.

http://birdsanctuary.co.uk/lenslok/

Ah yes, I remember Zool and its code-wheel. You had to line up certain colours and then read out the code that was printed in shiny black on matt black.

http://retrootakudensetsu.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/amiga-colle...

I remember Wizardry 4 had a red booklet like that - you had to look up a MordorCharge card number.

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