Ruoh
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I miss the days of code wheels. IIRC, Sierra LOVED those things.
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Thinking about going legit on a few games and have some questions.
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PrincessFrosty
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It puts a smile on my face remembering that stuff.
dr.stevil
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yup... An old Elvira game that we used to have (was like a FPS, mixed with an RPG) used a spinning wheel as copy protection. Alone in the dark made you look up a symbol in the book that came with it to allow you in and some of the old sierra games make you use a red lens to 'decrypt' symbols in the books as copy protection (so you couldn't photocopy it). Return to Zork also used a setup like that (along with requiring the CD in the drive, IIRC)
DRM has been in use since the 80's and possibly longer in one form or another (at least as far as games are concerned)
Wolfenstein 3D, the earliest game in his last, came along after "when PC gaming was getting started". The games he listed don't match the time period he was describing. Maybe he started gaming on a 386 PC running DOS, but many of us were gaming on PCs before they had hard drives.
Apple II was released in 1977, Commodore 64 was released in 1982, Commodore Amiga was released in 1985.
Now let's wait 15 to 7 years for the market to mature on some of the most popular personal computers ever....
Wolfenstein 3D was released in 1992.
I will actually answer the question instead of debating morality. The way Left 4 Dead and other games work on Steam is to sign in, then go to Offline mode, then launch the game. Then go to the other PCs and do the same thing. Once you go to Offline mode you can sign in on another computer. If all you are doing is LANning this will work. You won't be able to play online with just one copy.
In my experience you don't have to Alt-tab out of the game. When the game launches you are already in Offline mode.
In my experience you don't have to Alt-tab out of the game. When the game launches you are already in Offline mode.
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@the OP,
If you buy a game on Steam, you can play it on any computer so long as you're logged in with your Steam account.
I've run my Steam on friends PCs to demo games at their houses, and also re-formatted and re-installed enough that I'm pretty sure I would have encountered any "you've already activated this game X times!" warnings if they existed.
Please "go legit" and support the industry, especially on any & all games you may have 'acquired' but happen to really like!
If you buy a game on Steam, you can play it on any computer so long as you're logged in with your Steam account.
I've run my Steam on friends PCs to demo games at their houses, and also re-formatted and re-installed enough that I'm pretty sure I would have encountered any "you've already activated this game X times!" warnings if they existed.
Please "go legit" and support the industry, especially on any & all games you may have 'acquired' but happen to really like!
YeuEmMaiMai
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uhm PC gaming did not get "popular" until the mid 90's(once the platform was unified under MS DOS-Win95 and Intel x86) all those other machines you mentioned were basically game consoles with the added functionality of some basic computing ability.. look at their software inventory and most of it was games (apple might be the exception)
btw i was not describing any time period just pointing out that a lot of big hits in the early years of PC had no copy protection or limited copy protection in the form of requiring the CD to play lol.....
I would argue that quality demos made people want to buy the game Doom 2 for example gave you the ENTIRE 1st episode......same with descent, Duke Nukem, etc and all of those games sold like hotcakes.....
PrincessFrosty
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"Lots of games" I disagree with, I'd agree with "more games than today" as a percentage of the era but the point still stands plenty of studios were using copy protection even in Ye goode olde dayes.
Saying piracy causes copy protection is like saying robbery caused locks for houses. People would still lock their house even if no one had ever stolen anything in their town, it just rational to do so based on the idea that someone might do at some point in the future.
Saying piracy causes copy protection is like saying robbery caused locks for houses. People would still lock their house even if no one had ever stolen anything in their town, it just rational to do so based on the idea that someone might do at some point in the future.
Those of us explaining how things were in the "old days" disagree with your assessment that the Apple, the Commodores, and the PC I gamed on the CoCo2. PC gaming was very much popular long before the 90's...lol, I was 20 and I'd been gaming *and* programming for a decade; they were very much more than "consoles". If they were consoles, like you claimed, however you'd undermine your argument that computer gaming wasn't popular until afterwards...
Just so you know, we were gaming before hard drives, but that doesn't mean we were using cartridges if that's what you though. Some did, but my computer used a cassette deck (that's why I linked the wiki article explaining what it was) before upgrading it to a floppy (which was $399 at Rat Shack, iirc!).
