Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge • Hacker News Board

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#111

Post by mrandish » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 8:30 PM UTC

Wow, write-up was eye-opening for me. My first computer was a 4K Radio Shack Color Computer based on the Motorola 6809 CPU. It had no hardware support for sprites, tiles, palette tricks or other neat graphics. But what it did have was probably the best 8-bit CPU of that era. Being the 'little brother' of the 68000, it had an orthogonal instruction set, indexed and indirect addressing modes, separate user and software stacks and several 16-bit registers. All this made writing relocatable, re-entrant, preemptive multi-tasking code easy and to me it as pretty much "just how assembler is written".

My next computer was the 68000-based Amiga which I stuck with as my daily driver until sometime in 1995 (with upgrades to 68020 and 68030 along the way). While every computer platform has its challenges, the 68000 gave us a flat linear address space and, arguably, the best 16/32 bit CISC CPU architecture priced for desktop use. By the time I was coding on a PC, everything was C or other languages. So I never did 8086 assembler. Of course, I'd heard about segments and other various challenges on 8086 but this write-up gave me an up-close, in-context tour of just how challenging the PC architecture could be for assembly programmers. It was interesting, occasionally terrifying :-), and super fun. So thanks!

And I promise I will never, ever complain about the days of writing 680x0 assembler again.

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#112

Post by mrandish » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 9:34 PM UTC

abra0 wrote: post #75

skocznymroczny wrote: post #71

Interesting, I remember the speed skating issue being a problem in the copy I had back in the 1990s, but I don't remember the issues in other games like downhill and such. People usually find these gameplay based copy protections amusing as in "hehe stupid pirates let them play a broken game", but I have bad memories of them because I often had them trigger when playing legit copies of the game. All it took was havin…

Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money. The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.

> Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy.

Yeah, I get that maybe it made the developer and/or publisher feel some kind of 'justice' was done, but it's ultimately bad for your brand to have any game out in the world that has subtly degraded performance. The players of pirated versions probably just assumed the company makes games that are buggy or with really bad difficulty scaling. Reducing piracy by making players not want your games doesn't seem like a winning long-term strategy.

Some publishers instead layered their piracy checks later in the game play or delayed stopping pirated play until some number of game events after detection. If they were concerned crackers would find an explicit error message, another option is to change game play in some other way like this game ended the luge race before the player finished. A legit game behavior at the wrong time is still harder to find than an error box or specific text.

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#113

Post by mrandish » Tue, Apr 29, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #54

The downside of these systems is that the behavior of the cracked game is often simply attributed to the game, contributing to the perception that the game is buggy (or just bad/not fun). While they are somewhat effective at making pirates miserable, I have my doubts on whether they are actually good at driving sales. Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...

> Keeping pirates from enjoying the game isn't a victory for the developer, generating sales is...

In a lot of IP product categories, there are different classes of users who pirate. In the case of movies, a friend of mine who's a senior exec in a major Hollywood studio once told me they had data suggesting that of the three categories of audience: A) Never pay, only pirate, B) Only pay, never pirate, and C) Sometimes pay, sometimes pirate, the third category was probably larger than the first.

That would mean degrading your brand value among consumers of piracy, could negatively impact long-term sales.

Re: Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

#114

Post by xorcist » Wed, Apr 30, 2025, 9:43 AM UTC

RIMR wrote: post #53

miek wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing. Their leader was busted a long time ago so I thought they were toast. Razor, Class, Fairlight, and some others hold a special place in my heart. (I know nothing of their politics)

To be fair, a lot of those groups aren't any of the same people today. Fairlight was pretty problematic back in the 90's politically, they even did a fairly controversial nazi-themed demo. Definitely not the vibe they give off today.

It wasn't always that clear who the members were. Demos and cracks across several machine types were handled by separate people who didn't always know each other.

Especially Fairlight was a pretty loose group which many people were sort of affiliated with, and sometimes would release stuff under that name, and nobody really knew if they were officially members or not. There was a bit of drama as everyone didn't always get along.