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Achmed Jones
Oct 16, 2004



gonads and

wow i hadn't thought about that video inat least 15 years

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President Beep
Apr 30, 2009





i have to have a car because otherwise i cant drive around the country solving mysteries while being doggedly pursued by federal marshals for a crime i did not commit (9/11)

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

it’s pronounced “jife”

mods I’d say ban this chucklefuck but he’s already doing time. very telling!

Best Bi Geek Squid
Mar 25, 2016
mah jife

Mantle
May 15, 2004

The Parlor

Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



shif like in French

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

it’s pronounced “jife”

gonna hack you with tracer-t

Fart Sandwiches
Apr 4, 2006

i never asked for this

Sweevo posted:

gonna hack you with tracer-t

deep cut lmao

i used to teach network stuff and i loved showing this video at the end of the course.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl
lol classic

Suspicious
Apr 30, 2005
You know he's the villain, because he's got shifty eyes.
just remembered that 00's games anti-piracy measures only inconvenienced people who actually bought the game. pirates had all that poo poo patched out day 1

the funniest one i can remember right now was battlefield 1942. took minutes to load into a new map. cracked bf42 loaded immediately, even on official servers

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy

BLOBby Newmark posted:

still a thing for ebooks


more info pls

axolotl farmer
May 17, 2007

Now I'm going to sing the Perry Mason theme

this is lenslok DRM. the game came with a little plastic lens thing that you held up to the screen and was supposed to descramble a warped code. it did not work very well.

it was used on a few C64 and ZX Spectrum games.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

axolotl farmer posted:

this is lenslok DRM. the game came with a little plastic lens thing that you held up to the screen and was supposed to descramble a warped code. it did not work very well.

it was used on a few C64 and ZX Spectrum games.



I'm pretty sure the only time I remember reading about it back in the day was in a review of a Sinclair QL game but that got me thinking "there were games for the Sinclair QL?!"

e: I mean yes, yes there were is the answer.

President Beep
Apr 30, 2009





i have to have a car because otherwise i cant drive around the country solving mysteries while being doggedly pursued by federal marshals for a crime i did not commit (9/11)

axolotl farmer posted:

this is lenslok DRM. the game came with a little plastic lens thing that you held up to the screen and was supposed to descramble a warped code. it did not work very well.

it was used on a few C64 and ZX Spectrum games.



woah. neat.

mediaphage
Mar 22, 2007

Excuse me, pardon me, sheer perfection coming through
that’s awesome. my favourite drm was always the version of carmen sandiego that came with a copy of the world almanac and made you enter the heading on the top of a random page demanded by the game

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster


neat idea, except:

- the instructions for using it were confusing
- it just didn't work if your screen was significantly bigger/smaller than the developers
- you had to do it against the clock
- the timeout was not shown on-screen, so the code might change between reading it and typing it in
- if you got it wrong three times in a row then the computer reset and you'd have to load the game again
- the few games that used it often had the wrong lens in the box

Crazy Achmed
Mar 13, 2001

wait a minute, if all it does is rearrange the order of the columns on that little section of screen in a totally repeatable way, doesn’t that basically make it a simple substitution cipher? like one that you could jot down on to a piece of paper and hand out to your friends?

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

it's a 3-letter code, so there are 26^3 combinations - it's not feasible to draw them all out

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



Sweevo posted:

gonna hack you with tracer-t

that always reminded me of deus ex, specifically the tracer tong dude

Ritz On Toppa Ritz
Oct 14, 2006

You're not allowed to crumble unless I say so.

mediaphage posted:

that’s awesome. my favourite drm was always the version of carmen sandiego that came with a copy of the world almanac and made you enter the heading on the top of a random page demanded by the game

I forgot that I used the Almanac from the Sega Genesis version of where in Time is Carmen Sandiego for college in early 2000s.

