I was wondering how it was economical to burn every CD with a different key. Turns out it was not!
Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
21–30 of 230 posts
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#22Ha, I remember buying the shareware disk and unlocking every game on there. Plus you got the soundtrack which was pretty cool.
Did it work as an audio CD, the way PS1 games do?
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#23Okay, I haunted CompUSA in my teen years and I purchased my first 386 system there. So the photograph included in this blog seems bona fide.
Except their logo or name was never "Compu USA". Where in the world did they get a store hung with signs that all say "Compu USA"? Is this some Mandela Effect that has me in its clutches? The business was definitely never named or branded that way. I did my Wikipedia and Bing Images research. There are no serious search hits. Gemini is giving some truly b.s. explanations that I do not believe.
Is this a concrete example of a USA store tolerating mis-branded signage... inside their own store? Or is it some third-world knockoff? The merch on the shelves, the bros shopping for themselves, the tie-wearing salesmen, they all seem totally legit. What kind of big-box computer store lets that happen to their signage?
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#24Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
You would need some sort of hardware serial number system for PCs and a whole security infrastructure to verify that the serial number being used for the unlock wasn't faked. Then you could do per-PC unlocks. I'm not aware of anything like that being widespread back in the Quake days, though these days every computing device you own probably has a unique ID burned into ROM somewhere.
Supposedly Xbox One+ discs are individually serialized which was originally going to be used for their DRM system at launch that was walked back.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#25That box art is so cool. They don't make em like they used to!
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#26Ha, I remember buying the shareware disk and unlocking every game on there. Plus you got the soundtrack which was pretty cool.
Did it work as an audio CD, the way PS1 games do?
Yes, the game just played it as a regular CD. In fact, if you put a different disc in the drive it would play the tracks from there instead. There were also console commands to change the track, stop the music, loop, or even reload the disc information if you needed to refresh it after swapping CDs.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#27The "incredibly expensive Intel Pentium" image link 404s.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#28Okay, I haunted CompUSA in my teen years and I purchased my first 386 system there. So the photograph included in this blog seems bona fide . Except their logo or name was never "Compu USA". Where in the world did they get a store hung with signs that all say "Compu USA"? Is this some Mandela Effect that has me in its clutches? The business was definitely never named or branded that way. I did my Wikipedia and Bing I…
It’s not Mandela effect, it’s AI.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#29[comment withdrawn]
The computers in the photo and the layout of the store and signage are also quite strange.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#30[comment withdrawn]
I fed the image into Gemini and it could not detect that it’s legit or AI, but in addition to the wrong store name, the other banner that’s supposed to day SOFTWARE says TWARE or something like that. It sure seems like AI to me.