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Parasol Stars is one of the games most widely known as "very tough to crack" - the common story with this one is that you requested a bonus if it couldn't be cracked? How long did the protection take you? What did it consist of? (I hear it's masses of encryption loops for each level).

See attached files. The file MASTER.S creates the actual disk image, and applies the encryption and checksums. I probably spent around three weeks on it, on and off.

Basically there's three things going on:
1.There are checksums in the code to see if it has been altered, there are lots of these.
2.The code is encrypted in various ways.
3.The code is obfuscated in various ways.

I did ask for a bonus, which obviously I never got.

The main encryption, looking at it, seems to encrypt the main program using 132 slightly different types of encryption in about 550 levels. I suspect though that this was all simply bypassed.

Then there was run-time encryption and checksumming, in CHECKSUM.S, there were various macros that were scattered though the code, which would checksum other level, or encrypt code so that it would decrypt, call and re-encrypt a piece of code. Unfortunately I don't have any example usages.

The copylock itself on Parasol Stars (included multiple times) seems to be quite standard, no obvious trickery in the middle of it. Did you request this type or Rob Northen supplies one and you work with whatever you are given?

I just used what Rob gave me.

Were you aware how certain groups cracked games? Did you ever download your own games to see what crackers had altered to make them copyable?

Yeah, I did for Parasol Stars. Basically they just went through and removed all the protection one bit at a time. Quite depressing.