There was a specific ritual to using the thing. You’d be sitting there, the room lit only by the glow of a CRT monitor, physically spinning this cardboard disc like you were cracking a safe.
: You had to physically rotate the code wheel to line up those two specific runes. knights of xentar code wheel
| System | Example Games | Mechanism | Weakness | |--------|--------------|-----------|-----------| | Manual lookup | Monkey Island , King’s Quest V | “What is the 3rd word on p. 14?” | Photocopied manual pages | | Code wheel | Knights of Xentar , Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (LucasArts) | Rotating cipher | Photocopyable, crackable | | Lens-based | Star Control (red lens to read invisible ink) | Colored plastic sheet | Lost lens = no play | | Dongle | AutoCAD , Cubase | Hardware key on parallel port | Expensive, breakable | There was a specific ritual to using the thing
: Turn the middle wheel to the first symbol and the smallest wheel to the second. | System | Example Games | Mechanism |
: You had to align the runes shown on screen on the physical wheel to reveal a corresponding code (letters or numbers), which you then typed into the game to continue .