11 ms·

Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full

493 points by shdon 1mo ago

classichasclass 1mo ago
Man, those CompUSA and Computer City pictures take me back. Spent too much time there (when the 7300 was my regular Mac, the CompUSA "Apple store" was my primary source of software). Probably still have some of those free Computer City floppies in a drawer somewhere.
- tetrisgm 1mo ago
  It was fun to just browse. As least as a kid it was
- moribvndvs 1mo ago
  I worked the parts counter in 98-99. It was a coveted position, as the juice was the retail channel programs where qualified employees got pretty significant discounts from Intel, AMD, and the likes. Reps would also shower you with free or discounted stuff, I recall having a good friendship with a Creative Labs who rigged contests and gave away shit constantly. Lots of free software to be had as well. It was effective though because I happily and aggressively shilled for the companies hooking me up. CompUSA was actually a pretty miserable place to work but it fed MY insatiable hunger for new hardware.
ranger_danger 1mo ago
Is it really fair to call these such algorithms "security through obscurity"? By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?
- _def 1mo ago
  The obscured part was pretending the unlocker needs external information
  - chungy 1mo ago
    I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time. Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
    - smackeyacky 1mo ago
      Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
      - chungy 1mo ago
        Sneakernet was common also. Say you have a class of 30 kids, and one of them has access to Usenet to grab qcrack.zip. He'll put it on a floppy disk and share ;)
        mikestorrent 1mo ago
        Hells yeah qcrack.zip
        soneil 1mo ago
        yeah, software travelled exactly the same way as rumours that such and such had a rib removed - remarkably effectively. Also the same way we got viruses, long before anyone I knew had the Internet.
        edg5000 1mo ago
        Haha, I remember that rumour being told to me by classmates back in the day. Great example.
      - mikestorrent 1mo ago
        I was 12 years old and had qcrack on a floppy from a buddy. Everyone had it. Didn't even have to have internet.
- 1970-01-01 1mo ago
  I think you right, however they left all the right clues to decrypt it in days. You really don't want to do that.
- leni536 1mo ago
  I think it is fair, as all the released CDs are identical. So all the symmetric keys used to encrypt the data are also necessarily identical.
- thaumasiotes 1mo ago
  If I ask you to pass on a message from me to someone else, and the message is encrypted using a symmetric key known to me, and to the recipient, but not to you, there's no security-by-obscurity in place. If I ask you to pass on a message to someone, and the message is encrypted using a symmetric key known only to me, and I expect the recipient to be able to decrypt it because he knows that the key is written on the back of the paper, that's security by obscurity. You're just as able to do the decryption as the intended recipient is; I'm just hoping that you won't realize that.
  - ranger_danger 1mo ago
    But all parties are able to bruteforce the key, it's still just math, still obscured. The only difference is how complicated the math is, and how long the attack takes. Changing from a simpler substitution algorithm to a "real" crypto cipher IMO is still just as symmetrical, and still technically obscurity, only more complicated this time.
    - thaumasiotes 1mo ago
      > But all parties are able to bruteforce the key This isn't true, and you should be well aware of that.
ekelsen 1mo ago
Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?
- netsharc 1mo ago
  Maybe have n versions of the CD (maybe 16, or 32), so there are n decryption keys. When the buyer recites the code over the phone, the program run by the salesperson can identify which key is used based on the number. The hacker groups would be a little frustrated trying to find all of the different CDs.
  - duskwuff 1mo ago
    The setup costs for a pressed CD are substantial - manufacturing many different designs would have been much more expensive, and would have only slowed down crackers marginally. It's unlikely that this would have recovered enough sales to be worth it.
- kg 1mo ago
  You would need some sort of hardware serial number system for PCs and a whole security infrastructure to verify that the serial number being used for the unlock wasn't faked. Then you could do per-PC unlocks. I'm not aware of anything like that being widespread back in the Quake days, though these days every computing device you own probably has a unique ID burned into ROM somewhere.
  - chocochunks 1mo ago
    Supposedly Xbox One+ discs are individually serialized which was originally going to be used for their DRM system at launch that was walked back.
- loeg 1mo ago
  Some sort of public key crypto scheme + including hard-to-change local device characteristics in the challenge.
Naru_vek 1mo ago
Burning the soundtrack as audio tracks was genius. You got CD-quality music without spending any CPU cycles on playback.
jonhohle 1mo ago
It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.
- chungy 1mo ago
  Mind that every Quake release includes the same soundtrack, it's not just the shareware version ;) There's millions of such CDs in the wild, both shareware and fully purchased copies.
  - jonhohle 1mo ago
    Oops, I can see how that reads like only the shareware version is this way. It’s often cheaper if you’re just going for the music.
- doubled112 1mo ago
  The data track never sounds very good. A little too industrial for my tastes.
