Xenon 2 and DRM, almost irreparable damages?

http://kingofgng.com/eng/2012/02/06/xenon-2-and-DRM-almost-irreparable-damages/

by KingofGnG • 14 years ago

36 13 14 years ago

droithomme• 14 years ago

In my opinion its definitely worthy of discussion the economic impact of using this stuff.

I am not a downloader. I have plenty of money to spend on things. But I won't buy products that are a rip off or that causes me any unnecessary trouble.

I used to buy games. Not a big gamer, but occasional. Lately though DRM is a big hassle. I get all the Humble Bundles since there's no DRM. Other than that, no thanks, even though there's at least $1000 worth of games I would buy right off if I was confident it wouldn't give me troubles.

Same with BluRay. I returned my high end BluRay machine after discovering it was abysmally slow because of DRM code. I would actually RATHER watch 1080HD, but I am stuck with 480 on DVDs for now. Oh well, DVDs are cheaper anyway. Sucks to be them, but if they don't give a crap about the experience and convenience of paying customers, then they deserve to die as companies.

tldr: A lot of people are put of by DRM and would buy more without it. DRM may have a net negative impact on sales.

yread• 14 years ago

Check http://www.gog.com the good old games. They have ~380 older games without DRM for 6+$

hackermom2• 14 years ago

Unnecessarily inflammatory article. Back then, almost every single game released on the Amiga and Atari etc. had some form of copy protection, but the copy protections of that time were never a hassle or in the way for the user of the software, up until the point he or she tried to actually copy the software or crack it. The writer is painting a picture that the developers and publishers of that time had no way of foreseeing; trying to make their software run through an emulation-of-sorts on a largely incompatible platform. This just doesn't deserve to be bunched together with DRM as we know it today.

yew2• 14 years ago

I would tend to disagree. The end result is the same: Unless a title was popular enough to have been kept track of across half a dozen storage media changes, restoring it requires fighting against copy protection and is either very difficult or impossible. The ubiquity of such "solutions" doesn't come into it.

Anyway, this appears to have been a copy of the game for the PC. So it's really just trying to run DOS software under Windows, which isn't a terribly unusual thing to be doing.

hackermom2• 14 years ago

How do you imagine that the copy protection would allow for the software to migrate from its original and intended medium to another medium, while at the same time still being functionally copy protected?

Maci• 14 years ago

Never a hassle for the user you say ? I feel old remembering this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok

barrkel• 14 years ago

Dependence on internet connectivity and online services is a bigger threat to preserving games on an ongoing basis.

benologist• 14 years ago

Can't be emphasised enough. Those of us who loved Diablo 1 and 2 .... will not be able to show our children Diablo 3, because its mandatory online authentication and everything else will get shut down.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

Funny, I was expecting this to be an article about the much-hinted-at Xbox 720 (or whatever they're going to call it), since the Xbox 360 was code-named Xenon and there are rumors flying around that there's going to be some sort of no-used game playback 'feature' built into it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/26/xbox-720-rumors-blu...

romland• 14 years ago

Ooh got all giddy seeing Rob Northen's name again -- memory lane!

DRM's bad sides not withstanding. But I have to say, back when I was a young one, a new release of Rob Northen's copy protection had me (and a lot of others) all excited; rushing to get a copy of the original to crack it.

On the Amiga the protection (of the loader) itself was a tracing (encrypting instructions around current instruction), self-modifying mess that probably broke on any CPU upgrade (68k -> 68010+). In all honesty, I had quite the respect for Rob Northen as an inventor despite the authors grudge.

The actual copy protection was primarily just long tracks that was pretty difficult to duplicate without custom made hardware. But once you had unwrapped the loader it was a matter of memory dumping and saving.

As for what broke the author's disk, I don't know but I always considered the "long track"-trick a bit of a fragile beast, but that can very well just be in my head. I never did touch any of Rob Northen's code on the x86, but a quick Google confirms that it was pretty much the same.

I guess there's some take-away from this, but I'll be damned if I know. Perhaps that copy protections are entertainment too? For some.

teamonkey• 14 years ago

> As for what broke the author's disk, I don't know but I always considered the "long track"-trick a bit of a fragile beast, but that can very well just be in my head.

It could just be the magnetic data on the floppy disk decaying. I had many old games on 720k disk that I found had corrupted data when I tried them 15 years later.

CobaltHex• 14 years ago

i own that game!

Xenon 2 and DRM, almost irreparable damages?

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