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

Sweevo posted:

- it just didn't work if your screen was significantly bigger/smaller than the developers

back then TVs were like 100kg at most, so no danger of them being bigger than game developers

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

mediaphage posted:

that’s awesome. my favourite drm was always the version of carmen sandiego that came with a copy of the world almanac and made you enter the heading on the top of a random page demanded by the game

Police Quest with multiple car chase scenes that were entirely not fun and served no purpose other than to periodically check that you had the city map inside the back page of the manual

Progressive JPEG
Feb 19, 2003

picking from a list of like 10 sound card options for audio card and then separately for music/midi and hoping the dma/irq numbers are right because you can't remember that poo poo

music based on the sound card's midi synth so the game would sound totally different (and WRONG) on a neighbor kid's machine

Volmarias
Dec 31, 2002

EMAIL... THE INTERNET... SEARCH ENGINES...

Progressive JPEG posted:

picking from a list of like 10 sound card options for audio card and then separately for music/midi and hoping the dma/irq numbers are right because you can't remember that poo poo

music based on the sound card's midi synth so the game would sound totally different (and WRONG) on a neighbor kid's machine

Very same.

kitten smoothie posted:

Police Quest with multiple car chase scenes that were entirely not fun and served no purpose other than to periodically check that you had the city map inside the back page of the manual

To be fair, incorporating the copy protection into the game was a pretty reasonable way to defer verification until later so it couldn't be as easily cheesed, and could actually be a form of demo. One of the TOS games included a star chart, which you needed to use to warp to another planet (change stages), which I think is clever.

Then there's games like Stay Calm and Nobody Explodes where the copy protection printout IS the game.

axolotl farmer
May 17, 2007

Now I'm going to sing the Perry Mason theme

Kings Quest III made you type out several verses of incantations from the manual.

kitten smoothie
Dec 29, 2001

Progressive JPEG posted:

music based on the sound card's midi synth so the game would sound totally different (and WRONG) on a neighbor kid's machine

Intentionally picking Adlib when you had a Sound Blaster because it used different instrument mappings and sounded wack

Pardot
Jul 25, 2001




axolotl farmer posted:

this is lenslok DRM. the game came with a little plastic lens thing that you held up to the screen and was supposed to descramble a warped code. it did not work very well.

it was used on a few C64 and ZX Spectrum games.



this vid was good on it a few months ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpn9sLNg-6k

DELETE CASCADE
Oct 25, 2017

i haven't washed my penis since i jerked it to a phtotograph of george w. bush in 2003
monkey island code wheel best drm

3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

axolotl farmer posted:

Kings Quest III made you type out several verses of incantations from the manual.

I beat KQ and KQ2 but KQ3 was just so... loving evil! I'll get back to it one day when I have a proper computre set-up.

(I bought it so it's not the copy protection that stopped me.)

The Batmobile in KQ (or was it 2?) got me like #whoah #wow was that the Batmobile?!?!

RobobTheGreat
Jul 14, 2003

Mind your manners when talking to the king!

3D Megadoodoo posted:

I beat KQ and KQ2 but KQ3 was just so... loving evil! I'll get back to it one day when I have a proper computre set-up.

(I bought it so it's not the copy protection that stopped me.)

The Batmobile in KQ (or was it 2?) got me like #whoah #wow was that the Batmobile?!?!

I definitely recommend the AGDI remakes of the first 3 KQ games.

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



my grandparents had this badass tome:



it was like half strategy guide, half super interesting flavour/lore/tidbits about the games. i played KQ4-8 back in the day. KQ7 was a huge pita lol. also KQ8 was weird as heck being all FPS and poo poo. i could only play KQ8 at my grandparents house because they had a computer robust enough to run it.

edit: was it KQ4 for that had the puzzle in the desert where it was basically a maze? that was RUDE

Pile Of Garbage fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Aug 18, 2021

Agile Vector
May 21, 2007

scrum bored



3D Megadoodoo posted:

I beat KQ and KQ2 but KQ3 was just so... loving evil! I'll get back to it one day when I have a proper computre set-up.

(I bought it so it's not the copy protection that stopped me.)

The Batmobile in KQ (or was it 2?) got me like #whoah #wow was that the Batmobile?!?!