  - 986aignan 1mo ago
    Now I'm curious if it's possible to make a data track that has at least some resemblance to actual music. That could be an interesting challenge if it can't obviously be ruled out.
    - jonhohle 1mo ago
      In each sector 2048 of the data bits are just bits, but each data sector also includes 12 bytes of sync, 4 bytes of metadata and 288 bytes of ECC that are not really controllable (if you want the disc to be readable). Then there’s the ISO 9660 on top that will impact the first few sectors. If you have a single file (say a zip/tarball/rar, image) you could limit that. Assuming you could mask the noise from the ECC at 75hz it might be possible.
    - 1mo ago
netsharc 1mo ago
Man, if I were id, I'd sue the hell out of Testdrive for selling me that broken security system...
- jhy 1mo ago
  But it sounds like it wasn't Testdrive's fault; iD implemented it incorrectly. Their phone support weren't issuing the decrypt code, just a simple checksum: > Described as is, there is no flaw in this process. The secret seed comes from the unlock server, tied to a CHALLENGE/SERIAL that could not be reused. But the hacker team GNOMON found a way. > The QUAKE unlock program FLOW.EXE that ships on the CD is capable of generating the SERIAL from the CHALLENGE on its own. All it does is check that its own locally-generated SERIAL and the SERIAL entered by the user match! The entire protection mechanism relies on security by obscurity.
  - codebje 1mo ago
    If the phone support issued the decrypt code, you could just replay that same code for every CD stamped from the same master. If phone support issued an encrypted decrypt code that could only be used with your challenge code to decrypt the decrypt code, replay wouldn't be as trivial. Every CD is identical, so no matter how iD went about this there's only ever one decryption key (per title, I assume) and those keys must either have been encoded in iD support's response, or already stored on the CD. TestDrive sold iD on the notion that the process was too hard for hacker groups to reverse engineer, and it wasn't.
    - jandrese 1mo ago
      There was some replay protection as described in the article, but in the end the system was flawed enough that it didn't matter.
fullstop 1mo ago
Ha, I remember buying the shareware disk and unlocking every game on there. Plus you got the soundtrack which was pretty cool.
- andai 1mo ago
  Did it work as an audio CD, the way PS1 games do?
  - fullstop 1mo ago
    Yes, the game just played it as a regular CD. In fact, if you put a different disc in the drive it would play the tracks from there instead. There were also console commands to change the track, stop the music, loop, or even reload the disc information if you needed to refresh it after swapping CDs.
    - olyjohn 1mo ago
      Yeah, and I remember if you didn't have the audio cable that went from the CDROM into your sound card, you would never hear the tracks. It wasn't your computer decoding the music, the CDROM drive was simply doing the decoding, and passing the audio out into a CDROM input (just a line-level audio signal) on your sound card.
      - jaredhallen 1mo ago
        I'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?
        indrora 1mo ago
        4-conductor audio, generally. Later on there was a generation of two-conductor cables that used SPDIF/PCM Audio instead of analog audio for better fidelity.
bityard 1mo ago
I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.) I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all. (There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. It got people who couldn't afford the full retail version to buy the game and expand its popularity. The argument being that $10 was a fairly ludicrous amount of money to pay for a single shareware game. Shareware CDs tended to be $5 on the high end, or free with most computer/gaming magazines.)
- mewse-hn 1mo ago
  > There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. I doubt it. I would believe that the id guys weren't too choked about the lost revenue after the fact, but the business guys probably believed the scheme would work (especially since they contracted a company that said "yes, this will work"). Aside from that, the shareware cd was incredible marketing - the digipak cd case was the kind of art and paper construction that nin was using on their discs (like the Broken EP), and the disc itself has nice art with the four logos in cardinal directions. I bought a copy of the registered disc from ebay years later and it's in a jewel case with really crappy artwork vs the shareware version, it was a surprising disappointment.
  - ryanjshaw 1mo ago
    Surely anybody who could download the keygen could just as easily download the pirated game? Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.
    - sznio 1mo ago
      >Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category. well, if dialup cost more than just buying the game, it makes sense to buy it rather than pirate. also, if you care about audio then you'll get the cd, becuse downloading 400MB of audio over dialup isn't fun. compared to that a crack is just a single binary.
kolanos 1mo ago
This screw up ended up costing id Software millions in sales. With the Doom franchise they only included the first episode in the shareware version. But to save a buck I guess they decided this was better than mailing a second CD with the full game on it. Then doubling down on that greed by putting their entire game library on the disc. This is right about the time John Romero and John Carmack parted ways, can't help but wonder if this debacle played a role. And by all accounts Quake's development was painful, so imagine this happens after going through hell getting a game out the door.
