Re: 75% of new games purchased were downloaded

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 15:18:04 -0400, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:
>

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:
>

On Sat, 28 Sep 2024 08:27:39 -0400, Xocyll <Xocyll@gmx.com> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> looked up from reading the
entrails of the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs
say:

>

    [But honestly, I thought people would complain more
     about exposing the _game boxes_ to bright sunlight.
     Those are precious treasures!]

>
I just assumed like any normal person playing a single player game you
would have dl'd a no-cd crack, and the box and it's contents would
remain out of sight and out of reach of the nasty burny sky goblin.
>

>
I actually made surprisingly little use of no-CDs with games. It
wasn't that I never used them, but -given the size of my library- most
games I just used the optical disk. It helped that all of them had
been transferred to neatly-organized CD-folios (conveniently within
arm's reach of the PC), and that I tended to play one game at a time,
so swapping wasn't that much of an issue.

>
It wasn't the swapping, it was the constant spinning up of the disc
which sometimes damaged it (not only causing it to misread for dame
verification but also making future installs impossible.)
>
Some of those copy protect and verify schemes spun the disc up over an
over and over, with lots of nasty scuffing sounds.
>

>
I've never heard of that happening. I'm not saying it didn't, but that
seems very unusual. The usual complaint I've heard was that the
_discs_ would get scuffed because they were left sitting on the desk,
where it was easy to scratch them. Alternately, I've heard tales of
the optical drives themselves (not the discs) getting worn out by all
the excess reads. But the discs themselves getting damaged? That
sounds more a fault of the drive hardware than the DRM.

You might recall that when Bethesda released Morrowind they removed the
copy protection in the first patch, in part because it's _constantly_
accessed the disc, it was spinning up to read the disc every minute or
two and causing massive lag.

Some of these companies don't know what they are doing and/or are super
paranoid "you put in the disc for the check, then took it out so your
friend/sibling could use it, DIDN'T YOU?!?!?!?, well we're on to you,
here comes another check AND THAT DISC BETTER BE IN THERE MISTER!
"for visuals think of the guy from animal house/the we're not going to
take it video by twisted sister.

Certainly in my decades of using CD-ROMs, I never had such an
experience. All my discs (except for the two or three I broke because
of carelessly leaving them on the desk ;-) are still readable.
>
I've gone through a good number of optical drives, though.

As have I and some of them wee not the best, and/or slightly warped from
the manufacturer so the disc was not completely clear of the tray when
it spun up.

Sadly, most of the boxes were discarded shortly after purchase. I just
don't have the space to store them all. It was only for a handful of
favorites (of which the Ultima games predominate) that I kept the
packaging.

>

Yeah I have a few games in box, the aforementioned Daggerfall, since it
was one of my favorite games of all time, the City of Heroes boxes, and
some of the hard plastic clamshell boxes cause they're small and hard
and protect the discs and such well, while taking minimal space.

>
Daggerfall had a funky box, didn't it? It had a holgram or something
on it, I think. At least some versions did.

Mine didn't.

I've two "grades" of boxes in my closet. The first are the games I
love the most; the Ultima games in particular, but a few others. Then
there are the 'second tier' boxes; these I keep either because I liked
the game or -more likely- I just liked the box! These, though, get
emptied and flattened so they take up less space.
>
That said, I've all my original manuals (now stored in six or eight
office boxes neatly stacked in the aforementioned closet). Just
because I don't have room for the boxes doesn't mean I'm tossing the
manuals! ;-)

Of course not.

A moment of silence for the death of the well done manual.

Xocyll