3 with the very specific path down the stairs under a time limit leading to repeated alexander deaths was frustrating

6 got rid of the time limit but still had you step up several screens of stones on a cliff with pixel perfect clicking like the timer was the only thing wrong

Pile Of Garbage posted:

my grandparents had this badass tome:



it was like half strategy guide, half super interesting flavour/lore/tidbits about the games. i played KQ4-8 back in the day. KQ7 was a huge pita lol. also KQ8 was weird as heck being all FPS and poo poo. i could only play KQ8 at my grandparents house because they had a computer robust enough to run it.

edit: was it KQ4 for that had the puzzle in the desert where it was basically a maze? that was RUDE

that book loving rules. I bought it and the compilation of 1-7 and the 1 remake, as well as several of their other games. I think I tried the games but mostly read the novelized sections and found 3 and 7 way more enjoyable that way

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



as i understand and from what i remember roberta williams had a huge input to that book. that "brings my games to life" quote really is an understatement.

Truman Peyote
Oct 11, 2006



in addition to whatever copy protection I'm sure it had, Leisure Suit Larry would ensure the player was over 18 at startup by asking questions that only adults would know the answers to, such as "john, paul, ringo, and ____?"

Carthag Tuek
Oct 15, 2005

Tider skal komme,
tider skal henrulle,
slægt skal følge slægters gang



Truman Peyote posted:

in addition to whatever copy protection I'm sure it had, Leisure Suit Larry would ensure the player was over 18 at startup by asking questions that only adults would know the answers to, such as "john, paul, ringo, and ____?"

in one of them, you could tell how many you got right by spying on your neighbor and she'd have the drapes up if you got em all

what a creeper lol

Fortaleza
Feb 21, 2008

I think my fav was one of the Command & Conquer games (I think Red Alert?) that let you play for a few minutes then all of the sudden all of your units died all at once and you lost, no error or permissions message or anything

Pile Of Garbage
May 28, 2007



the SMAC demo only let you play for 100 turns. i remember when i was a kid i'd edit the ini files so that instead of University getting one free tech they'd get 100, then that way i could kind of experience the end-game lol

Sagebrush
Feb 26, 2012

i definitely respect the game more if the copy protection makes it subtly unplayable instead of just refusing to launch.

there was another RTS, maybe another command and conquer, where if the game detected it was pirated it would just give the enemy a bunch more units and greatly increase their damage. i suppose that could backfire into internet reports of "game sucks, way too hard" but it's definitely more fun as a response.

one of the early pirated versions of deus ex did that inadvertently: the crackers accidentally (or maybe intentionally for space) removed one sound file that played near the end of the first level, when you get on the police boat to the mainland, and the trigger to end the level was the successful playing of that file. so the ion storm forums filled up with hundreds of CAN'T GET ON BOAT<???? PLS HELP threads and everyone quickly figured out what was going on


e: oh yeah and the old escape velocity games. they were shareware but if you went past the 30 day limit an extremely powerful space pirate, captain hector, would show up and harass you continuously until you registered

shoeberto
Jun 13, 2020

which way to the MACHINES?
Serious Sam 3 was a fairly recent one that just sent an unkillable monster through the levels of the cracked version. Thought that was a fun throwback.

Sweevo
Nov 8, 2007

i sometimes throw cables away

i mean straight into the bin without spending 10+ years in the box of might-come-in-handy-someday first

im a fucking monster

There were a few Amiga games that moved a platform a few pixels so you couldn't make a jump, or fiddled with timers so you didn't have enough time to finish a level.

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3D Megadoodoo
Nov 25, 2010

RobobTheGreat posted:

I definitely recommend the AGDI remakes of the first 3 KQ games.

Thanks but I shan't play them :evilbuddy: I'm all about the Lego graphics.

Truman Peyote posted:

in addition to whatever copy protection I'm sure it had, Leisure Suit Larry would ensure the player was over 18 at startup by asking questions that only adults would know the answers to, such as "john, paul, ringo, and ____?"

Yeah it was really cool and good for the 4 billion people on the planet who did not know American popular culture. (Was it CTRL or ALT and X that skipped the quiz? And then in LSL3 it was some other combo?)

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