logicallee 1mo ago
[comment withdrawn]
- ydj 1mo ago
  The computers in the photo and the layout of the store and signage are also quite strange.
- dennisnedry 1mo ago
  I fed the image into Gemini and it could not detect that it’s legit or AI, but in addition to the wrong store name, the other banner that’s supposed to day SOFTWARE says TWARE or something like that. It sure seems like AI to me.
- fabiensanglard 1mo ago
  That was an image I found in Google Image search. I should have done a better job to research the provenance and I appreciate being called on it. I have updated the photo.
  - vunderba 1mo ago
    Kind of sounds like the low‑background steel [1] problem all over again. I have a rather badly written tool [2] I made about 5–6 years ago. If you connect it to your Google Custom Search Engine (along with the appropriate CSE keys), you can quickly search, copy, and download images from before 2022. It also has a ban list so you can filter out Shutterstock, Alamy, and other heavily watermarked sources. The app is a hot circle of garbage code, but it might still be useful as a starting point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel [2] https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show
andai 1mo ago
I was wondering how it was economical to burn every CD with a different key. Turns out it was not!
ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
Okay, I haunted CompUSA in my teen years and I purchased my first 386 system there. So the photograph included in this blog seems bona fide. Except their logo or name was never "Compu USA". Where in the world did they get a store hung with signs that all say "Compu USA"? Is this some Mandela Effect that has me in its clutches? The business was definitely never named or branded that way. I did my Wikipedia and Bing Images research. There are no serious search hits. Gemini is giving some truly b.s. explanations that I do not believe. Is this a concrete example of a USA store tolerating mis-branded signage... inside their own store? Or is it some third-world knockoff? The merch on the shelves, the bros shopping for themselves, the tie-wearing salesmen, they all seem totally legit. What kind of big-box computer store lets that happen to their signage?
- dennisnedry 1mo ago
  It’s not Mandela effect, it’s AI.
- fabiensanglard 1mo ago
  I made a mistake when I researched photos for it and found "one" without sources. You are right this photo looks shady. I have replaced it (with source).
andai 1mo ago
That box art is so cool. They don't make em like they used to!
kristianp 1mo ago
The "incredibly expensive Intel Pentium" image link 404s.
- fabiensanglard 1mo ago
  Thank you for reporting the issue. Fixed.
beloch 1mo ago
"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast! In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.
- NopIdoN 1mo ago
  Ripper (1996) with Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti came on 6 CDs
  - jaggederest 1mo ago
    Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fork_in_the_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fork_in_the_Tale - not a good game, but an impressive number of CDs at 5
- shmoe 1mo ago
  I miss the entire WC series... alot. I wish we could get something like that again today.
  - beloch 1mo ago
    Chris Roberts is still doing his thing. Elite:Dangerous is still getting updates and there's also Star Citizen/Squadron 42, both of which could either turn out to be epoch-defining or fusterclucks of truly epic proportions.
dylan604 1mo ago
"The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]." While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting on Friday, and the crack available when I checked back on Monday. Even apps that needed a physical dongle for the ADB port were cracked and not just the apps that needed a key typed in to unlock. Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.
- TacticalCoder 1mo ago
  I remember old games shipping with huge lists of codes on paper. Paper made, on purpose, too big for an US legal/A4 photocopier. And moreover the codes would be using "light blue characters on slightly less light blue paper". Very annoying for casual piracy (as in: copying your neighbor's version of the game). > Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices. That's a good one!
  - fabiensanglard 1mo ago
    I have a whole collection of boxes featuring anti-piracy stuff: https://fabiensanglard.net/happy/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/happy/index.html The sentence "This created an only-too-familiar situation where illegitimate users enjoyed a better experience than paying customers." is a direct reference to these system which annoyed people who actually paid for their game!
    - dylan604 1mo ago
      Only to be repeated with the experience of streaming vs torrents
brcmthrowaway 1mo ago
If you were to do this today, how could you make it foolproof?
- shoo 1mo ago
  there isn't a market for gamers buying games on CDs these days, so it's not really a problem that needs to be solved
  - brcmthrowaway 1mo ago
    Well how does Steam do DRM?
    - wbl 1mo ago
      Its easier on a system that doesn't need to do broadcast distribution and with servers available.
    - jamesfinlayson 1mo ago
      I think most (all?) Steam games link steam_api.dll (or something like that) which somehow figures out the running Steam process and thus the Steam ID, and then does a HTTP API request to check that you own the title. Like 15 years ago Steam launched CEG (Custom Executable Generation) - I remember reading a write-up a while ago, but each user had a customer launcher generated on install I think, and I think there was an extra segment put into the .exe file and that was put to use somehow, though I don't know if CEG is still a thing.
