🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 14 Sep 2008 12:27:19 -0700, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg, Loren Pechtel
wrote: 

>On Sun, 14 Sep 2008 17:39:26 +0100, Andrew <spamtrap@127.0.0.1> wrote:
>
>>On Sun, 14 Sep 2008 09:49:00 -0600 (MDT), DC
>><nobody@pseudo.borked.net> wrote:
>>
>>>"Spore: Most Pirated Game Ever, Thanks to DRM" - 
>>>http://atu.ca/675
>>
>>Spore: Most Pirated Game Ever, by a bunch of thieves pretending they
>>are on a moral crusade.
>>
>>No wonder PC gaming is dying.
>
>No.  Get too offensive about the DRM and people will pirate rather
>than put up with it.
>
Case in point:

In the 80's, I bought M.U.L.E., Archon, Seven Cities, and Heart of Africa for
the C=64. You'd wait 3 or so minutes while the famously offensive, anti-copy
_EOA_ loading screen just sat their and changed the color of their logo, one
stripe at a time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Electronic_Arts_historical_logo.svg

was all you saw for about 3 minutes.

I bought Epyx Fastload. No help. I'm pretty sure EA's loader loaded custom
firmware into the 1541 drive. You could do that with a 1541 because the
hardware was very flexible (and notoriously slow with its default firmware). I
also used to use EA's loader as a test when I was realigning the heads, too,
because if you weren't in *perfect* alignment, EA games would _not_ load.

*Everything else* would read just fine, but EA disks would choke.

Eventually, I found a pirate authored "load and dump" program that would
capture the data the EA loader grabbed, and then dump it to a normal file.

With Fastload, those games went from taking 3 minutes of corporate advertising
on load to 5 seconds. 5 seconds! I used to get up and make a sandwich while EA
games loaded, no more!

That's just my personal story. I cracked every EA game I bought. I bought every
EA game I played. They were one of the best companies out there at the time.

EA has a *long* history of putting DRM before customer satisfaction, but at
least they *used* to care about quality. That was how they got away with it in
the 80's.

-- 
Zag

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little 
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ...Ben Franklin