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Winks posted:You could avoid getting it by disabling autorun and just use the CDs like any other CD.
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Jul 1, 2014 04:52
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Aurora-Capitah posted:Webcam is often the exception here. I downloaded a 500mb bluetooth driver the other day 
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Jul 1, 2014 08:25
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blugu64 posted:MiniDisc data drives were a thing Oh I know, but dang if I could find one with my lovely Australian dialup. And me being a poor student thinking "oh it won't cost much at all, then I'll be able to rip UMDs" <--- I was an uninformed idiot. Now an informed one.
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Jul 1, 2014 10:09
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Ripping UMDs was super easy once you got a custom firmware installed, no external hardware needed. Got a memory stick adapter that took micro SD cards for a super cheap 32GB stick and I could carry all my games as images. Of course the Vita's memory card is roughly the same size as a micro SD card but shaped a little different, so a cheap adapter is impossible.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:04
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I'm sure it varies by year/quarter but I recently read an article about how the majority of Sony's consumer business has been operating at a huge loss for years, and the operational side (i.e. not including insurance/finance/real estate) is basically kept kind-of afloat entirely by Playstation game royalties. So I hope that makes you feel better.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:20
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Throatwarbler posted:I'm sure it varies by year/quarter but I recently read an article about how the majority of Sony's consumer business has been operating at a huge loss for years, and the operational side (i.e. not including insurance/finance/real estate) is basically kept kind-of afloat entirely by Playstation game royalties. So I hope that makes you feel better.
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Jul 2, 2014 00:49
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WebDog posted:I did mention this. I was poorly summing up the investigations that made the point that despite ruining people's computers with anti-piracy methods, it didn't actually stop the ability to make copies and it was trivially circumvented from turning off auto-run or going to drastic steps and using a market to outline the edge of the disc to blot out the data track from being accessed. And even if you had the software installed and it was filling your drive up with hiss, I suspect you still could be able to record via dub.
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Jul 2, 2014 02:25
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MondayHotDog posted:People would make fun of me for my Canadian accent and I'm not even from Canada. Where are you from? I know every Canadian says this but the southwest coast accent is not very thick/stereotypical e.g. Michael J Fox, Seth Rogen, Cobie Smulders, Ryan Reynolds
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Jul 2, 2014 02:36
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Oh the heyday of StarForce and how that became a PR nightmare for Ubisoft. StarForce was made in Russia, where they really know a thing or two about the many ways you can copy things. The result was a very very complex mechanism that overwrote your DVD drivers and replaced it with nine layers of hell. It initially was seen as a breakthrough as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory was uncracked for over a year. But eventually the group RELOADED had pulled enough of the byzantine puzzle apart to find out it was a complex system that relied on running a virtual machine in order to create a system that couldn't just be bypassed or tricked with image readers. But the problem soon emerged when it was discovered to installed with demos and weren't removed with the game. It took a while for third party removal tools or even official ones to be released. And even then removal tools didn't always match with what version of StarForce was installed so you'd likely have multiple versions of it on your system. Another effect was the reports of people's drives suddenly failing to work. What was happening was the StarForce drivers wer tripping XP's data correction, which automatically slowed down the read speed if it detected a read error. Starforce kept on tripping this to the point where XP forced the DVD-drive into 16bit mode. This usually resulted in your drive not appearing anymore as XP had no idea how to read it. In some cases multi-format drives couldn't operate that slow and would destruct. Another issue that emerged was that Starforce was being installed at a system permissions security level (ring-0). It opened up an old security hole that had been patched over in XP meaning anyone was able to install a file at system level by using Starforce as a backdoor. StarForce responded by offering up a $1000 prize to anyone who could prove their new and within warranty system had been damaged by the software. But the caveat meant you had to lug your PC to their Russian office to show them in person at your own cost. You'd apparently got reimbursed, or failing that, got publicly branded as a loser on their website. Meanwhile employees were caught out spamming comments saying how the software was perfectly fine and it was the evil pirates spreading lies about the software. Things got silly when one of Ubisoft's employees tried to make a point about how effective their software was by posting torrent links to a copy of Galactic Civilizations. For Ubisoft this resulted in a $5m class action lawsuit being filed against them citing there was no warning that the software was to be installed. Ubisoft eventually dropped it, fearing a sales backlash over the much anticipated Heroes of Might and Magic. In 2010 they returned with their infamous Online Services Platform (Uplay) which managed to be even more of a nightmare for gamers as any intermittent bump in their Internet connection would drop them from the game and usually loosing whatever progress they had made. Most games eventually got this feature patched out and had off-line mode enabled.
