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

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

#171

Post by benj111 »

beloch wrote: post #91
mook wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, in the early days of DVDs I recall a game that came with uncompressed 48kHz audio. Compress it to mp3 (which the game naively accepted if you had the correct Windows filters) and it fits in a CD.

Uncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. Y…

CDROM and 386 would have been an odd combination though?

My 486 had a single speed CDROM but it only had a 500mb and a 100mb hard drive, so still wasn't playing mp3s

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

#172

Post by fipar »

beloch wrote: post #91
mook wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, in the early days of DVDs I recall a game that came with uncompressed 48kHz audio. Compress it to mp3 (which the game naively accepted if you had the correct Windows filters) and it fits in a CD.

Uncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. Y…

Even as late as in 2008 I had such a slow machine that when I had to use NetBeans and I wanted to listen to music at the same time, I'd just play music CDs with headphones plugged into the headphones port of the cdrom drive :)

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

#173

Post by Uvix »

fizzbuzzbarbazz wrote: post #166
williebeek wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because with lossless compression you can save a lot of storage space without losing any quality. You are thinking about lossy compression.

I think you misunderstood his question. Given two files, a compressed file which must be uncompressed to play, and an uncompressed one which does not require extra processing - why would the game ever bother uncompressing te compressed file when the same data is already available uncompressed? There's no true use case for that that I can see.

With hard disks, I could see reading the compressed version from disk and decompressing giving you the bytes faster than reading the uncompressed version. With SSDs that advantage likely went away.

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

#174

Post by benj111 »

fizzbuzzbarbazz wrote: post #166
williebeek wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because with lossless compression you can save a lot of storage space without losing any quality. You are thinking about lossy compression.

I think you misunderstood his question. Given two files, a compressed file which must be uncompressed to play, and an uncompressed one which does not require extra processing - why would the game ever bother uncompressing te compressed file when the same data is already available uncompressed? There's no true use case for that that I can see.

I would guess to save on installed size?

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

#175

Post by fer »

kaoD wrote: post #120
dylan604 wrote: post #38

"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 did reverse engineering as a hobby in my teens. The method for 90% of cracks back in the day boiled down to: 1. Launch the app. 2. Trigger the "not registered" screen. 3. Search for the string in the binary. 4. Search for code that references the location of the string and squint hard until you spot the "check if CD-key is valid" section. 5. Patch the final opcode from "jnz" to "jz". If you felt fancy, reverse engi…

That hits the feels. Sometimes I miss late night sessions on SoftICE hah

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

#176

Post by fullstop »

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.

My cdrom drive also had an audio jack on it, so you could plug headphones directly into that if you wanted to have just CD audio and not the sounds coming from the PC.

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

#177

Post by lobsterthief »

seritools wrote: post #167
fizzbuzzbarbazz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

..so.. ..you know about RealMyst, right? A 3d first-person adaptation of the original Myst?

What's the point you're trying to make?

I think they were just excited to share that a newer game exists, given OC was posting how they liked it.

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

#178

Post by Delk »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #94

Surprised that it's not mentioned that the CD was also an audio CD with the Quake soundtrack..! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(soundtrack) "Originally pressed on the same disc as the game, Quake was otherwise commercially unavailable until its release on vinyl in September 2020" Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLttdCOgCM

It was actually reasonably common around the mid 90's for game CDs to have their music as audio tracks on the CD.

I guess there was a point when CD-ROM was the target format anyway but game content hadn't necessarily grown to fill it yet. Having the CD drive play the audio directly (it could be directly connected to the sound card) with no decompression or software processing required probably saved some CPU cycles as well.

I think at least half a dozen games I had around the time did that. Of course most of the soundtracks wouldn't be interesting enough on their own.

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

#179

Post by picofarad »

bombcar wrote: post #83
zf00002 wrote: post #45

I remember Microsoft had a time limited version of Office on cd-rom that was sold for a couple bucks at Kinko's. You could replace a .dll in it and that removed the time limit.

There was something similar (but I can't recall what) where you just set your clock far in the future (like 2010!) and then the trial would last that long + one month.

Or use any serial number from a Microsoft hardware device, or use all zeros except the rightmost number is "7", like, "00000007" or...

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

#180

Post by TylerE »

lobsterthief wrote: post #177
seritools wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point you're trying to make?

I think they were just excited to share that a newer game exists, given OC was posting how they liked it.

For very small values of newer. There have been two remakes of Myst since then.
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