Re: 'People like to hate EA, I don't know why'

On Mon, 24 Mar 2025 09:03:51 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

On 23/03/2025 19:00, Zaghadka wrote:

Shit! You guys think Denuvo is bad? The "scene" *exists in the first
place* because C=64 CP was so gobsmackingly outrageous.

>
I came from Spectrum land and there, as I presume trying to stop people
copying tapes was hard, they went down the route of physical things you
have to have. Some examples are just typing in certain words from the
manual, colour charts (colour photo copiers, not that common) and the
most dreaded of all - Lenslock. The was a piece of plastic with a
special lens in it that you placed over the screen and then hoped, with
as many fingers crossed as you could manage, you could see what you
needed to type in to start the game. It was a right PITA as if you
actually bought the game then you used this awful method, get a pirate
copy and it was likely to be patched out.

Indeed. It got to the point that at a certain point it became
advantageous for publishers to market their games as /not/ having
on-disk copy protection (instead relying, as mentioned, on manual
look-ups, code-wheels, or even -very rarely- dongles) because stopping
people from copying the disks was becoming so onerous and pointless.

Which is (mostly) where I entered into gaming. I only dabbled with the
8-bits, so I was spared most of the worst excesses of on-disk
copy-protection, but I ran smack-dab into the offline variety. In
fact, I can think of only one PC game I encountered that used it
("Lemmings"), with everything else relying on manual checks, etc.

But, honestly, I didn't mind most of the latter. It was, after all, an
era when most manuals were written well enough that you didn't mind
thumbing through them, and often the copy-protection checks were so
integrated into the game so that they felt more like a necessary part
of the storyline than an onerous check. And none of them were
impossible to bypass, even if all you had was a pen and paper (and a
little time). So you /could/ pass on a game to your friends, if you
really wanted to, but you'd only if you /really/ liked it, because it
took a lot of work.

    [or a connection to a local BBS with a cracks section in
     their downloads area ;-)]