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Jul 2, 2014 03:52
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Makes me long for the days of Jet Set Willy II's copy protection, which was a colourful grid inside the cassette inlay. When the game booted it gave you random coordinates and you had to plug in the right colours for the game to work. Tedious to copy by hand, because colour photocopiers didn't exist. Although you could take a picture of it with a film camera and develop that, I guess. Operation Stealth's copy protection was some system where you needed to cover an image with a piece of red cellophane, again not something that was easy to copy. And wasn't there some game like Ultima where it came with a map printed onto actual cloth that you needed to complete the game? One of the cleverest copy-protection mechanisms on the Amiga was use of the Trace bit in the CPU, normally used for debugging. The binary was encrypted and loaded into memory, and on every instruction the Trace bit would cause an interrupt to occur and decode the next instruction in front of the PC. If you tried to look at what was going on with a debugger, the debugger would of course install its own interrupt and disable the decoder, so you'd just see garbage in front of the program counter and (for a while) be mystified as to how it was every running.
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Jul 2, 2014 04:58
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Ahhh Starforce. The best argument for not buying games you could possibly make  Thank god we live in the age of Steam sales letting you eventually buy whatever for $3 or something.
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Jul 2, 2014 05:12
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Shugojin posted:Ahhh Starforce. The best argument for not buying games you could possibly make Games for Windows Live is pretty compelling as well. On the subject of DRM and GFWL, does anyone else think it's
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Jul 2, 2014 05:15
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minato posted:Makes me long for the days of Jet Set Willy II's copy protection, which was a colourful grid inside the cassette inlay. When the game booted it gave you random coordinates and you had to plug in the right colours for the game to work. Tedious to copy by hand, because colour photocopiers didn't exist. Although you could take a picture of it with a film camera and develop that, I guess. Out of This World came packaged with a crazy code wheel (in two parts) that you had to use to decode certain keys the game would ask for before you could start playing.
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Jul 2, 2014 05:33
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minato posted:And wasn't there some game like Ultima where it came with a map printed onto actual cloth that you needed to complete the game?
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Jul 2, 2014 06:44
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Dogan posted:Out of This World came packaged with a crazy code wheel (in two parts) that you had to use to decode certain keys the game would ask for before you could start playing. I always like Wofpack's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfpack_(video_game) copy protection. You had to find a quote/sentence/word/phrase/technical info or something like that in a 50+ page manual and type it in when the game started. My uncle copied the disks for me and wrote down like 5 of the answers. So I had to restart the game over and over again until one randomly came up. e: While looking up random Wolfpack stuff I found this. Brings back the memories. 
Plinkey has a new favorite as of 06:55 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 06:45
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The 'Lenslok' copy protection in the original Elite game on the ZX Spectrum was a bit unusual as it was prism. The tv screen displayed a scrambled graphic which if you put the lenslok onto the screen it would (hopefully) unscramble the graphic into a code. Needless to say it was a total pain to use as they were cheaply made of plastic and had to be calibrated due to different screen sizes. 
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Jul 2, 2014 07:07
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I know I've posted this on SA somewhere before but Space Quest IV came with a fake news magazine that contained runic codes that you entered into the time machine to get to various times and locations to solve puzzles - all of the codes you needed except the final one to reach the last area of the game. Where did you find this final code? It was on the display of the time machine the first time you stepped into it, before you had figured out how to operate it or to look for the codes in the booklet. Touching any of the controls in the ship blanked out the code. You had to copy down meaningless runic symbols you had no context for before clicking anything in the time machine you stole during an action-y sequence where any delay meant the time-cops returning and killing you. It's hard to adequately describe what a dick move this meta-puzzle was. Time to buy a hint book! Edit: There was also really no in game hint to point you toward this at the end when you suddenly run out of places to go. You just have to decide that you need to return to where the time cops came from before your first encounter with them and then start the entire game over to get back there and get the code. I'm fairly sure it changed with every new game as well so you couldn't just play a new save up until that point to get the code for your endgame save. moller has a new favorite as of 07:15 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 07:12
