Thread 11883092

Classic copy protection

>>11883092 (OP)
You have to be at least 60 to know the answers to the LSL1 questions.

>>11883092 (OP)
Lsl 3 is the game with the hardest protection

>>11883190
I heard it's better without any protection

>>11883092 (OP)
I remember pool of radiance had this fucking decoder thing in the box
had never seen anything like that before

That's not copy protection, that's age verification, you idiot, and even then it's basically become a boomer test

>>11883185
True. A zoomer brain is incapable of storing a few dozen answers.

Railroad Tycoon had you enter the names of trains in the manual. 90% of my manual was fucked so it used to take ages to start a game.

>>11883247
The wheels were very popular and at least it wasn't lenslok

>>11883092 (OP)
Leather Goddesses of Phobos
the game wasnt copy protected deliberately because it had a scratch and sniff card included and you couldnt advance in the game unless you knew the correct smell.
it also asked you questions about the comic book that also came with the game.

>>11883530
Old PC games are just fucking amazing

>copy protection
>just photocopy that as well
pretty sure they did almost nothing against determined floppy copiers. I also remember some pirated diskettes have a page or two of copy protection answers for games which used "enter the word in manual page xx paragraph xx".

>>11883092 (OP)
>had a pirated copy of this game
>a section where you need to produce a cure (iirc aspirin), but no hints were given
>thought this game was meant for actual pharmacists, just like the adult screening for larry games
>took years before knowing that it's actually a copy protection and the recipes are inside the manual

>>11883092 (OP)
Some were pretty nice to pirates.

Civilization has you answer what two inventions are prerequisite to develop a specific one, which you'll learn as you play the game, read the in-game encyclopedia before or with some common sense.

Also Dune 2 shows a picture of a unit or building, asking about one if its characteristics (all information being in the manual).
The thing is it usually asks about armor type, with medium being the most common. So you can pass the test answering "medium" most of the time and you even have 3 tries.

>>11883092 (OP)
That's an age gate, not copy protection.
Picrel was copy protection.

>invents the color scanner behind you
nothing personnel, game publishers

>>11883536
they were. but when you had a collection of games and every one of them had some funky way of verifying legitimacy then it gets incredibly tedious.

>>11884762
teenage mutant ninja turtles had a code table printed in same way. was so painful to read.

>>11883546
>pretty sure they did almost nothing against determined floppy copiers.
some of these manual checks were usually trivial to bypass. biggest headache was custom disk formats created using disk duplicator machines.

>>11884762
kek I remember copying one of these by hand

is anyone itt kind enough to spoonfeed me a red pill on Leisure Suit Larry?

>>11883092 (OP)
That's not copy protection, that's age protection. The game asks questions to make you prove that you're an adult. Issue is they were questions about pop culture, songs, celebrities, etc that you would have probably known if you were an adult in 1987, so nowadays you need to be around your 60s or be really into 80s pop culture and history to answer them.

https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.html

>>11883530
>the game wasnt copy protected deliberately because it had a scratch and sniff card included and you couldnt advance in the game unless you knew the correct smell.
>it also asked you questions about the comic book that also came with the game.
Anon... that's copy protection. A lot of that early copy protection relied on using something that came with the game in the box, it fulfulls the same purpose as asking you for a specific word on a specific page, paragraph, and sentence on the manual. It's just slightly more organic the way Leather Goddesses of Phobos did it than just straight up asking you to recite part of the manual, but it still is for the exact same purpose, copy protection.

>>11883546
>>just photocopy that as well
First of all, that would not work if you downloaded the game from a BBS or similar, you would not ever have the manual or whatever it was physically there TO photocopy.

Second some manuals were absolutely massive, it would cost more to photocopy than just buying the game.

Third publishers weren't stupid, they knew stuff could be photocopied, that's why they started relying on physical objects that were some kind of toy or gadget needed to pass the copy protection. Or if they wanted to be cheap and just include a sheet of paper, use colored paper and printing that would be impossible for the black-and-white photocopiers at the time to reproduce, they would just end up printing a pure black sheet. Picrel was one such game that I had (though it was possible to carefully bleach this specific paper to turn it from a very dark crimson red to a light pink, making it easy to photocopy after that)

>>11883575
I highly doubt that was copy protection, that was probably just Kojima being Kojima, he loves his meta-humor and 4th wall breaks. It's a single 5 digit number that never changes, would be a pretty shitty form of copy protection, especially for a system that already has copy protection built in and this being the age where it would be possible to look that up on the internet.

>>11884963
Does a pair of queens beat three deuces?
a. Yes, in blackjack.
b. Yes, in poker.
c. No, in canasta.
d. It depends on what the three deuces said.

