Talk:Soft-Lok

I'm adding this discussion here about Soft-Lok in request to those who might have had a copy of Soft-Lok and could share their experiences.

Personally I had Version 2.2 of Soft-Lok and while it documented that it could handle numerous updates made to the SpeedLock loading system I was never really able to test the full potential of this - mainly because it was coming to the end of the era for the 8bit. What I did find out was it was able to transfer a good deal of my Codemasters games to Disc with the exception of Ghost Hunters (which was a headerless loader!) and Vampire (I think this was a Soft-Lok v86) and documented as such, but just wouldn't work with Soft-Lok and The Hit Squad - which had it's own loader, which was straightfoward to unprotect sadly! All my other Codemasters games were Soft-Lok 87 and gave no issues.

I think the only other game I had was Rambo from The Hit Squad - being an early Ocean game it was in Speed-Lok 85 to which Soft-Lok cracked. I had a number of other games which were mention though also wouldn't transfer, I think Freddy Hardest was one of those, again Soft-Lok didn't reckonise this one though I had the Budget version from Alternative Software, might of had an alternative Loader which was also another straightfoward program to unprotect and save to Disc! Another one I couldn't do with Soft-Lok was Zub, unsure what kind of Loader this was, though it resided at the Reset Address 0! In order to unprotect it one had to move the loader elsewhere, load the game and save it. What Zub did was unusual, since it would load the loader and then load a Headerless Loader which included the Loader & the title screen! Then proceed to load the game using a Protected loading system!