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m2pt5 posted:Games for Windows Live is pretty compelling as well. GFWL was an attempt to bring up quality standards. The idea was that if you were a developer then by having that branding your game supported widescreen, subtitles, 5.1 and a few other features to keep quality in line. However GFWL was a part of something bigger; to sell Windows Vista, featuring the new DirectX 10, needed for all of the next-gen games like Crysis. However in 2007, not much existed that was ready, everything was delayed till 2008. Hunting for a carrot Microsoft came up with Shadowrun and the much awaited PC port of Halo 2. Halo 2 became a sticking point as it was questioned to why the hell did a DX 8.1 game needed to be "upgraded" to DX10 despite featuring no actual upgrades, short of perhaps a few more lights and better texture streaming. Consumers were pretty pissed that you had to buy Vista (around $300) and a new graphic card that had DX10 for this reason. Even more frustrating was despite Shadowrun's ability do multiplayer on console and PC, Halo 2 didn't offer this feature - no doubt in fear of the ease of hacking that was already rampant on the console. Hacks were soon established to trick Shadowrun and Halo 2 into running on XP, complete with backported libraries. Pretty much every other DX10 game released since had a DX9 fallback and ran on XP fine. Microsoft's arrogance seemed to have stunted consumer confidence and there seemed to be a slower adoption of DX10 at the time vs DirectX 9 only a few years back, it ended up being more or less extravagant optional extra - or an elusive "Ultra" mode in settings. Back to GFWL. To begin with integration was pretty harmless, even going so far as to easily allow an offline account so there was very little checks in the way of it being an actual DRM. However Microsoft must have noticed more people creating offline than online so hid this option. Then stuff started getting complex as Steam integration often was clumsy or went the long way around as Microsoft just didn't want to play nice - ask anyone who brought DLC or tried to verify serials for GTA IV via Steam. Where it really got poo poo was it's poor backwards compatibility as versions got updated, notably with Windows 8 where the new LIVE games infrastructure did not like the old to the point of failing to install games. If you managed to bypass the GFWL installer it then some games failed to save game data or crash with some cryptic error resulting in hunting down obscure versions to make a hodgepodge of .dll swaps. In many cases there was little to no developer support in fixing this. An infamous case is Arkham City where if you brought the regular game and perhaps the major DLC the game just shat itself and failed to save. However the GOTY didn't feature this bug. Little surprise the whole service quietly ended last year and where possible games have been updated to remove it.
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Jul 2, 2014 09:36
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Flipperwaldt posted:Wanted to correct you, but I was misremembering and it indeed involved either a registry edit, group policy on XP Pro or the TweakUI tool.  TweakUI. It was one of the first things I installed on WindowsXP to make it usable.
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Jul 2, 2014 10:14
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Aleph Null posted:I have an HP laptop with a Blu-ray drive. I can't watch DVDs or Blu-rays while the WiFi is active. The drive gradually churns more and more until I am watching the movie in 1 second chunks every 5 seconds. Turn on Airplane Mode? Problem disappears.
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Jul 2, 2014 10:32
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Before the days of maturity ratings, Leisure Suit Larry quizzed you on things that only an adult would know. The full list of questions is here http://www.allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.html and includes a mildly prophetic question about OJ Simpson. O. J. Simpson is a. an R & B singer. b. under indictment. c. embarrassed by his first name (Olivia). d. no one to fool with. Correct answer: d.
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Jul 2, 2014 10:36
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Awful Library Books has a review of Eyewitness Books "Future" book. A book featuring such modern technology as the compact disk, teleconferencing, and portable televisions. The book was published in 1998: those things existed by then. http://awfullibrarybooks.net/the-future-was-yesterday/
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Jul 2, 2014 11:35
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cheerfullydrab posted:I have no answer as to why my wireless adapter just turns itself off and needs to be reset all the time, and I think I never will. Wireless networking technology doesn't actually exist anymore. Wireless networking technology almost exists. (I know the place I work at had their own proprietary wireless network back in the early eighties and people say it never failed. Of course all those people are now old and old people are not to be trusted.)
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Jul 2, 2014 12:31
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WebDog posted:No, it's a special level of insanity where everyone wants their own slice of the pie. And it's going to get nasty as digital distribution really settles in. A lot of games are also not getting updated, despite being maybe only a year old or less, and hence when the GFWL servers shut down they will cease to work at all. Microsoft is basically an EA esque villain at this point with how badly they hosed up GFWL and the xbone.