      - select1 1mo ago
        The ownership check you are referring to is a local check. There is another check (involving EncryptedAppTickets) which is not local, but far fewer games use that. CEG is long dead/was broken immediately in a pragmatic, automatable way.
  - charcircuit 1mo ago
    The same problem exists with PC games released on DVDs.
jasongill 1mo ago
As soon as I saw "Quake Shareware" in the title of this post, I thought "Pray to the one you will pay!" which was what appeared on the screen when you ran QCRACK. I always wondered why Final Doom didn't unlock with QCRACK - I always assumed it was a bug with the keygen, never realized it wasn't possible to purchase it from the disk at all!
- fabiensanglard 1mo ago
  You can actually unlock Final DOOM from qcrack. But you need to use `-g` to give the codename of the game[1] because sku.17 won't give it away. 1. https://rmolina-co.blogspot.com/2016/08/qcrack-y-la-belleza-de-lo-innecesario.html https://rmolina-co.blogspot.com/2016/08/qcrack-y-la-belleza-...
zf00002 1mo ago
I remember Microsoft had a time limited version of Office on cd-rom that was sold for a couple bucks at Kinko's. You could replace a .dll in it and that removed the time limit.
- bombcar 1mo ago
  There was something similar (but I can't recall what) where you just set your clock far in the future (like 2010!) and then the trial would last that long + one month.
  - picofarad 1mo ago
    Or use any serial number from a Microsoft hardware device, or use all zeros except the rightmost number is "7", like, "00000007" or...
- Anamon 1mo ago
  Corel once gave a German magazine a time-limited version of their graphics suite to put on the cover CD. You could overwrite a few .EXE files with their .BAK copies to turn it into the full version. That issue of the magazine sold out pretty quickly once it became public knowledge. Corel issue a statement that replacing the files doesn't make it a legally licensed copy. I'm sure many people cared. Edit: here's an article about it from that time. It was PC Direkt issue 5/2001. https://www.golem.de/0104/13530.html https://www.golem.de/0104/13530.html
toast0 1mo ago
> A gamer could go to any of the hundreds of CompUSA/Computer City stores and buy the CD for $9.95. I'm pretty sure I bought it for $6.66
thaumasiotes 1mo ago
> Upon contacting the operator, users were to also communicate a "SOURCE CODE". It played no part in generating the Unlock code. It may have been a way for the distributors to claim a transaction fee. Browsing eBay, I found many with names indicative of past/present retailers. 12-BSTBY BestBuy, 24-CCITY Computer City, 22-CUSA CompUSA, 88, 11-1111, 38-EB Electronic Boutique, 44-FTRSP Future Shop (Canada), 34-EGGH Egghead Software, and 56-MCTR Media Play/ Musicland. Why do we think that CCITY is a code for Computer City and not Circuit City?
- mook 1mo ago
  Presumably MCTR was MicroCenter as well.
edg5000 1mo ago
Am I reading this right, and was only the file header encrypted? Also, wasn't ID the company that did not use serials or other DRM? Maybe that explains their naivite, maybe they underestimated how easily games get cracked.
- jamesfinlayson 1mo ago
  Not sure about the early days - I got a Quake II CD in the early 2000s that didn't need a CD key. Doom 3 and Quake 4 required CDs, at least at release, but after a little while no CD patches were released.
songhonglei1985 1mo ago
[flagged]
palmotea 1mo ago
> By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card. That wasn't a new idea at the time. In 1994 Apple distributed a "software store" CD-ROM called Software Dispatch that implemented the same idea: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-software-dispatch-from-1994.31509/ https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-software-dispatch-from-1.... The thing was full of demos, and if you wanted to buy the full version, you just had to call some number to get an unlock code. I think I had at least one other CD-ROM that implemented the same concept. I'm sure there were tons of others.
- alt227 1mo ago
  The article doesnt say that they claim they invented it.
gregsadetsky 1mo ago
Surprised that it's not mentioned that the CD was also an audio CD with the Quake soundtrack..! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(soundtrack) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(soundtrack) "Originally pressed on the same disc as the game, Quake was otherwise commercially unavailable until its release on vinyl in September 2020" Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLttdCOgCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLttdCOgCM
- Delk 1mo ago
  It was actually reasonably common around the mid 90's for game CDs to have their music as audio tracks on the CD. I guess there was a point when CD-ROM was the target format anyway but game content hadn't necessarily grown to fill it yet. Having the CD drive play the audio directly (it could be directly connected to the sound card) with no decompression or software processing required probably saved some CPU cycles as well. I think at least half a dozen games I had around the time did that. Of course most of the soundtracks wouldn't be interesting enough on their own.
  - jasomill 1mo ago
    Did the early proprietary CD-ROM interface cards that shipped in "multimedia upgrade kits" and on sound cards even support DMA? I know both DMA and PIO-only SCSI HBAs existed at the time, but I'm not sure about the proprietary interfaces that were more common for consumer CD-ROM drives.
    - rasz 1mo ago
