Am I reading this right, and was only the file header encrypted?
Also, wasn't ID the company that did not use serials or other DRM? Maybe that explains their naivite, maybe they underestimated how easily games get cracked.
Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
71–80 of 230 posts
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Haha, I remember that rumour being told to me by classmates back in the day. Great example.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#73"The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]." While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting…
I remember old games shipping with huge lists of codes on paper. Paper made, on purpose, too big for an US legal/A4 photocopier. And moreover the codes would be using "light blue characters on slightly less light blue paper". Very annoying for casual piracy (as in: copying your neighbor's version of the game).
> Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.
That's a good one!
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#74"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…
I find it so funny that there are new games that are are smaller than Wing Commander 3 despite the 32 year gap. To be fair, they obviously pack their data very differently.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#75"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…
I miss the entire WC series... alot. I wish we could get something like that again today.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#76"The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]." While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting…
I remember old games shipping with huge lists of codes on paper. Paper made, on purpose, too big for an US legal/A4 photocopier. And moreover the codes would be using "light blue characters on slightly less light blue paper". Very annoying for casual piracy (as in: copying your neighbor's version of the game). > Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles a…
I have a whole collection of boxes featuring anti-piracy stuff: https://fabiensanglard.net/happy/index.html
The sentence "This created an only-too-familiar situation where illegitimate users enjoyed a better experience than paying customers." is a direct reference to these system which annoyed people who actually paid for their game!
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#77Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
Some sort of public key crypto scheme + including hard-to-change local device characteristics in the challenge.
I guess the path of least resistance then would have been to patch the executable to remove the check.
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember old games shipping with huge lists of codes on paper. Paper made, on purpose, too big for an US legal/A4 photocopier. And moreover the codes would be using "light blue characters on slightly less light blue paper". Very annoying for casual piracy (as in: copying your neighbor's version of the game). > Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles a…
I have a whole collection of boxes featuring anti-piracy stuff: https://fabiensanglard.net/happy/index.html The sentence "This created an only-too-familiar situation where illegitimate users enjoyed a better experience than paying customers." is a direct reference to these system which annoyed people who actually paid for their game!
Only to be repeated with the experience of streaming vs torrents
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#79[flagged]
Re: Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
#80"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
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fork_in_the_Tale - not a good game, but an impressive number of CDs at 5