>>11883092 (OP)
IIRC the only game I had growing up that had copy protection was The Simpsons, and I didn't have the manual, so I just kept trying and trying until I got in-game. It was fairly simple as far as copy protection goes: you just had to choose an in-game character from several pictured on-screen by going to a specific page of the manual.
I honestly can't imagine having more than ten games, each being copy protected, and having to have the manuals, answer sheets, color wheels, and whatever the fuck else on-hand in case you wanted to play one of them. Seems like it'd be a whole lot of clutter on your desk.

>>11886152
Only ones I remember are The Humans, The Incredible Toon Machine, and when I borrowed Innocent from my cousin.

>I honestly can't imagine having more than ten games, each being copy protected, and having to have the manuals, answer sheets, color wheels, and whatever the fuck else on-hand in case you wanted to play one of them. Seems like it'd be a whole lot of clutter on your desk.
Unless you played the game daily you didn't keep them on your desk, you generally kept them in the game box. Or in a pile of manuals as the majority just relied on something from the manual.

>>11883530

>be me with no sense of smell

well thats just rude. Could I just answer 'spunk' each time? presumably that was one of the smells in a game like this.

>>11884762
The version I had was printed on a dark grey and very reflective paper, good luck scanning that.

Operation Stealth/The Stealth Affair, on the other hand, was easy.

>>11886165
Fair point, though it still seems like a hassle. Or at least it would've been for me. I can imagine 10 year-old me sitting down at the computer, feeling like playing a game, loading it up, then remembering I need the color wheel to actually go in-game, and having to go get it from the shelf.
I bet nobody who actually had to deal with all that back in the day misses it, same way I don't miss having to put a CD in the disc drive every time for a game that's fully installed on the hard drive.

>>11886203
>I bet nobody who actually had to deal with all that back in the day misses it
Correct, there is a reason ScummVM even bypasses these automatically

>same way I don't miss having to put a CD in the disc drive every time for a game that's fully installed on the hard drive
Funny you mention that, because for the games that had a CD version, the CD version generally did not have the copy protection since at the time just being on a CD was in and of itself the copy protection.

>>11883575
I've never understood people who complain about this being hard to understand.
The registration card in the manual is on the exact same page that lists all the codec frequencies in both the NTSC and PAL versions. Her codec number is literally the first thing you see upon opening the manual.

>>11883558
>>11884736
I love how Sierra implemented the copy protection in the games

>>11886208
Even funnier is I've been messing with old Windows games recently, and I came across a few that require a CD, but the check system is incredibly stupid: it relies on a config file installed on the hard drive that points to a directory (something like d:\game\) for specific game files. So I just copied the contents of that directory to one on the hard drive, pointed the config file to that directory, and it worked. Off the top of my head, I got The Oregon Trail Deluxe to work without the CD this way. No such luck with others such as Caesar II, though, as that seems hardcoded to look in either the D or E drives.

ducktales quest for gold came with a decoder insert to decipher picrel. as a kid i had no idea this was something other than a fun thing to do

>>11886109
This. Clearly if you copied the game you couldn't answer that.
Unless you were a grownup

>>11886215
It's very unexpected, when was the last time a game required you to break the 4th wall like that to progress? Especially on consoles? Most players completely did not expect that, especially since the game in no way hints that you need to do anything outside the game itself and mostly takes itself seriously. It's the "reset the computer" situation from X-Men all over again.

>>11886219
Yes, like I said, for most of them the CD was the copy protection so they didn't bother even putting in a disk check. If it was a large game it would not have been possible to copy it to harddrives at the time anyway, and if it uses audio tracks on the disk then you would have no music. Others might have implemented a very rudimentary disk check, but generally it didn't have any way to check if the disk was copied, since the idea of copying a cd at home was preposterous at the time.

>>11886264
Again, that's not meant to prevent you from copying the game at all, it's meant to prevent people that were too young from playing the game. Some of them were about general adult topics like alcohol or sex, others have seemingly nonsensical answers that appear to be memes from the time, such as where's the beef.

Startropics did it best.

>>11886563
I don't think this was intended as copy protection. The developers probably just thought it was cool.

>>11883536
all the old 'extras" that came with computer games were so cool. I always liked flipping through the old catalogs for games that I was never going to buy

>>11886575
Good luck beating the game without it.

>>11886617
Again, like mentioned in >>11884981, it's a single 3 digit number that never changes. It's meant for some fun 4th wall breaking, not as a form of copy protection. Anyone who could have cloned the cartridge back then could have scribbled down "747" on a piece of paper or the cartridge level or whatever.

This guy had a copy right check in Quest for Glory 4. My parents bought this game for me in a bargain bin at Sam’s Club a looong time ago and right out the gate, game had a fatal ctd right out of the starting area (later fixed but this was before online patches) and it didn’t come with a manual to help break pic rel copy right. You had to mix “chemicals” to produce the correct formula from which I guess were in the manual. Needless to say, that’s as far as I got but the atmosphere was great and I came to replay it later and love the game as well

>>11884963
>calvin klein
>hitler
>earth is round
I'm sure even today a kid could answer those.

