

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

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romland
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
> 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.

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

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aaronbrethorst
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...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/26/xbox-720-rumors-blu-ray-
kinect-2-used-games_n_1234775.html)

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

~~~
benologist
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.

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CobaltHex
i own that game!

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hackermom
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.

~~~
yew
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.

~~~
hackermom
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?

~~~
yew
I don't. Which is one of the main reasons I'm totally opposed to DRM. This
particular title was popular enough to survive by way of being migrated from
medium to medium over time, but plenty of historically-important software (not
just games!) has been totally lost because of copy protection and the
destruction of IP during corporate mergers.