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Jul 2, 2014 13:22
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WebDog posted:GFWL GFWL is actually still running. The GFWL store was closed some time last year, so you can't buy new games directly from MS or DLC (not that anyone every bought from there). The GFWL match making and copy protection service was rumored to be ending at the end of those month and a LOT of big titles have been updated to use Steamworks instead, but MS has stated that it's not going way. Back to their store, they had an issue with their CD key system. quote:
The trick was that all of the legacy games used the same CD keys. You could keep activating games on their service that used that method. So with one CD key, you had access to the following games: Batman: Arkham Asylum Battlestations Pacific Bioshock 2 Blacklight: Tango Down BlazBlue - Calamity Trigger Colin McRae's DiRT 2 Dark Void Fallout 3 Flatout Ultimate Carnage FUEL Game Room Gears of War Grand Theft Auto IV Grand Theft Auto IV - Episodes From Liberty City Halo 2 Hour of Victory Juiced 2 - Hot Import Nights Kane & Lynch: Dead Men Legend of the Galactic Heroes Lost Planet: Colonies Edition (MUST be Colonies Edition) Mahjong Tales: Ancient Wisdom Microsoft Tinker Osmose Quantum of Solace Red Faction Guerilla Resident Evil 5 Section 8 Shadowrun Star Wars - The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes Stormrise Street Fighter IV The Club Universe At War Vancouver 2010 Viva Pi?ata Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 - Chaos Rising Where's Waldo? - The Fantastic Journey World of Goo Lowen SoDium has a new favorite as of 13:27 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 13:23
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Reminds me of their PlaysForSure music DRM, which, well, doesn't. It was an xp-era program for both hardware and music stores, and also Windows media player, with reasonably wide compatibility. So obviously, the Zune and its music store didn't support it at all.
Computer viking has a new favorite as of 13:29 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 13:24
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cheerfullydrab posted:I have no answer as to why my wireless adapter just turns itself off and needs to be reset all the time, and I think I never will. My HP laptop refuses to play nice internally on my wireless network. If all it's doing is accesing the internet, it's fine. But if I try to send a file from/to it, or stream something from/to it, the entire wireless network slows to a crawl...I mean, like, 1 kbps crawl. The laptop has an N wireless card, it's configured to use N, the router is N, EVERYTHING ON THE NETWORK CAN USE N, so why does it drop to slower than "a" speeds? And only when doing things internally on the network? No clue.
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Jul 2, 2014 14:03
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Drone_Fragger posted:A lot of games are also not getting updated, despite being maybe only a year old or less, and hence when the GFWL servers shut down they will cease to work at all. Microsoft is basically an EA esque villain at this point with how badly they hosed up GFWL and the xbone. The thing I'm most looking forward to is that in the wake of facebooks inevitable shutdown 5 or so years from now, all the games and services that have rushed to implement "log in from facebook" buttons will stop working. DrBouvenstein posted:The laptop has an N wireless card, it's configured to use N, the router is N, EVERYTHING ON THE NETWORK CAN USE N, so why does it drop to slower than "a" speeds? And only when doing things internally on the network? No clue. Are any of them "draft N"? For a while there was a legal spat about who owned the N specification and thus got the delicious patent-bux, and devices were being sold with "kinda-sorta N but not really" support. They didn't always play nice, and not all of them worked properly with the proper N specification. Sir_Substance has a new favorite as of 14:25 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 14:22
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Good opportunity to link this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjEbpMgiL7U - LGR - History of DRM & Copy Protection in Computer Games
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Jul 2, 2014 16:22
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Lowen SoDium posted:GFWL is actually still running. The GFWL store was closed some time last year, so you can't buy new games directly from MS or DLC (not that anyone every bought from there). The GFWL match making and copy protection service was rumored to be ending at the end of those month and a LOT of big titles have been updated to use Steamworks instead, but MS has stated that it's not going way. The authentication servers aren't, but the GFWL service itself most definitely does close down this month, so if a game doesn't have an offline profile option you're probably going to be screwed.
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Jul 2, 2014 17:43
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SybilVimes posted:The authentication servers aren't, but the GFWL service itself most definitely does close down this month, so if a game doesn't have an offline profile option you're probably going to be screwed. Don't misunderstand me, I believe that they are going down too. But MS is telling people that they are not even though a lot of games that use it have switched to steamworks like rats deserting a sinking ship. edit: http://www.gamrreview.com/news/91676/microsoft-denies-games-for-windows-live-shutdown/
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Jul 2, 2014 18:13
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Lowen SoDium posted:[GFWL-using] Shadowrun Oh god that game. That does not deserve the title. ... though, maybe someone needs to hire some runners to get the server side part of some of these DRM schemes. That would certainly fix a lot of our problems.