      Very firsts Philips/DEC LMSI controller did DMA https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro/blob/main/EDA/ISA-Card/ISA-Card.pdf https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro/blob/main/EDA/ISA-Car... Panasonic (MKE) was pure pooled PIO and didnt even support Interrupts. Sony and Mitsumi do have DREQ/DACK pins so most likely did ISA 8bit DMA. ISA DMA is pretty terrible and slow (4.7MHz clock, steals CPU cycles for the duration of the byte transfer), barely enough for 2x CDROM. IDE PIO is better on 286 and up than ISA DMA thanks to nice dedicated REP INSW. Taking into account ISA limits transferring one CD sector should take no less than ~700-1000us. While ISA SCSI and VLB controllers could do DMA, they rarely did with ISA 16MB memory limit and VLB compatibility worries. The one VLB IDE controller dlaiming to do DMA, Promise PDC20630, does MWDMA2 to the drive but with CPU manually pooling IO pins on the other side, total waste https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1323789 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1323789 TLDR: Talk of enabling DMA for your HDD and maybe even CDROM became common only somewhere around 1996, a good year into Intel shipping busmastering IDE controller in PIIX on Pentium boards (430FX and up). You had to put devices on separate IDE channels and hope everything is compatible and works.
PrimeAli 1mo ago
[dead]
gblargg 1mo ago
From the title I was expecting this to be about them packing 700MB of data on the CD, a common thing at the time by spacing the tracks slightly closer together, as some CD-Rs did.
- ChoGGi 1mo ago
  This is hacker news, not packer news. What are you, some sort of Green Bay fan?
adventured 1mo ago
$55 ($9.95 CD + $45 activation) in August 1996 = $116 today, per the BLS inflation adjustment calculator. Gold was ~$400 back in 1996. Now it's ~11 times that. An expensive game however you gib it.
- nairboon 1mo ago
  There was a lot less competition in the digital entertainment industry back then. Nowadays you still have AAA games going for $80 in a much more crowded market.
phendrenad2 1mo ago
Those photos of the inside of CompUSA are just stunning. Bright sodium lighting, not a dim dank cave (one of the benefits of CRTs over modern OLED screens and their color range from black to slightly-less-black). Colorful packaging everywhere (this was before fun was made illegal in 2012). Big signage, so you know where things are (the idea of a customer knowing where to find something without being diverted to an antivirus upsell by a "helpful" "associate" didn't bother MBA CEOs back then. Nowadays the idea would cause them them to spontaneously combust).
xg15 1mo ago
> The packaging was actually pretty high quality for a shareware product. On my copy, a sticker on the front clarifies this is the "Shareware version" with instructions to call 1-800-669-9342 (or 1-800-ID-GAMES) to unlock the full game. > The phone number is still active today. However you don't reach the unlock center since CompUSA went out of business. The Superstore chain closed between 2007 and 2008. Instead of an unlock operator we get an automated message to sell us elderly stuff. I remember how stuff like that presented an insurmountable obstacle as a kid. Buying stuff in the store, sure, but calling phone numbers or writing letters to companies? No way. I like how it has come full circle today, with the phone number being inaccessible once again...
lukwoz 1mo ago
"Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity. And never attribute to stupidity what you can attribute to time pressure. -- Fab's Razor". Surfacing this gem of a razor here, as it's buried deep in the (fantastic) blog post. Indeed, all too often, what we attribute simply to stupidity/ignorance, as per the classic Hanlon's razor, is actually downstream of market/client/management/deadline etc. pressure.
wodenokoto 1mo ago
How would the challenge/serial have worked if implemented correctly? Since the challenge rotate every 5 minutes, there must be some way for a user to enter against an old challenge, right? Else they call, get a code and nothing. But even with that out of the way, the decryption key must be the same across all discs, since there is only 1 master disc. So the challenge/serial must combine to create a decryption key, which can be shared across users.
- jcul 1mo ago
  IIUC the rotating challenge actually didn't have anything to do with the key, it was a red herring. The actual decryption key was just a function of the fixed serial number or something like that.
  - wodenokoto 1mo ago
    I'm talking about, if they had actual encryption, how would it have supposed to even work?
- rasz 1mo ago
  > since there is only 1 master disc you destroy every retail disk a little https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343326
Aeolun 1mo ago
The best part of this article was seeing the old computer store. It was all so much better before the internet... Don't get me wrong. I like the internet, but...
Dan42 1mo ago
I'm upvoting this just for the blast-from-the-past anachronistic hype intro. > With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed photos[1], VOC soundtracks, and play with Video For Windows butter-smooth 12 fps 240x179 videos[2][3] lasting up to several seconds. Deliciously worded, and highlights how far we have come since then.
thesurlydev 1mo ago
There's Quake merchandise available on Nine Inch Nails (nin.com) store right now. I'm not affiliated with either. Just a fan of the band and the game.
- manytimesaway 1mo ago
  It's been scalped on announcement, sadly. Sold out everywhere.
emursebrian 1mo ago
You could also put this CD-ROM in an audio CD player and play the music on it.
kwar13 1mo ago
reading this was a trip down the memory line