We also gamed online, but we had to use BBS.
If you're our age then I'm confused by how you formed your opinion. But if you aren't our age then you might consider learning something instead of telling us how it *was* :\
I disagree with your definition of "getting started" but it's not important to me what you call a "PC". As long as we all understand that games being played on machines called "PC"s in the 1980's frequently(not rarely) used copy protection I'm OK.
"when PC gaming was getting started" does describe a period of time, and you described a period of time again, "early years of PC", in your clarification.
YeuEmMaiMai
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Those of us explaining how things were in the "old days" disagree with your assessment that the Apple, the Commodores, and the PC I gamed on the CoCo2. PC gaming was very much popular long before the 90's...lol, I was 20 and I'd been gaming *and* programming for a decade; they were very much more than "consoles". If they were consoles, like you claimed, however you'd undermine your argument that computer gaming wasn't popular until afterwards...
Just so you know, we were gaming before hard drives, but that doesn't mean we were using cartridges if that's what you though. Some did, but my computer used a cassette deck (that's why I linked the wiki article explaining what it was) before upgrading it to a floppy (which was $399 at Rat Shack, iirc!).
We also gamed online, but we had to use BBS.
If you're our age then I'm confused by how you formed your opinion. But if you aren't our age then you might consider learning something instead of telling us how it *was* :\
of course games came on floppies and those things could be copied like mad (matter of fact it was easier to copy a floppy than a cartridge) C64 had tons of cames that came on floppy and or carts. PC gaming in the early 80's was more problematic due to umteen different versions of DOS out there all at differing levels of usability. sure a few games had simple copy protection like bad sectors in a specific spot but must were copy at will type of deal.\
btw PC is the accepted term for IBM compatable machines as IMB coined the term PC aka IBM PC.....so while the apple, commodore, TI, Tandy, sinclair, etc were all personal computers, no one is going to get them confused with PC gaming as I was referring to it. want to talk about old PC games lol Sopwith, King's Quest, Drangon's quest...lol now those were some old games...
btw Doom is largely considered the game that made PC gaming popular.....
No, Doom is responsible for popularizing the FPS genre and 3D graphics, not "gaming" (PC or otherwise) in general.
Interestingly enough, the games you cite from Sierra were developed for the Amiga, Atari, Apple and the Tandy computers so while you may not consider them "PC's" the premier PC Gaming Company certainly did :|
I'm really not sure where you're going with this discussion, to be honest. It seems like you want to argue over minutiae while ignoring the point that was incorrectly brought up: the internet did not create software protection.
I should have pointed this out earlier, but the main reason those games he listed didn't have copy protection wasn't because the developers didn't care about piracy. You guys either weren't alive then and are gleaning your info from wikipedia or you are forgetting that floppy drives cost hundreds of dollars, cd burners were virtually unheard of and prohibitively expensive, and blank media was $20. It cost less to buy the game than it did to copy it.
Developers always protected their software, but before they were able to do it physically. When floppies were first released, they didn't have a hole in them. The floppies weren't able to be written to unless we cut holes in them. And even after blank media came out at an affordable price, the original disks were larger than the media. People pirated Windows back then, but they had to carry a binder of 3.5" floppies to do so. King's Quest III was on 5 or more floppies for my CoCo. A 20MB hard drive was humongous. Copying games was for all intents and purposes infeasible as a cost saving mechanism.
Anyway, I'm just reminiscing. I don't really understand what we gain by this particular trajectory of discussion but it was fun recalling when I was a young teenager tearing through pages of Byte Buyer and drooling over the multi-thousand dollar computers listed for sale.
Commander FAT
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A lot of Lucasarts games used it to. Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe had all kinds of nose art on theirs.
Ruoh
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Monkey Island used one as well, IIRC. *sigh* I need to check out the new versions of those classic games. KQ 1-5 was pretty damn good, as was Space Quest.
Decepticon
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This.
i buy alot and sometimes feel let down by sub standard games, I think in a sense the pirated game is todays version of a demo since we don't get those anymore.. If you really like the game and want online play then they are going to get your money anyway. Just an opinion and not a justifacation for piracy. They also might make more in the long run with lower game prices.
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