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Jul 2, 2014 19:14
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Jerry Cotton posted:Wireless networking technology doesn't actually exist anymore. Wireless networking technology almost exists. I have enterprise grade wireless APs in a production environment that regularly need to be power cycled to work properly. They carry two networks, corporate and open (mostly) internet access. They will randomly just decide one day that they no longer want, for example, all apple devices to connect, or all laptops or something crazy. Power cycling, by pulling the ethernet sometimes only brings back one network, another power cycle will only bring back the other. They are roof mountable, but I'm not going to. Get your poo poo together [well respected network company]
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Jul 2, 2014 23:18
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leidend posted:Where are you from? Upstate New York, about 10 miles from where NY, Ontario and Quebec meet. Everyone who laughed at my funny talk was from NYC but they all spoke with the typical midwestern American accent. Edit: So it's not a total derail, today at work I was reminded that we used to (possibly still do) charge twice as much for burning a DVD-R over a CD-R. Even though they cost like 5 cents more. We have probably thousands of blank discs we bought years ago that we're never gonna use. I don't know why we bought so many in the first place, we never used a lot of them to begin with. Monday_ has a new favorite as of 05:19 on Jul 3, 2014 |
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Jul 3, 2014 04:25
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Computer viking posted:Reminds me of their PlaysForSure music DRM, which, well, doesn't. It was an xp-era program for both hardware and music stores, and also Windows media player, with reasonably wide compatibility. So obviously, the Zune and its music store didn't support it at all. Wasn't there something to do with MS creating a separate format for the Zune in order to appease companies that had bought into the PlaysForSure technology and not pull away people who bought their devices to the MS Zune store?
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Jul 3, 2014 05:28
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moller posted:I know I've posted this on SA somewhere before but Space Quest IV came with a fake news magazine that contained runic codes that you entered into the time machine to get to various times and locations to solve puzzles - all of the codes you needed except the final one to reach the last area of the game. Where did you find this final code? It was on the display of the time machine the first time you stepped into it, before you had figured out how to operate it or to look for the codes in the booklet. Touching any of the controls in the ship blanked out the code. You had to copy down meaningless runic symbols you had no context for before clicking anything in the time machine you stole during an action-y sequence where any delay meant the time-cops returning and killing you. I think you may be misremembering some things. The fake newspaper is used for copy protection in the diskette version (no copy protection in the CD-ROM version), but in both versions all the time travel codes are found within the game. The codes to Vohaul's Fortress and the Galaxy Galleria mall can be gleaned when you first enter their respective time pods; the code to Estros is set to whatever you type randomly; and the code to Ulence Flats/Space Quest 1 is constructed from two halves that you find in the gum wrapper and the hintbook respectively.
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Jul 4, 2014 01:54
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There aren't rose-tinted lenses thick enough to make me look back at the Sierra games with any fondness.
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Jul 4, 2014 02:38
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JediTalentAgent posted:Wasn't there something to do with MS creating a separate format for the Zune in order to appease companies that had bought into the PlaysForSure technology and not pull away people who bought their devices to the MS Zune store? All I know is that my zune appears to be a PlaysForSure device in almost all aspects except actual functionality. Heck, even connecting it to Linux, it shows up on Rhythmbox as a music device and I can browse its contents. But everything else - transfers, syncing, etc. is broken. So, it uses a protocol called "Plays For Sure" for a device that, in reality, does not play for sure in almost all situations. For all its faults, I still love my Zune though.
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Jul 4, 2014 06:25
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Computer viking posted:* One good thing about being in Norway is that the language is rare enough that the call centers are typically in-country. What, you actually get to speak to Norwegians when you phone up call centers? All I ever get are Swedes or Indians, or a guy from Scania with a heavy Indian accent. That's actually one of the many reasons why I just stopped using Dell products. Every time I called their support lines, I'd get some outsourced guy I couldn't really understand. Lurkman posted:There aren't rose-tinted lenses thick enough to make me look back at the Sierra games with any fondness.
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Jul 4, 2014 11:34
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Mikser posted:I think you may be misremembering some things. The fake newspaper is used for copy protection in the diskette version (no copy protection in the CD-ROM version), but in both versions all the time travel codes are found within the game. The codes to Vohaul's Fortress and the Galaxy Galleria mall can be gleaned when you first enter their respective time pods; the code to Estros is set to whatever you type randomly; and the code to Ulence Flats/Space Quest 1 is constructed from two halves that you find in the gum wrapper and the hintbook respectively. Yep, you're right. I was conflating the copy protection that pops up when you get to the first (?) timepod with the timecode puzzle and (i think) the similar looking runic manual-based copy protection from SQ1. I think this puzzle was sufficiently evil enough that it existed as folklore among some of my friends, and got exaggerated by re-telling it over the years. I appreciate the correction though and feel a bit silly now. I don't think I got to see the CDROM version until decades after the fact. Gary Owens was pretty amazing as the narrator though.
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Jul 4, 2014 12:48
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