Ok, we covered the pirates. Now let’s talk DRM or Digital Rights Management. It’s the manual lookups, the code wheels, the servers that cannot validate your game and the bloody dongles…
Playlist:
00:00 Flashback – track from the past – show intro
00:08 DJ Daemon speaks: A few weeks ago it was all about the pirates, the crackers and the Warez d00dz. But we must also look at the things the gaming companies did to keep your grubby little hands off the games until you forked over the dough. So for this episode: this is the story of maps, broken diskettes and just how bad losing the manual could be.
00:34 ASIKWUSpulse – AM I Dancing
04:01 DJ Daemon speaks: The ways to protect the games were many and when the crackers found a way around them, the industry invented new ways to make the games you bought work for you, but making it impossible for you to copy them to your friends. The frustration in the industry was enormous and the mechanisms they threw in the mix were therefore many. Today, we’ll check some of the out and talk about: – Code wheels – The pesky manual – The map you could not live without – Online protections and how they can make you suffer. … And the genius of Nintendo’s key and lock-chips.
04:49 Siren – The Last Ballad
09:19 DJ Daemon speaks: First up is the messing with the technology itself. It’s not just about computers. The industry found ways to make VHS-cassettes impossible to copy. Remember – it’s an analog format. So, it’s not that hard to make happen. On diskettes, they would often write to them in an incorrect way that would cause them to become corrupt but still work. Any program trying to copy them would not be able to properly reproduce the disk. And the game, when it started, checked for the expected irregularities and refused to work if they were not there. The crackers removed this check and also repackaged the game so it could be copied. That’s how we got Eagle software, Triad, Fairlight and Razor 1911.
10:20 Arcane Toaster – Dandelion (London)
12:28 DJ Daemon speaks: In order to hear the next song, you need to consult your podcast manual page 34, paragraph 3 and type in the second word in that paragraph in the input field. Yup, the dreaded manual protections. If you had the cracked game, the were removed or would accept any input and still let you through. If you actuallt paid for the game, you’d better not lose the manual or the game would not work. Sid Meier’s Pirates had a number of novel ideas on how to make this work. If you failed the check, the game would let you play, but your career as a captain would be poor as you would be given very unfavourable stats for your character. The game even warned you about it.
13:26 Melcom – Headlock
18:34 DJ Daemon speaks: Nintendo’s key and lock-chip is a marvel to behold. It’s one of the most powerfull copy protections ever deviced. It also protected the NES from running non-approved games. Each cartridge had a key-chip and each NES had a lockchip that would accept a proper key. This system is simple by today’s standards, but was impossible to bypass directly until 2006. Some shady game developers would try to cheat the system by using a “sacrificial” official game and piggy-back their crappy game on them.
19:22 Vincenzo – Lost in transponation
22:07 DJ Daemon speaks: One of the previous episodes of this show that was about computer piracy was called “Dial a pirate”. That’s a reference to the code wheel called just that from the game Monkey Island. It was a wheel, where you rotated it as to match up a pirates lower and upper part of their heads to prove that you bought the game. It was a smart move as it fit the humourus style of the game and still worked. The crackers off course… Removed the need for that as well…
22:45 K. Jose – Staring Danger in the Eye
25:28 DJ Daemon speaks: I have done many episodes of this podcast, and we’ve spoken about some of those protections previously. This one has been a favourite for me to talk about, and it’s SID Meier’s Pirates. That game had a map. It was a physical one that was too big for my dads Xerox-machine and purposefully dark and with contrastlevels that made the copies hard to read. Believe me, i tried this a number of times. No crackers could really fix this as this was before computers could show large pictures and run the game at the same time. So, there…
26:14 Ida – Funky Lesbians
27:54 DJ Daemon speaks: Let’s move into more modern times. The digital right management era to be specific. At this time, the Internet was there and every time you started a game it would validate the game against a server. Many painful stories are told about the users that could not even start the games they bought when the servers were down or malfunctioned. And Sony’s infamous rootkit that pretty much “hacked” your Windows installation to make it hide stuff, made it clear that the only winner were those that illegaly copied the game and thus didn’t have to contend with that. I got a story about that…
28:41 Laamaa – Opl Omega
31:33 DJ Daemon speaks: Somewhere in the mid naughties I bought a weird game called Sacred 2. It, just as its predesessor had to be the buggiest games every developed. Me and a friend played two-player co-op over my network mostly to laugh at the many weird glitches that could make our characters explode without a warning or freeze for no apparent reason. But the copy protection was horrible. I switched to Windows XP 64-bit as soon at I got my AMD x2. And the game itself would still work, but the copy protection would not. The solution? I downloded the cracked and thus illegal version. Hey, don’t judge, I did pay for the game – remember?
