131–140 of 230 posts
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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.
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It's still not possible. You would need to make a unique master for every individual unit.
You'd use CD-R of course.
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…
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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…
And don't forget to engage your "TURBO" button, to make the playback slightly better!
The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose.
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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…
For reference: I had a 486 DX2 66 MHz, and I played MP3s by decoding them in batch to PCM and then playing that as it couldn't really do that in real time. Perhaps only if you didn't do anything else and the MP3 was low bitrate enough and ideally mono.
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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…
MiniDisc did. You could make one (digital) copy but not two.
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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.
But in any case physical copy + crack was the best solution at the time.
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When Metal Gear Solid 4 released on Ps3, they used uncompressed audio. I think part of it was just to show off how much storage Blu Ray had. The game Titanfall on PC has the audio in it twice, compressed and decompressed. The decompressed was for machines with dual core or less so that there was enough overhead to keep the game running.
Why would it play the compressed version if it had the decompressed audio right there though?
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it would have been like 520 hours to download 500mgb. Assuming it didn't break at some point. That was pretty tough in that day and age. Especially from pirate sites. mIRC had some good servers but getting someone to keep a direct connection with you for that long was problematic too. And then if you didn't have a dedicated phone line for the modem...
If I remember correctly, actual pirated copies would have been maybe tens of megabytes, since they didn't include the CD audio. But that would still have been a hefty modem download.
"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…