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Are Pirates The Good Guys? – This Week In Retro 158

Are Pirates The Good Guys? – This Week In Retro 158

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“This Week in Retro”

Retro DRM getting on your nerves? Microsoft dropped support for Safedisc years ago but now there is a new workaround. A new …

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32 Comments

  1. About blue LEDs .. when they first appeared in Maplin (an electronics retailer which is sadly long gone, like the other electronics stores we had) they retailed at £10 each! The next year they dropped to £2, then I guess the flood gates opened.
    →ETA← Also, I REALLY hate those blinding bluish "now-you-see-me-now-you-don't" headlights some cyclists use, aimed at eye level, leaving a trail of spots on the retinas of oncoming pedestrians and motorists. Those should be illegal. And cycling on pavements .. oh, that is!!

  2. DRM only hurts the paying customer. And it helps nobody. The few studies that have been conducted on the topic show that piracy does not harm the profits from game sales. The people who were going to pirate in the first place were never going to pay anyhow. I'd also kind of promise you this: If Steam said tomorrow that Denuvo was no longer allowed on any games sold on their platform, after the table-flipping baby-rage from the different publishers, Steam would see an increase in sales. Maybe not a significant increase, but a very noticeable one. You might have a small handful of devs leave the platform, but the vast majority of them would stay because Steam is – for better or for worse – the most effective and profitable way to distribute PC games and there's very little sign that's changing anytime soon.

  3. Excellent episode! Regarding Game Copy World, etc., we really have lost a lot of resources for preserving games over the years that even The Wayback Machine can't solve. That's why I tend to make backups of whatever I can. I have old versions of software that can indeed save the day in certain specific circumstances. Now thinking of it I will upload everything to the Internet Archive in some spare time soon.

  4. I used the reg edit fix for SafeDisk when I got a copy of Sim Golf from my dad. I think I needed to download a hotfix on Windows 8 before the reg edit can work to toggle SafeDisc on/off. I’ll be trying this new option.
    Also, I do remember the difficulty of squeezing every k out of memory to finally get Ultima 7 to run. You had to be there. The first puzzle to solve in many DOS games was the memory puzzle.

  5. On the subject of blue LEDs. They were rare and expensive for a few years. I think the first one I ever saw was on a PS2 dev kit in ‘99. I also remember hearing that they cost Sony $10 each at launch.

  6. Awesome Episode 😀 Loved it. Love seeing Clint come on and seems we had a similar……restricted games history for the same reasons 😀
    Loved the story and chat about Mem management in DOS.
    Little known fact: The main reason WWIII hasn't broken out yet is, no one knows how to free up enough base mem to launch 😀
    Also…..Clint…..knock knock knock 😀

  7. I can confirm that on Amiga the boot floppy with custom "startup-sequence" file in the "S" directory would work exactly like a custom "autoexec.bat". Just make a bootable disk, add the "startup-sequence". All that file needed to do was "CD" to the game directory on the HD (for instance "cd DH1:games/worms") in the first line, then the second line would simply be "worms.exe" to execute the game.

  8. Memory management. I recall writing a statement in college of how messed up it was with all the three letter acronyms. This is not my college statement but (no Google) do you know what the following three letter acronyms are?

    DOS can use extenders such as 4GW. Making use of UMB in the UMA with the HIMEM.SYS driver saving space on DCM. Using an EMM driver such as EMM386.SYS you can gain access to EMS (or XMS) above 1Mb. As the driver enables the CPU's MMU to remap memory for DOS applications (you know games). DOS was definitely over stretched.

  9. Using old floppies for ICBMs is actually pretty clever. It introduces an 'air gap' to the procedure for security, and the format is not easily duplicated due to its obsolescence. I would keep this system going as long as humanly possible.

  10. I hate blue LEDs. I bought a Fractal case for my Plex server and it had a blue LED for the power light that I had to unhook because it lit the whole room with the lights off and made it hard to sleep. Later I hooked it back up as the HDD activity light.

  11. Boot discs! I had totally forgotten about them as a way to get enough conventional memory, yeah I think a few DOS games I used to have provided that in manuals. I just used memaker and let it do it's thing…

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