Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

fabiensanglard.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 230 posts

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#61

Post by jaredhallen »

olyjohn wrote: post #54
fullstop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, and I remember if you didn't have the audio cable that went from the CDROM into your sound card, you would never hear the tracks. It wasn't your computer decoding the music, the CDROM drive was simply doing the decoding, and passing the audio out into a CDROM input (just a line-level audio signal) on your sound card.

I'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#62

Post by thaumasiotes »

> Upon contacting the operator, users were to also communicate a "SOURCE CODE". It played no part in generating the Unlock code. It may have been a way for the distributors to claim a transaction fee. Browsing eBay, I found many with names indicative of past/present retailers. 12-BSTBY BestBuy, 24-CCITY Computer City, 22-CUSA CompUSA, 88, 11-1111, 38-EB Electronic Boutique, 44-FTRSP Future Shop (Canada), 34-EGGH Egghead Software, and 56-MCTR Media Play/ Musicland.

Why do we think that CCITY is a code for Computer City and not Circuit City?

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#63

Post by fluoridation »

ekelsen wrote: post #49
fluoridation wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that CD-ROMs are pressed from glass masters, not burned like CD-Rs. I wonder if anyone has tried something like this with burned discs, though.

Yes, my point, if the answer is that there is no way this works without every disc being different. It was not possible to manufacture at the time at scale.

It's still not possible. You would need to make a unique master for every individual unit.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#64

Post by codebje »

jhy wrote: post #48
netsharc wrote: post #6

Man, if I were id, I'd sue the hell out of Testdrive for selling me that broken security system...

But it sounds like it wasn't Testdrive's fault; iD implemented it incorrectly. Their phone support weren't issuing the decrypt code, just a simple checksum: > Described as is, there is no flaw in this process. The secret seed comes from the unlock server, tied to a CHALLENGE/SERIAL that could not be reused. But the hacker team GNOMON found a way. > The QUAKE unlock program FLOW.EXE that ships on the CD is capable of…

If the phone support issued the decrypt code, you could just replay that same code for every CD stamped from the same master.

If phone support issued an encrypted decrypt code that could only be used with your challenge code to decrypt the decrypt code, replay wouldn't be as trivial.

Every CD is identical, so no matter how iD went about this there's only ever one decryption key (per title, I assume) and those keys must either have been encoded in iD support's response, or already stored on the CD. TestDrive sold iD on the notion that the process was too hard for hacker groups to reverse engineer, and it wasn't.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#65

Post by indrora »

jaredhallen wrote: post #61
olyjohn wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and I remember if you didn't have the audio cable that went from the CDROM into your sound card, you would never hear the tracks. It wasn't your computer decoding the music, the CDROM drive was simply doing the decoding, and passing the audio out into a CDROM input (just a line-level audio signal) on your sound card.

I'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?

4-conductor audio, generally.

Later on there was a generation of two-conductor cables that used SPDIF/PCM Audio instead of analog audio for better fidelity.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#66

Post by soneil »

chungy wrote: post #32
smackeyacky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.

Sneakernet was common also. Say you have a class of 30 kids, and one of them has access to Usenet to grab qcrack.zip. He'll put it on a floppy disk and share ;)

yeah, software travelled exactly the same way as rumours that such and such had a rib removed - remarkably effectively.

Also the same way we got viruses, long before anyone I knew had the Internet.

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#67

Post by kalleboo »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #59
fluoridation wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that CD-ROMs are pressed from glass masters, not burned like CD-Rs. I wonder if anyone has tried something like this with burned discs, though.

The multisession standard actually afforded the possibility of CD-PROM; a hybrid disc with a pressed read-only session followed by a writable section. It was only used for Kodak Picture CD (not the same as Photo CD) to hold software in the pressed session. It also apparently standardized a magneto-optical hybrid that never made it to market.

It was also used by Ricoh EncryptEase - CD-Rs with encrypted backup software in an initial pressed track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5ucImqdKbY

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#68

Post by NopIdoN »

beloch wrote: post #33

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year an…

Ripper (1996) with Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti came on 6 CDs

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#69

Post by brcmthrowaway »

shoo wrote: post #55
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #39

If you were to do this today, how could you make it foolproof?

there isn't a market for gamers buying games on CDs these days, so it's not really a problem that needs to be solved

Well how does Steam do DRM?

Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

#70

Post by Lammy »

jonhohle wrote: post #3

It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

> Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

There is very slightly more to it than just the mixed-mode sessions: the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis, so your ripper or player needs to apply corresponding de-emphasis EQ in order for them to sound correct. 1996 was actually a strangely late year to find any CD mastered with pre-emph; it was mostly an '80s thing: https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasi...

On top of being a technique that had fallen out of common use by that time, Quake has the pre-emphasis metadata flagged in the subcodes but not flagged in the TOC, so some software players/rippers like (annoyingly) Exact Audio Copy won't heed it: https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Comparison_of...

Here's a side-by-side comparison — my EAC rip of my MacSoft version of Quake (left) alongside the output of `sox_ng deemph` for the same file (right): https://i.ibb.co/9m18CSsk/Emi-2026-08-17-18-52-48.png

And if you're curious, here's the pre-emphasis subcode channel Q flag and pre-emphasis frequency response as described in the Red Book standard, and sox_ng's code for undoing it:

― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...

― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...

― https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/src/branch/main/src/deemp...

Although if someone has been unknowingly listening to the pre-emphasized tracks for thirty years, maybe the ‘incorrect’ one is what sounds right to them? :)

Post reply on HN