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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

#221

Post by rasz »

tetrisgm wrote: post #149
rasz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every game separately encrypted then compressed into solid archives. Pressed in a way every game lands on different precise height of CD, padded before compression if necessary so it takes enough space on CD. Separate machine burning tiny holes in CD from the back, but not so tiny that CIRC could fixes them. At least one hole per file. Install locates the damage and gives you code encoding locations. Over the phone Y…

I respect the creativity, but this was a 22mb game. Nothing arj or rar wouldn’t handle. Or going on irc

Sure, but the question wasnt about solving world hunger, wars and global piracy :) Its a solution for limiting pirate-ability of this particular CDs contents.

Encode data in a way short ECC code dictated over the phone is enough to reconstruct one missing sector (2KB).

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

#223

Post by Cpoll »

Xirdus wrote: post #207
guhcampos wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " To me the Saturn made the absolute best choice. The whole game's OST would be burned as audio tracks. I used to - and still can - jus…

PlayStation games had that too - not sure if all, but at least some of them. It was especially funny if the game disk failed to load as a game, but opened just fine in the PlayStation's built-in music player.

> not sure if all

A fair amount, but far from all of them. AFAIR it was largely a technical decision with trade-offs; games that did it could offer CD-quality music, but wouldn't be able to read data from the disk and play music simultaneously.

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

#224

Post by returnorthrow »

epihelix wrote: post #159
beloch wrote: post #33

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year an…

Myst was the CD-ROM killer game for me. And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride. Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall hav…

I too was in the Cyrix camp when Quake came out. My first video card was a Permedia 2. It ran GLQuake when that came down the pipe but not very well. The Christmas when I got my 3dfx Voodoo1 card was magical.

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

#226

Post by project2501 »

guhcampos wrote: post #190
beloch wrote: post #33

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year an…

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " To me the Saturn made the absolute best choice. The whole game's OST would be burned as audio tracks. I used to - and still can - jus…

IIRC, the Quake 1 CD also had its OST as standard audio tracks

Quake 2 had it for sure, that CD spent as much time in my car as in my PC

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

#227

Post by Anamon »

fipar wrote: post #170
somat wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The turbo button was always on, or it should be. you would turn it off to downgrade your pc to run at the speed of the original IBM PC in the mostly vain hope that whatever old game that was programmed for that exact speed would start to run right. It was slightly be fore my time(we had a 286 with the button, but I was to young to be curious about it) Would the pc take the speed change without problems or was it best…

The way I remember the turbo button it just halved the clock speed when not depressed, but it didn't bring it back to the original IBM PC's speed. I do remember using it to make older games play less bad, but, as you say, this rarely worked, I think precisely because the speed was never the original one (I don't remember the clock speed of my first PC, but the first one with a turbo button ran at 33 MHz which I'm sur…

Yes, our first family PC was a 386 that we could slow down from 33 to 16 MHz with the Turbo button. It even had the segment display to show the current clock rate.

I knew what it was for and had some old games that ran too fast, but from what I remember, in most cases 16 MHz was still much too fast, so I didn't use the button much.

I think it was no problem to switch Turbo mode on and off in the middle of running software.

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

#228

Post by Anamon »

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.

Corel once gave a German magazine a time-limited version of their graphics suite to put on the cover CD. You could overwrite a few .EXE files with their .BAK copies to turn it into the full version.

That issue of the magazine sold out pretty quickly once it became public knowledge. Corel issue a statement that replacing the files doesn't make it a legally licensed copy. I'm sure many people cared.

Edit: here's an article about it from that time. It was PC Direkt issue 5/2001. https://www.golem.de/0104/13530.html

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

#229

Post by Anamon »

Delk wrote: post #178
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 a…

It was routine for preteen and teenage me to put any game CD or game magazine coverdisc in the Hi-Fi CD player at some point, and see if the track number indicator would show anything higher than 01. It was definitely quite common. Some that I remember are Grand Theft Auto, Carmageddon, Alone in the Dark 2, Rayman, Little Big Adventure 2, Tunnel B1, 7th Guest, The Dark Eye...

The music was made interesting by the sheer novelty of being able to listen to it that way, and get a bit of the game to enjoy even after the parents decided computer time is over =D

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

#230

Post by Delk »

Anamon wrote: post #229
Delk wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

It was routine for preteen and teenage me to put any game CD or game magazine coverdisc in the Hi-Fi CD player at some point, and see if the track number indicator would show anything higher than 01. It was definitely quite common. Some that I remember are Grand Theft Auto, Carmageddon, Alone in the Dark 2, Rayman, Little Big Adventure 2, Tunnel B1, 7th Guest, The Dark Eye... The music was made interesting by the she…

I remember at least Civilization II, Descent II, Settlers II, Outcast, and I think some rallying game I had as using Redbook audio. The industrial soundtrack of Descent II was actually pretty good.

The interwebs also mention G-Police, which I remember playing, but I have no recollection about the soundtrack.

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