I remember distinctly having a Knights of Xentar wheel that had been "repaired" with Scotch tape so many times that the window was permanently foggy, requiring a flashlight and a magnifying glass to read the symbols.
Each layer of the wheel featured various symbols, character faces, or numbers alignment markers. To pass the game's startup security check, players had to manipulate the physical wheel according to instructions displayed on their computer monitor. How It Worked
If you were a kid, that code wheel was the most fragile thing in your possession. It inevitably got crushed at the bottom of a backpack, chewed on by a dog, or lost in a move. Once the wheel was gone, the game was gone. You couldn't just Google the answers in 1992. You were stuck calling the tip hotline (which cost money your parents didn't want to spend) or writing a letter to the publisher begging for a replacement.
Publishers offered a more convenient alternative for those who found the floppy version's code wheel cumbersome: the CD-ROM release. As noted in various gaming databases, this version removed the code wheel copy protection entirely. knights of xentar code wheel
Type that code into the game to prove you actually owned the physical big-box edition. Why a Wheel?
Although clear pictures of the original wheel are rare, its operation is recorded in documentation. When the game launched, players were prompted for a code combination, for example: "A-24".
Suppose we want to encode the message "HELLO" using the Knights of Xentar Code Wheel. I remember distinctly having a Knights of Xentar
: The wheel typically consisted of two or three concentric circular sheets of cardboard held together by a central rivet.
Symbols were often printed in colors (like light blue on white) that were difficult for 1990s-era photocopiers to capture.
In the era before widespread internet access, game publishers used creative physical "analog copy protections" to prevent unauthorized copying. The code wheel evolved from earlier "manual protection" systems, where players had to enter a specific word from the game manual to start playing. As photocopiers became more common, entire manuals could be easily duplicated. However, a multi-layered cardboard wheel was more difficult to reproduce, making it a preferred anti-piracy tool for a short period. How It Worked If you were a kid,
To pass the check, the player had to physically pick up the cardboard wheel and perform the following steps:
Despite the physical complexity, the code wheel system was not impervious to circumvention.
Would you like to give it a try or learn more about cryptography?
The was a physical anti-piracy device included with the 1995 MS-DOS diskette release of the classic role-playing game Knights of Xentar . Published in North America by Megatech Software, this mechanical form of copy protection forced players to manually rotate concentric cardboard rings to find an alphanumeric security bypass code before starting up the software. Why Did Knights of Xentar Use a Code Wheel?