493 points by shdon 1mo ago

Man, those CompUSA and Computer City pictures take me back. Spent too much time there (when the 7300 was my regular Mac, the CompUSA "Apple store" was my primary source of software). Probably still have some of those free Computer City floppies in a drawer somewhere.

tetrisgm 1mo ago
It was fun to just browse. As least as a kid it was
moribvndvs 1mo ago
I worked the parts counter in 98-99. It was a coveted position, as the juice was the retail channel programs where qualified employees got pretty significant discounts from Intel, AMD, and the likes. Reps would also shower you with free or discounted stuff, I recall having a good friendship with a Creative Labs who rigged contests and gave away shit constantly. Lots of free software to be had as well. It was effective though because I happily and aggressively shilled for the companies hooking me up. CompUSA was actually a pretty miserable place to work but it fed MY insatiable hunger for new hardware.

ranger_danger 1mo ago

Is it really fair to call these such algorithms "security through obscurity"? By that logic, wouldn't real symmetric crypto also be considered the same, since it's still just math that similarly swaps the data with other bytes, based on an "obscured" password or key?

_def 1mo ago
The obscured part was pretending the unlocker needs external information
- chungy 1mo ago
  I guess they could have done a public/private key pair in 1996, but doing that over a phone call was going to be painful. A simple password read over the phone and verified by the software was the best solution at the time. Mind, this was also intended for a world where internet connectivity was not to be expected. The majority of PC owners were not online.
  - smackeyacky 1mo ago
    Which is true, so the distribution of the software cracker would have been fairly limited I would have thought.
    - chungy 1mo ago
      Sneakernet was common also. Say you have a class of 30 kids, and one of them has access to Usenet to grab qcrack.zip. He'll put it on a floppy disk and share ;)
      - mikestorrent 1mo ago
        Hells yeah qcrack.zip
      - soneil 1mo ago
        yeah, software travelled exactly the same way as rumours that such and such had a rib removed - remarkably effectively. Also the same way we got viruses, long before anyone I knew had the Internet.
        edg5000 1mo ago
        Haha, I remember that rumour being told to me by classmates back in the day. Great example.
    - mikestorrent 1mo ago
      I was 12 years old and had qcrack on a floppy from a buddy. Everyone had it. Didn't even have to have internet.
1970-01-01 1mo ago
I think you right, however they left all the right clues to decrypt it in days. You really don't want to do that.
leni536 1mo ago
I think it is fair, as all the released CDs are identical. So all the symmetric keys used to encrypt the data are also necessarily identical.
thaumasiotes 1mo ago
If I ask you to pass on a message from me to someone else, and the message is encrypted using a symmetric key known to me, and to the recipient, but not to you, there's no security-by-obscurity in place. If I ask you to pass on a message to someone, and the message is encrypted using a symmetric key known only to me, and I expect the recipient to be able to decrypt it because he knows that the key is written on the back of the paper, that's security by obscurity. You're just as able to do the decryption as the intended recipient is; I'm just hoping that you won't realize that.
- ranger_danger 1mo ago
  But all parties are able to bruteforce the key, it's still just math, still obscured. The only difference is how complicated the math is, and how long the attack takes. Changing from a simpler substitution algorithm to a "real" crypto cipher IMO is still just as symmetrical, and still technically obscurity, only more complicated this time.
  - thaumasiotes 1mo ago
    > But all parties are able to bruteforce the key This isn't true, and you should be well aware of that.

ekelsen 1mo ago

Was there anyway to make this work unless every CD was burned with a different key used to do the encryption?

netsharc 1mo ago
Maybe have n versions of the CD (maybe 16, or 32), so there are n decryption keys. When the buyer recites the code over the phone, the program run by the salesperson can identify which key is used based on the number. The hacker groups would be a little frustrated trying to find all of the different CDs.
- duskwuff 1mo ago
  The setup costs for a pressed CD are substantial - manufacturing many different designs would have been much more expensive, and would have only slowed down crackers marginally. It's unlikely that this would have recovered enough sales to be worth it.
kg 1mo ago
You would need some sort of hardware serial number system for PCs and a whole security infrastructure to verify that the serial number being used for the unlock wasn't faked. Then you could do per-PC unlocks. I'm not aware of anything like that being widespread back in the Quake days, though these days every computing device you own probably has a unique ID burned into ROM somewhere.
- chocochunks 1mo ago
  Supposedly Xbox One+ discs are individually serialized which was originally going to be used for their DRM system at launch that was walked back.
loeg 1mo ago
Some sort of public key crypto scheme + including hard-to-change local device characteristics in the challenge.

