Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like Razor could sue Rockstar for copyright infringement. That would be hilarious.
Former cracker for rzr here :) did not do this game unfortunately.
Thank you for your service o7
Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
161–170 of 259 posts
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#162Many years ago, I worked on a product that provided a bunch of old emulated games. We properly licensed them, but many of the license holders no longer had the original ROMs, ripping the game data off of some of the really old consoles was quite difficult, and the only ROMs available publicly were cracked copies with demo's added. That was the birth of the demoscene, which was awesome, but bad for us trying to legiti…
It would be kind of sad/funny if one of the games had a bad crack and the game itself was broken and not caught by QA. For example, Earthbound has one final check that would cause the game to freeze and delete your save at the final boss.
To me it happened the other way around.
The original game from Steam won't run on Linux but if I change the .exe for one that is cracked, it works.
I've been keeping that .exe for years.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not a particularly productive reply. Thanks for your input, I guess.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Yes. And what would you consider "keep malding" to be? In any case, I edited my reply to remove the snark.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#164Could we get some more context than this tweet (which doesn't really explain what's going on)?
The game shown here, Midnight Club II, required the CD to be in the drive to play it. With the advent of Steam and companies releasing older games on Steam, they needed a way to bypass that check. Bypassing a CD (commonly called No-CD) was a very common crack/DRM bypass back in the day. Rockstar didn't want to bring up old source code and find someone who understood it enough to remove the check, so instead they just…
This is a great example of how today's "piracy" is tomorrow's "only working copy left". I wish there were a more formal way to explicitly allow this, though I'm probably just pining for shorter copyright terms. This game was released 20 years ago, longer than the original U.S. copyright term of 14 years.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
A No-CD crack might not be transformative enough to warrant copyright protection as derivative work in the US. But they could sue in a jurisdiction that is more likely to give them a favorable outcome. Handling of derivative works and the minimum threshold for copyright varies considerably between countries.
Likely Rockstar would counter sue for violating their original Copyright and the terms of use attached to them. At best it would be a wash, there is a decent chance the damages for the countersuit would lead to a net loss.
After some short searching online, looks like for copyright infringement litigation, the statute of limitation is three years.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
He knows what cracked means. I think you misunderstood.
Not much room to misunderstand, and if he knows what cracked means what's going on should be obvious.
Not necessarily. You could understand that a cracked PC game means its copy-protection has been removed by someone illegally but not have a detailed enough understanding of the process to understand the tweet. Personally I'm not familiar with Razor1911 so I wouldn't have understood the significance of that string in the hexdump if it weren't for the context provided by other comments here.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#167Wouldn't it be just easier for everyone not to include DRM in the first place? Waste of money, vast majority of zoomers dont use cracks anyway.
(I am talking with the context of current games using denuvo, not this specific case)
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
The game shown here, Midnight Club II, required the CD to be in the drive to play it. With the advent of Steam and companies releasing older games on Steam, they needed a way to bypass that check. Bypassing a CD (commonly called No-CD) was a very common crack/DRM bypass back in the day. Rockstar didn't want to bring up old source code and find someone who understood it enough to remove the check, so instead they just…
This is a great example of how today's "piracy" is tomorrow's "only working copy left". I wish there were a more formal way to explicitly allow this, though I'm probably just pining for shorter copyright terms. This game was released 20 years ago, longer than the original U.S. copyright term of 14 years.
Disney lawyers, meanwhile, are looking to extend copyright to 50 years beyond the life of the author's 3rd generation descendant or the heat death of the universe, whichever comes last.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#169Would be funny if the hacker sued rockstar for profiting off his work.
Re: Rockstar is selling cracked game copies on Steam
#170Related story, I remember years ago as a kid I bought a Prince of Persia PC game at a yardsale (on a CD), but early on in the game there was a riddle where you needed a password to get through this door, it was some cryptic message of a few numbers. I don't remember the exact format but it turned out the riddle was instructing me to go to page X, line Y and character Z of the manual for the game! I remember being so…
It was common as well to use these things called Code Wheels: https://archive.org/details/code-wheels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_wheel
> https://archive.org/details/code-wheels
Oh dang, these are fun, I remember the classic Monkey Island "Dial-A-Pirate" wheel [3]
FYI you can use these without downloading the whole collection:
- Under Download Options, click "SHOW ALL" to see the list of files [1]
- Find the zip file for the game you want and click "View Contents" [2]
- Click the "HTM" file listed [3]
Kudos to the kind soul who took the extra effort to package them as single-file self-contained html docs!
1: https://archive.org/download/code-wheels
2: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...
3: https://ia904503.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22...