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

On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 11:29:40 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:01:59 -0400, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
wrote:
>

On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:16:17 +0000, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:
>

Oh I did and it was just finicky to get it to work. To rub salt into the
wound I thought, hang on a sec I've actually paid to buy this thing
although strictly speaking not really as £10 was by then the anchor
price for premium games which you can blame Ultimate for with Sabre Wulf.

>
The craziest copy protection scheme I had to deal with was having to
plug in this adapter\dongle thingy that came with one of my games to
play it. I thought that was weird, but that  has nothing on Lenslock.

>
>
The most famous game on computer to use dongle-based copy protection
was Ocean's "Robocop 3" (and even that game dropped the dongle pretty
quickly because it didn't offer significantly more protection, but did
raise the cost of the game!). "10th Frame", "B.A.T" and "Leaderbord"
and "Neutral Zone" were amongst the handful of others that implemented
dongle protection. Apparently some games on consoles also used dongles
to help bypass the licensing checks used by Nintendo etc. to make sure
only "allowed" games ran on "their" hardware.
>

Brevity is the soul of wit.

Players, in general, hated dongles. The disadvantages were numerous.
They suffered from hardware compatibility issues with hardware that
usually worked well enough but wasn't close enough to spec to work
with the dongle. Dongles were easily lost. If you had multiple games
with dongles, you either had to swap them out (and thus risk losing
one) or face possible compatibility issues caused by chaining dongles.
>

That said, I intend to be entirely "witless." I'm about to lose my wits.

Checking for the presence of the dongle could often be slow. They
added to the price of the game. And unlike off-disk copy-protection,
they added nothing to the experience of the game (I mean, sure
code-wheels were annoying, but at least you got to spin the wheel ;-).
So you didn't see many games that actually used a hardware dongle.
>

Screw code wheels and "page 3, paragraph 2, word 5" schemes. Really now?

But in The Lurking Horror, the *premiums* were the CP. You recieved a
physical student ID in the box, and the entire game was impossible to
take beyond a limited demo if you didn't read it and type in your student
ID number. Space Quest IV had a puzzle with a series of "IRK addresses"
(a play on the IRQ address) that you had to configure to get beyond a
certain point of the game. The "technical specs" to navigate this were in
the manual, with no shortage of gallows humor regarding the lack of
"plug-and-play." Not only was that fun, it was funny!

So CP went way beyond code wheels when the developer was clever enough to
make hardware-based CP actually fun.

Unfortunately, the entire BBS system ruined their fun in doing so,
because they couldn't provide different manual configurations for
different copies at the time. We were a bunch of ungrateful, freeloading
little bitches. They tried. We behaved poorly.

Of course, for a while CD-ROM based disk-protection could have been
seen as a form of dongle; keep the disk in the drive or the game won't
run! ;-)
>

Yes. This is not a dongle, but it does fall into the category of a
hardware-based DRM scheme. A medium like a floppy disk is hardware.
Reading it is a hardware operation. Requiring reading it to run the game,
by leaving data on the CD-ROM (which was valid because HD sizes were
small, eg: Journeyman Project)* is a hardware solution. Rewarding someone
with Redbook audio by providing a hybrid disk is a hardware solution.

Software recognition of a valid, but malformatted, disc is not. When they
finally turned to things like Safedisc, then it's hardware assisted
software DRM. It's still a piece of hardware though.

Dongles were _a lot_ more common on application software, because the
price of the hardware device was more easily absorbed into the very
high price of the application. Also, because these apps were more
expensive, end users were more likely to take care of them (as opposed
to kids and their throw-away games). But when you were talking about a
$5000 program, you better believe that you knew where the dongle was!
Furthermore, because the app was likely to be in continued use for
year after year, it was much less likely to get unplugged and lost, as
opposed to a game which you will probably stop playing (and remove the
dongle) after a few months.
>

Hell, some of them required that you solder a chip to your mainboard, or
plug in an ISA card later on. I remember when my teacher soldered a Word
Processor chip to a Commodore PET in the lab. She showed me the odd
little beetle like thing, and I really enjoyed that. (c 1982).

All this made dongles a lot more common in business software than in
games. The only software I remember specifically that used a dongle
was Quark Xpress, an early desktop-publishing program, but dongles
were endemic. I recall one instance when an office had a bunch of
dongles (one plugged into the next plugged into the next) that was
easily a foot in length (and the dongles had to be plugged into one
another in a VERY specific order otherwise they wouldn't work).
Dongles are still used to this day; fortunately, most are USB these
days rather than parallel or serial-port based so at least the pain of
chaining is gone ;-)
>

USB dongles are also used for high security credential management.
Eventually, we might all be using NFC on our phones to log in.
Fingerprint recognition (biometrics) is already pretty ubiquitous.

Dongles get a bad rap. They can be a very useful tool. But it can't
propagate to 10 of them. My wife keeps hers on a lanyard. It gets her
everywhere.

--
Zag

This is csipg.rpg - reality is off topic. ...G. Quinn ('08)
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* I remember when my best friend got an (at the time) HUGE HDD and put
the entire Journeyman Project CD on it, and SUBSTed the drive to a CD-ROM
letter. It ran like a dream. It was also the only game available on his
system! IIRC he also did things like run entire games off a RAMDisk.