5 ms·

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 prot

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 15y 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.
- hackermom 15y 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?
  - yew 15y ago
    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.
Maci 15y ago
Never a hassle for the user you say ? I feel old remembering this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok

yew 15y 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.

hackermom 15y 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?
- yew 15y ago
  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.

Maci 15y ago

Never a hassle for the user you say ? I feel old remembering this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok