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Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

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Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#151

Post by enos_feedler »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #41
robbiet480 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The game shown here, Midnight Club II, required the CD to be in the drive to play it. With the advent of Steam and companies releasing older games on Steam, they needed a way to bypass that check. Bypassing a CD (commonly called No-CD) was a very common crack/DRM bypass back in the day. Rockstar didn't want to bring up old source code and find someone who understood it enough to remove the check, so instead they just…

Sounds like Razor could sue Rockstar for copyright infringement. That would be hilarious.

Former cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#152

Post by avg_dev »

Bluecobra wrote: post #149
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #93

Many years ago, I worked on a product that provided a bunch of old emulated games. We properly licensed them, but many of the license holders no longer had the original ROMs, ripping the game data off of some of the really old consoles was quite difficult, and the only ROMs available publicly were cracked copies with demo's added. That was the birth of the demoscene, which was awesome, but bad for us trying to legiti…

It would be kind of sad/funny if one of the games had a bad crack and the game itself was broken and not caught by QA. For example, Earthbound has one final check that would cause the game to freeze and delete your save at the final boss.

man that is absolutely brutal

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#153

Post by xxs »

function_seven wrote: post #133
nonethewiser wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cracking is about removing anti-features Anti what features? Piracy?

Anti-backup, Anti-I-don't-have-a-cdrom-on-this-machine, Anti-I-lost-the-stupid-dongle, etc. Like parent says, cracking and piracy pair well, but I've had to do it many times just for compatibility reasons, on software I had purchased.

The anti-what-word-is-on-the-17th-page-3rd-paragraph-of-the-handbook was a very common on for so many games.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#154

Post by Bluecobra »

phpisthebest wrote: post #28
demarq wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cracking was a 90s term for pirating software

pirating software (movies, and music) is a term from the 90's by the MPAA, Riaa, and Games industry in attempting to link the act of simple copyright infringement, a civil non-criminal violation of the law to violent robbery on the high seas... Cracking is a method of removing undesired features or inclusions from software, often licensing controls, or other anti-consumer features. Many many many people "cracked" the…

Another alternative to cracking was to use something like DAEMON Tools to emulate the CD in the drive with an .iso so you could legitimately play multiplayer games without having to deal with stupid CD checks.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#155

Post by PrimeMcFly »

paint wrote: post #148
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not dying on any hill, I think that's a weird comment to make, let alone to make an issue out of my original comment at all. The way the comment was phrased read as though they didn't understand what had happened, not that they didn't understand why. Especially since no one has an answer to that, so no one can offer an explanation.

[flagged]

That's not a particularly productive reply. Thanks for your input, I guess.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#156

Post by xxs »

tj-teej wrote: post #100

Related story, I remember years ago as a kid I bought a Prince of Persia PC game at a yardsale (on a CD), but early on in the game there was a riddle where you needed a password to get through this door, it was some cryptic message of a few numbers. I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game! I remember being so…

>I wonder if this was an anti-piracy strategy

Totally, and exceptionally common. It was popular in the '80 and the early '90.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#157

Post by barbs »

monocasa wrote: post #131
echelon_musk wrote: post #22

This is more common than you might expect. The Windows port of Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents under Pressure being sold on Steam is the DEViANCE crack. Open the game's exe in a hex editor and you can plainly see "DEViANCE".

I seem to remember hearing that wrt roms on at least one of the NES|SNES|PS1 Classic systems.

Yeah same, although I think it was the ROMs distributed in the Wii Shopping Channel?

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#158

Post by PrimeMcFly »

bragr wrote: post #126
CapstanRoller wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you cannot sell copies of your Hermione spin-off, because that'd be copyright infringement, because it is a derivative work But you can distribute it for free, as fanfiction. Also, a no-CD crack does not contain any of the original work. It's akin to a program that you can use to modify, say, your legally-purchased Harry Potter ebook in order to change all instances of "wand" to "wang"

Fan fiction is illegal, or at best in a deeply gray area, it's just that most people realize suing your super-fans is a bad move. There are exceptions of course, Anne Rice was famously super litigious over any attempted fan fiction of her characters which generated a lot of bad feelings online. https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gqjz/anne-rice-really-hate...

Paramount suing Star Trek fan productions is another great example. They recently took down the Wolf 359 audio book project for example.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#159

Post by nxobject »

BowBun wrote: post #119
bluejay2387 wrote: post #118

Kind of mind blowing to see a name (Razor1911) from my C64 days make an appearance again 0.o

They've been a consistent name in cracking since then!

I wonder if they're like the Bourbaki group in mathematics – an anonymous group where members elect other members, with a trivial amount of cloak-and-dagger secrecy from the public.

Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam

#160

Post by barbs »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #155
paint wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That's not a particularly productive reply. Thanks for your input, I guess.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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