Mysteries Of The CDRW and Backups Revealed 231
Talinom writes "Tom's Hardware has a story that details information regarding some of the new (and old) copy protection schemes out there, as well as results from several different CDRW drives. There are a lot of sites devoted to this topic, but Tom's is usually rather thorough."
*Whoosh* (Score:4, Funny)
The RIAA is quoted as saying:"There is no spoon"
Re:Copy Protection Rules (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Idea of copying and protecting (Score:2, Funny)
No, those aren't so good. I hacked around one of those in an old D&D-style game on Macintosh II Cx owned by a guy down the hall back in college.
The "copy protection" was like this: Every time you wanted to cross a bridge, you had to answer a question, 'ere the other side you see. (No flying into the chasm if you got it wrong, though. You just couldn't cross) Well, it had a list of words, paired up with Page 37 word 5 and such. There were maybe 200 choices. What the program did was to look at what you typed in, and then look up the right answer based on page (x) word (y).
My simple hack was to populate the field where you type in the word with the answer the program looks up one line later to see if you got it right. It worked AND you got to see what the word was, which I think was useful somewhere else in the game.
I think I did this using (pirated) Norton DiskDoctor and MacsBug, but there might have been some other coding apps involved. It was *really* easy, a fun project for a few hours spread out over a few nights.
That mac (and his roommate's mac, and playing Oids, and Spectre over appletalk) is why my GPA plummeted from 3.3 to 1.6 in my second semester. I only wish I'd stayed with coding, now I can't code hello world unless it's in HTML. Such is the life of the Microsoft Certified Professional.
I wish terrorism would hurry up and surrender.
Tom Pabst = William Shatner? (Score:5, Funny)
Wellcome
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to Toms Harware where we
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Discuss the new anti copying
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schemes that affect your CD-R
VS
Spock I never (pause) wanted (pause) you to dress (pause) like a (pause) tribble (pause) and tracktor beam (pause) me from behind (pause) you burning hulk (pause) of Vulcan (pause) man meat
Tom's...? Please...! (Score:0, Funny)
Since when is "thorough" a synonym for "incompetent"...?
Re:Ah, copy protection from hell (Score:2, Funny)
Me: Oh, you've hit the "paws" button, ha ha!
Customer: No, I click on the Lemmings and nothing happens!
Me: Hrm... what kind of sound card do you have?
Customer: I think it's a Cadillac.
Me: I see. Do you have the disk in the drive?
Customer: I don't know, this thing says it needs two Emm Bee of Arr Ay Emm, but I only have eight of my hard drive! And there's something about DOS, but I don't speak Spanish!
Me: Oh, are you running Windows?
Customer: No, I'm at work.
Me: What do you see on your screen right now?
Customer: It says "please insert disk 1 into your floppy drive."
Me: Ahh. Let's try inserting disk 1 into your floppy drive.
Customer: Hang on... [interminable pause] The computer doesn't like it.
Me: Doesn't like it?!?
Customer: It spit it back out.
Me: Hrm, sounds like a defective disk. What does it say on the label?
Customer: It says "Lemmings Disk 1."
Me: Aha! Turn the disk around 180 degrees, then stick it into your computer again.
Customer: Oooohhhh!
Me: So it's working now?
Customer: Yes! No, now it says it can't find disk 1. That's funny, 'cos it worked for my friend who I copied it from!
Me: Arrrrrrrgh!
And those were the *good* conversations. The bad ones involved many more expletives. The really bad ones involved expletives and tricky level 19 (for those of you still stuck there, buy my damn book!).
Re:Sim City (Score:2, Funny)
Bard's Tale III had a code wheel...with three wheels and around 20 entries per, with cutouts that showed through...truly annoying, but the best part was that they didn't ask you for it until, like, 5 hours into the game, so you could be playing for awhile and then start cursing them.
--trb