Naru_vek 1mo ago

Burning the soundtrack as audio tracks was genius. You got CD-quality music without spending any CPU cycles on playback.

jonhohle 1mo ago

It’s worth getting the Quake shareware disc for the NIN soundtrack. Official track names are now available following the vinyl release a few years ago. This is the only CD release of the soundtrack. Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

chungy 1mo ago
Mind that every Quake release includes the same soundtrack, it's not just the shareware version ;) There's millions of such CDs in the wild, both shareware and fully purchased copies.
- jonhohle 1mo ago
  Oops, I can see how that reads like only the shareware version is this way. It’s often cheaper if you’re just going for the music.
doubled112 1mo ago
The data track never sounds very good. A little too industrial for my tastes.
- 986aignan 1mo ago
  Now I'm curious if it's possible to make a data track that has at least some resemblance to actual music. That could be an interesting challenge if it can't obviously be ruled out.
  - jonhohle 1mo ago
    In each sector 2048 of the data bits are just bits, but each data sector also includes 12 bytes of sync, 4 bytes of metadata and 288 bytes of ECC that are not really controllable (if you want the disc to be readable). Then there’s the ISO 9660 on top that will impact the first few sectors. If you have a single file (say a zip/tarball/rar, image) you could limit that. Assuming you could mask the noise from the ECC at 75hz it might be possible.
  - 1mo ago

netsharc 1mo ago

Man, if I were id, I'd sue the hell out of Testdrive for selling me that broken security system...

jhy 1mo ago
But it sounds like it wasn't Testdrive's fault; iD implemented it incorrectly. Their phone support weren't issuing the decrypt code, just a simple checksum: > Described as is, there is no flaw in this process. The secret seed comes from the unlock server, tied to a CHALLENGE/SERIAL that could not be reused. But the hacker team GNOMON found a way. > The QUAKE unlock program FLOW.EXE that ships on the CD is capable of generating the SERIAL from the CHALLENGE on its own. All it does is check that its own locally-generated SERIAL and the SERIAL entered by the user match! The entire protection mechanism relies on security by obscurity.
- codebje 1mo ago
  If the phone support issued the decrypt code, you could just replay that same code for every CD stamped from the same master. If phone support issued an encrypted decrypt code that could only be used with your challenge code to decrypt the decrypt code, replay wouldn't be as trivial. Every CD is identical, so no matter how iD went about this there's only ever one decryption key (per title, I assume) and those keys must either have been encoded in iD support's response, or already stored on the CD. TestDrive sold iD on the notion that the process was too hard for hacker groups to reverse engineer, and it wasn't.
  - jandrese 1mo ago
    There was some replay protection as described in the article, but in the end the system was flawed enough that it didn't matter.

fullstop 1mo ago

Ha, I remember buying the shareware disk and unlocking every game on there. Plus you got the soundtrack which was pretty cool.

andai 1mo ago
Did it work as an audio CD, the way PS1 games do?
- fullstop 1mo ago
  Yes, the game just played it as a regular CD. In fact, if you put a different disc in the drive it would play the tracks from there instead. There were also console commands to change the track, stop the music, loop, or even reload the disc information if you needed to refresh it after swapping CDs.
  - olyjohn 1mo ago
    Yeah, and I remember if you didn't have the audio cable that went from the CDROM into your sound card, you would never hear the tracks. It wasn't your computer decoding the music, the CDROM drive was simply doing the decoding, and passing the audio out into a CDROM input (just a line-level audio signal) on your sound card.
    - jaredhallen 1mo ago
      I'd forgotten about those little cables. If I recall correctly, they were small round cables, with maybe four conductors and a little flat connector with a clip?
      - indrora 1mo ago
        4-conductor audio, generally. Later on there was a generation of two-conductor cables that used SPDIF/PCM Audio instead of analog audio for better fidelity.

bityard 1mo ago

I did exactly this thing when I was a broke teenager. The files in my ID1 directory that I shuffle around from computer to computer to this day came from that disc 30 years ago. (I still have the disc, but not the case.) I did, however, purchase Quake II and III when they were released. And many years later bought Quake on Steam. I think they got their money's worth from me after all. (There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. It got people who couldn't afford the full retail version to buy the game and expand its popularity. The argument being that $10 was a fairly ludicrous amount of money to pay for a single shareware game. Shareware CDs tended to be $5 on the high end, or free with most computer/gaming magazines.)

mewse-hn 1mo ago
> There were some who believed that making the shareware disc easily-crackable was an intentional stroke of genius. I doubt it. I would believe that the id guys weren't too choked about the lost revenue after the fact, but the business guys probably believed the scheme would work (especially since they contracted a company that said "yes, this will work"). Aside from that, the shareware cd was incredible marketing - the digipak cd case was the kind of art and paper construction that nin was using on their discs (like the Broken EP), and the disc itself has nice art with the four logos in cardinal directions. I bought a copy of the registered disc from ebay years later and it's in a jewel case with really crappy artwork vs the shareware version, it was a surprising disappointment.
- ryanjshaw 1mo ago
  Surely anybody who could download the keygen could just as easily download the pirated game? Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category.
  - sznio 1mo ago
    >Only difference is time and dialup costs, but neither of those would’ve pushed somebody into the buy category. well, if dialup cost more than just buying the game, it makes sense to buy it rather than pirate. also, if you care about audio then you'll get the cd, becuse downloading 400MB of audio over dialup isn't fun. compared to that a crack is just a single binary.

