#Copy Protection RWar
5 messages in this thread
Here's an idea for a thread. What game, or other program, has the worst
copy protection.
I've got two entries. Accolade's Jack Nicklaus' Golf has the worst. It
has a password sheet that is printed on brown Xerox resistant paper. (Glad
I'm not color blind) where you have to pick out a golf course hole pattern
out of a mere choice of 54 holes! What's worse is that the drawings often
don't match the screen. Water is drawn solid black in places, outline in
others.
A close second is Sierra's Liesure Suit Larry 2. They use the same picture
matching system where you have to pick out one of sixteen pictures
scattered throught the manual. Easier than golf, however again, drawings
don't match the screen. Some pictures show dark clothes, and the manual
requires a drawing with light clothes. What's worse is there's no second
change. Get it wrong, and it goes back to re-boot with a different
picture. Larry also does not recognize the second floppy disk, so it's
constand disk swapping.
I haven't had this section of the forum active until recently, so I'm not
sure if this subject has been done before, but I hope this will warn people
about these companies that take advantage of honest paying (former)
customers.
Paul
Heh. This is too easy. My vote for worst copy protection is actually
shared by several programs, so it's more a category than a specific choice.
To wit: *ANY* program which has a disk based copy protection scheme and
also writes to the original disk. (Examples I can recall offhand include
Portal, Little Computer People, Ultima III, and Times of Lore…) To me,
this is the single unpardonable sin of copy protection. A programmer or
company which peforms such a henious act should be shot, diced, drawn and
quartered, fried to a crisp, shredded, boiled in oil, buried in soft peat
for three months and recycled as fire lighters. And *then* we can get down
to the serious punishment… <grin>
–>Steve Bennett
My personal favorite (or is that least favorite?) form of copy-protection
is the damned dongle Precision Software saw fit to curse SuperBase with.
This little piece of brain-damage plugs into one of the mouse ports and has
to be there for the software to run. Want to have SB do a sort in the
background and play a game while you're waiting? Simple. First, figure
out which dongle belongs to SB (assuming you haven't lost it) and plug it
in. Start the sort, then the game. Now unplug the mouse and plug in a
joystick and your ready to roll. What could be simpler? Oh, and if you
want to run 2 pieces of software which require dongles, you damn well
better hope you don't need the mouse. If you want to run 3 pieces of
dongled software, you're just SOL. Talk about convenience.
– Dave
Should they also be fed to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall? I
just got Tymes of Lore yesterday and I couldn't believe that it writes to
the original disk. Time to price Project D again.
But for the historians among us, let us not forget the Dongle, that
clever little circuit that got put into the second Mouse port.
In my opinion the best protection scemes were used by Infocom (R.I.P.)
which put inportant clues in the rather entertaining inserts that came with
the game. Like the comic book in LGOP and the Newspaper in Sherlock Holmes
and the Riddle of the Crown Jewels.
I bought every piece of software I have but I don't consider it a sin to
use every method available to make a backup or my programs, even if they
are 'just games'.
Mike McC
I vote for Music Studio. I remember the first time I loaded that into my
1000. I thought the disk head would pop out the front of the machine!
Made the worst grinding noise too. And to top it off, the program wasn't
that great.