>>11886705
QFG4 was a buggy mess but it's still my favorite point and click adventure. I played through QFG1-3 probably a dozen or so times as a kid just so I could export my characters to QFG4.

>>11883253
Cope

>>11883530
Tell me the scratch & sniff was pussy smell.

>>11886552
>Again, I've very mad I got filtered by questions meant to filter me
Again, lol

>>11887517
I'm not the OP you moron

>>11887517
I am the OP and deliberately gave a bad example to stoke engagement :^)

>>11887846
>I'm not the OP
>I'm a morron who thinks you think I'm OP

>>11888123
Insults coming from a retard like you hold about as much weight as being challenged to a basketball game by a midget.

>>11884949
No, sir. You'll be wanting the blue pill instead.

>>11883092 (OP)

First one I remember

>>11888179
Lucasarts sure loved using those decoder wheels

>>11886767
>blocks your path

>>11888216
>And yes, the O. J. Simpson question below was in the original game back in 1987, long before O. J. ever was indicted!
Even funnier that the answer the game is looking for is d

>>11883575
Campbell just gives you Meryl's number if you call a few times.

Would you play a game based on Larry before his transformation?

>>11883092 (OP)
One of the Space Quest games had planet coordinates in the background of some bullshit page in the manual that was dressed up as an in-game astrology article
I had to call the fucking 1-900 number to figure it out and they didn’t help me
eventually I figured it out and the page even said on it “many will be mystified by the hidden copy protection on these pages”
I was mad
>>11883185
Well, NOW. You probably only had to be, like, 20 or 30 at the time.
the (barely) gen-X guy who made Frog Fractions 2 parodied this by asking questions about ancient Persian poets — the guy really nailed the feel of being 12 and getting filtered by impossible questions
>>11886219
neverwinter nights for Mac OS X had a CD check
turns out, you could just rip the disc to a disk image and mount the disk image and that would be enough
>>11888216
hah, I had to remember when I saw the bronco chase
LSL1 definitely pre-dated that

How copy protection was this?
it was probably four times the size of an 8½″×11″
we probably could have finished the game without it but that would have sucked way harder

>>11889835
>How copy protection was this?
anon, that's a map.

>>11889840
like, on a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is a code wheel and 1 is, I dunno
this thing is closer to 1

>>11884981
one thing that happened back in the day was things to ensure someone couldn’t just marathon the game in a night or two and beat it while renting it
the StarTropics thing counts
for all I know the Kojima thing counts too

>>11889856
anon, copy protection is something that prevents you from playing until you consult a physical thing that came in the box with the game. On a scale from 1 to 10, a map is 0. it's not copy protection. it's a map.

>>11889791
No

>>11889830
>neverwinter nights for Mac OS X had a CD check
>turns out, you could just rip the disc to a disk image and mount the disk image and that would be enough
Just simply checking if the disk was in the drive was a very very very common form of copy protection, especially when it was not very viable to copy a CD at the time. Even after some still did that because it was cheap to do or because it would at least prevent online piracy since connections and storage at the time was not viable for downloading entire disk images.

>>11889861
>for all I know the Kojima thing counts too
That doesn't make sense, I doubt people were stumped for days on that. Plus that was the era of memory cards, you could just rent the game again.

>>11889830
>You probably only had to be, like, 20 or 30 at the time.
I was 19 when it came out and had no problem with the questions. Even my siblings who were a bit younger had no problem. The questions only filtered pre-teens. As they have ITT.

Even for an adult this shit was impossible if you weren't American.

>>11890713
Here in Spain the questions were adapted

>>11890717
I had a pirated copy of what was probably the US version.

>>11890696
>The questions only filtered pre-teens.
That was probably the intent. It would have been pretty much impossible to ask questions that people 21+ would know but kids who are in their later teens would bit also know. The test was likely more designed to stop little children like 8 year olds from playing an adult game.

>>11890713
I've heard people complaining about that in UK, apparently the questions were not adapted for all regions.

>>11888178
that's fucking bullshti motherfucker
I want to know why he sin't named leisure suit leonard

>>11884949
Larry is a virgin 40 year old. You go on an adventure in each game trying to score. Even though you do at the end of each game, by the next game he reverts back to being a virgin again. Boomers found this hillarious for some reason.

>>11893564
Zoom here, it's hilarious.

>>11893564
>by the next game he reverts back to being a virgin again
that ain't how it works

>>11894945
I guess he wanted to say that he's lonely again, with the exception of the fifth game.

>>11894958
what about the fourth game?

>>11893564
It's a had sex thing. You wouldn't understand.

>>11893564
>>11894945
>>11894958
It's not just about losing his virginity, it's about having a romantic relationship. The first game spells it to you after fucking the whore.