32:36 Nim – Life Hardships
36:26 DJ Daemon speaks: And now we have almost arrived in modern times. In 2012 Microsoft had a service were you could buy and download music to your Zune. You know, Microsoft’s ilfated, Ipod rip-off. In 2015 Microsoft shut the project down and on March 12, 2017 the site closed. Sad as it was for the, what, two people that still used the Zune it also meant that the songs they previously bought would nolonger play. Clowns to the left and jokers to the right, here I am in the middle with a brick of a mediaplayer. Send me an email if you want free doorstop.
37:16 Manwe of SandS – Evening Glow
39:34 DJ Daemon speaks: All right, just joking, I never had a Zune. I’m not that unfortunate sunnova… Ehh.. Never mind… So, as I said earlier, all DRM make the honest user suffer the most. They have to spinning their wheel, sift through their coffe-stained manuals, blow on the cartridges, choose their operating systems to match their copyright protections. And the lamers downloading stuff illegally? Oh, no problems for them, except for the frequent malware and spyware that comes along for the ride.
40:20 Marwin and Voice – Revelation
43:38 DJ Daemon speaks: Today, the whole debate may be dead. Do you still download movies and mp3s? I mean, we have Spotify, HBO and Netflix. Or why not YouTube and Google Music. Like listening to books? Try Audible or some other service. Podcasts are everywhere. Ah, well, when this is done, I will put one of my Beatles vinyl records on and laugh at it all…
44:16 Mystra of Brainstorm and Nectarine – Zico
46:53 DJ Daemon speaks: All right enough of the DRM talk. Let’s talk demo parties. Again? Yes, I can’t stop talking about them you see, but data men tell no tales. That’s the slogan of the Edison party of 2021 that runs on the 9th of July and ends on the 11th. It will be online and a physical meeting for a select group of 50 people, which means you have to be quick if you want to be there in person. But the sales of “on site” tickets opens in a few weeks. The online tickets are 50 Swedish kronas a pop (about $5) and can be bought on edisonparty.com.
47:46 Nim – Meridian Highway
48:51 DJ Daemon speaks: There’s not much to add right now, but the next week will see less activity as we approach vacation time. But as I said the last to episodes, the podcasts will continue. There will be less of my live broadcasts, but the station will stay on 24/7.
49:19 Nim – Reentry
51:17 DJ Daemon speaks: … And in the end of this show as it is now, I, DJ Daemon is calling it a day. This show will soon be available as a podcast. Thanks for listening.
51:33 Shaman – Melting Sunbeam
54:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Says good bye.
54:45 Nim – Resuscitation please
58:47 DJ Daemon speaks: Presents last song.
59:11 Statikk Art – Soft Vibes
Production notes:
Colophone
The title is an old slogan used by the gaming industry to discourage the kids from copying games illegaly. The Amiga soundeditor "Audiomaster IV" cleverly changed this to "Spread the word, not the disk". And I use that slogan A LOT in my podcasts.
The pin on the episode artwork shows a message from Swedish anti-piracy organisation "SIMP".
Tags: Storytelling, Retro history, Host: DJ Daemon, 2021
