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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

#111

Post by Lammy »

protimewaster wrote: post #108
Lammy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/in…

IIRC, it's actually debatable if the pre-emphasis flag is supposed to be set. I don't remember the exact details anymore, but I think it was discovered that there multiple releases with bit-identical audio tracks, but some of them have the flag set while others don't. They can't both be correct, because the audio data should've changed if the emphasis was removed.

Make sure that it isn't a case of the software you're using to inspect the disc intentionally looking the other way with regard to that flag.

> 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

I learned that this is an intentional deficiency in EAC: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/eac-not-detecting-pre...

> For a short while, up to version 0.95b3 [in 2004], Exact Audio Copy had a manual function to actually scan the audio area of the disc also [talking about subcode channel Q versus the TOC] to find if tracks used pre-emphasis. This was removed due to some perceived legal threat. Now, basically, a standards-compliant disc that doesn't use the TOC kludge won't show "pre-emphasis"

And sure enough, the Red Book standard mentions usage of the other three flag bits alongside the pre-emphasis flag: https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...

The adjacent bit is “copy prohibited” versus “copy permitted”, which is not a piece of metadata I knew Compact Disc had. Makes a lot more sense why EAC would remove that feature in the legal climate of the P2P era, because to look for one flag also must look for the other, and this way it's out of sight and out of mind and Gee Your Honor We Didn't Know You Couldn't Do That if someone uses EAC to rip a “copy prohibited” disc. I wish I could get this feature back in 2026 though :p

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

#112

Post by kbelder »

mook wrote: post #81
ColdStream wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

They're doing that with Blueray games now, writing gigabytes of uncompressed audio for no particular reason other than to use up space and sucker the occasional audiophile.

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

#113

Post by protimewaster »

Lammy wrote: post #111
protimewaster wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC, it's actually debatable if the pre-emphasis flag is supposed to be set. I don't remember the exact details anymore, but I think it was discovered that there multiple releases with bit-identical audio tracks, but some of them have the flag set while others don't. They can't both be correct, because the audio data should've changed if the emphasis was removed.

Make sure that it isn't a case of the software you're using to inspect the disc intentionally looking the other way with regard to that flag. > 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 I learned that this is an intentional deficiency in EAC: https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/eac-not-de…

I actually remembered more about this after my initial post. I ended up with two copies of Quake (one is the original shareware release and one is a later release of the full game), and one of them has the PRE flag set in the TOC and the other one doesn't. Now I'm wondering if I ever checked the subcodes for the one that's missing the flags in the TOC. I'll have to dig it out sometime and check.

I did verify that the audio is identical down to an offset, though, between the two.

> The adjacent bit is “copy prohibited” versus “copy permitted”, which is not a piece of metadata I knew Compact Disc had.

I wonder if any equipment ever actually used those other flags for anything?

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

#114

Post by ryanjshaw »

mewse-hn wrote: post #56
bityard wrote: post #16

I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.) I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all. (There were some who believed th…

> There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. I doubt it. I would believe that the id guys weren't too choked about the lost revenue after the fact, but the business guys probably believed the scheme would work (especially since they contracted a company that said "yes, this will work"). Aside from that, the shareware cd was incredible marketing -…

Surely anybody who could download the keygen could just as easily download the pirated game? Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.

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

#115

Post by confusedbucket »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #39

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

COD:BO7's single-player uses dedicated servers. Terrible, yes, but that's as foolproof as it gets when it comes to piracy. They also probably did this to combat all the 'services' offering to unlock camos/cosmetics that you'd normally have to grind for; players would give someone their credentials (probably stolen later and sold to cheaters) and the person on the other side would then use a hacked client to trick the backend into thinking they completed all the challenges. With a server-side campaign, that probably got much more time consuming, I reckon.

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

#116

Post by phendrenad2 »

Those photos of the inside of CompUSA are just stunning. Bright sodium lighting, not a dim dank cave (one of the benefits of CRTs over modern OLED screens and their color range from black to slightly-less-black). Colorful packaging everywhere (this was before fun was made illegal in 2012). Big signage, so you know where things are (the idea of a customer knowing where to find something without being diverted to an antivirus upsell by a "helpful" "associate" didn't bother MBA CEOs back then. Nowadays the idea would cause them them to spontaneously combust).

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

#117

Post by leni536 »

ranger_danger wrote: post #2

Is it really fair to call these such algorithms "security through obscurity"? By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?

I think it is fair, as all the released CDs are identical. So all the symmetric keys used to encrypt the data are also necessarily identical.

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

#118

Post by dingaling »

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…

And when the crack came out on the same day as the CD release it was called a zero-day. A term that has long since lost ita original meaning, in fact it has been inverted.

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

#119

Post by sznio »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #114
mewse-hn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. I doubt it. I would believe that the id guys weren't too choked about the lost revenue after the fact, but the business guys probably believed the scheme would work (especially since they contracted a company that said "yes, this will work"). Aside from that, the shareware cd was incredible marketing -…

Surely anybody who could download the keygen could just as easily download the pirated game? Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.

>Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.

well, if dialup cost more than just buying the game, it makes sense to buy it rather than pirate. also, if you care about audio then you'll get the cd, becuse downloading 400MB of audio over dialup isn't fun.

compared to that a crack is just a single binary.

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

#120

Post by kaoD »

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 engineer the checking algorithm to create a keygen instead of a patch.

Anticracking methods became mainstream in the late 90s, but they weren't very sophisticated and most amounted to obfuscation.

Long live +ORC, +Fravia and CracksLatinos.

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