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Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

birchtree.me

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Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#431
post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much. P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.

The kernel is solid, its all the userspace software where they are fumbling hard.

The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel.

Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those.

But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#432

Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away. These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s…

> I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away. At least there are already extensive ways to get a game cube running games off an SD card using a pi pico and some hardware that uses the expansion port. So even once disc rot takes away the original copy you can keep going.

You'll be dead before disc rot takes effect on almost any disc kept out of direct sunlight and in a climate controlled environment.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closed group of friends works fine in offline mode (pirate friendly mode).

If you can get a group of other parents to also pirate... Not really in the cards, though I can appreciate your dedication to pirate advocacy.

The referenced config setting is apparently literally just whether to have the server authenticate accounts with Microsoft, so pirate and nonpirate players can play together on a server with checking off.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#434
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are offline, it will work for a few days that’s right. If you are online, and the rights service is failing, it will revoke your key. The trouble is, you would have to know about the outage first and go offline before attempting to play.

> If you are online, and the rights service is failing, it will revoke your key. Do you have evidence of this? I've played Xbox for 25 years and never seen this.

i’ve tested it , that’s how i found out. If you run your dns it’s easy. Set licensing.xboxlive.com to 0.0.0.0 .

The entitlement only lasts a few days. If the online check fails and you’re otherwise online, it gets revoked .

Nearly all DRM systems are fail-Closed not fail-open.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#435
post #108

Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away. These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s…

Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.

There are already perfect FPGA emulators of N64 out, why not GameCube.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#436

I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, cou…

This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap. There's something seriously wrong in Redmond. At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work. Office on the web is…

> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.

AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#437
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get in the locked box in the first place. That's the whole point. A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to b…

With the planned death of physical media for games, it will soon become impossible to do so. Like, Sony literally plans to stop making discs starting in 2028, and all games you buy will have to be digital only. GTA 6 is just giving a code in a box. It's really the end of times for physical media in a few years, maybe something can change if consumers push back but they likely will not if we are being realistic. https…

Read a book instead. It is not like you have to consume audiovisual media to survive.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and I maintained it How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?

It's genuinely hard to imagine commodity USB DVD-ROM drives being sold with subscriptions? There's millions of them, they cost nothing, they're built by a dozen no name Chinese factories

Buy a generic one from China.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.

All problems with Microsoft products are design and intent problems, not engineering.

WinUI 3 was upgraded to stable/release when it had literally thousands of outstanding issues, including stuff like [fully replicable] 'using drag and drop causes the program to crash.' That was about the time I started opting out of the entire MS ecosystem after investing decades in it.

I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.

If an engineer executes on bad intent and design goals and builds a bad bridge, that's also a bad engineer. Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.

Is it 2019 again?
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