The gawd-almighty merged DRM in Silent Hunter V thread

[Nisgeis]

Hacking is very different to cracking. Hacking = cretaing POKEs for infinite lives and ammo. The protection systems were designed to stop the competition from looking at the game code, not to stop copying. Back in those days, all you had to do to copy a game was to put it in a tape to tape dubber and anyone could do that. The copy protection relied on having info requested from pages on a manual (a printed one!) or other objects supplied with the game. When disks arrived though, they started to get a bit more devious and started putting electronic copy protection in.