kolanos 1mo ago

This screw up ended up costing id Software millions in sales. With the Doom franchise they only included the first episode in the shareware version. But to save a buck I guess they decided this was better than mailing a second CD with the full game on it. Then doubling down on that greed by putting their entire game library on the disc. This is right about the time John Romero and John Carmack parted ways, can't help but wonder if this debacle played a role. And by all accounts Quake's development was painful, so imagine this happens after going through hell getting a game out the door.

logicallee 1mo ago

[comment withdrawn]

ydj 1mo ago
The computers in the photo and the layout of the store and signage are also quite strange.
dennisnedry 1mo ago
I fed the image into Gemini and it could not detect that it’s legit or AI, but in addition to the wrong store name, the other banner that’s supposed to day SOFTWARE says TWARE or something like that. It sure seems like AI to me.
fabiensanglard 1mo ago
That was an image I found in Google Image search. I should have done a better job to research the provenance and I appreciate being called on it. I have updated the photo.
- vunderba 1mo ago
  Kind of sounds like the low‑background steel [1] problem all over again. I have a rather badly written tool [2] I made about 5–6 years ago. If you connect it to your Google Custom Search Engine (along with the appropriate CSE keys), you can quickly search, copy, and download images from before 2022. It also has a ban list so you can filter out Shutterstock, Alamy, and other heavily watermarked sources. The app is a hot circle of garbage code, but it might still be useful as a starting point. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel [2] https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show https://github.com/scpedicini/truman-show

andai 1mo ago

I was wondering how it was economical to burn every CD with a different key. Turns out it was not!

ButlerianJihad 1mo ago

Okay, I haunted CompUSA in my teen years and I purchased my first 386 system there. So the photograph included in this blog seems bona fide. Except their logo or name was never "Compu USA". Where in the world did they get a store hung with signs that all say "Compu USA"? Is this some Mandela Effect that has me in its clutches? The business was definitely never named or branded that way. I did my Wikipedia and Bing Images research. There are no serious search hits. Gemini is giving some truly b.s. explanations that I do not believe. Is this a concrete example of a USA store tolerating mis-branded signage... inside their own store? Or is it some third-world knockoff? The merch on the shelves, the bros shopping for themselves, the tie-wearing salesmen, they all seem totally legit. What kind of big-box computer store lets that happen to their signage?

dennisnedry 1mo ago
It’s not Mandela effect, it’s AI.
fabiensanglard 1mo ago
I made a mistake when I researched photos for it and found "one" without sources. You are right this photo looks shady. I have replaced it (with source).

andai 1mo ago

That box art is so cool. They don't make em like they used to!

kristianp 1mo ago

The "incredibly expensive Intel Pentium" image link 404s.

fabiensanglard 1mo ago
Thank you for reporting the issue. Fixed.

beloch 1mo ago

"For video game developers, the CD-ROM was an odd beast. The capacity far exceeded the quantity of assets they were able to produce. A few titles, like 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995) introduced Full Motion Video (in a world where only part of the screen could be animated). " ------ The title that made me go out and buy a CD-ROM drive was "Wing Commander III", released during the holidays of 1994, a year and a half before Quake 1. This was peak "Silliwood", when games started to use FMV cut-scenes starring bankable actors like Mark Hamill. Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast! In the age before wikipedia or ubiquitous internet access, it was also pretty amazing to have access to a multimedia enhanced encyclopedia. Storing large amounts of data was still a tricky thing. It would take a few years for CD-R's to arrive, and there would be a plethora of competing technologies like Zip drives. Looking back, it seems like computer technology was moving especially fast in the 90's.

NopIdoN 1mo ago
Ripper (1996) with Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti came on 6 CDs
- jaggederest 1mo ago
  Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fork_in_the_Tale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fork_in_the_Tale - not a good game, but an impressive number of CDs at 5
shmoe 1mo ago
I miss the entire WC series... alot. I wish we could get something like that again today.
- beloch 1mo ago
  Chris Roberts is still doing his thing. Elite:Dangerous is still getting updates and there's also Star Citizen/Squadron 42, both of which could either turn out to be epoch-defining or fusterclucks of truly epic proportions.

dylan604 1mo ago

"The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]." While not being familiar with the Windows side of things, I did frequent the a.b.m.a newsgroup being a broke student. It was always impressive to me to see how quickly someone would post a binary before the crack was posted. I remember one app I was very interested in posting on Friday, and the crack available when I checked back on Monday. Even apps that needed a physical dongle for the ADB port were cracked and not just the apps that needed a key typed in to unlock. Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices.

TacticalCoder 1mo ago
I remember old games shipping with huge lists of codes on paper. Paper made, on purpose, too big for an US legal/A4 photocopier. And moreover the codes would be using "light blue characters on slightly less light blue paper". Very annoying for casual piracy (as in: copying your neighbor's version of the game). > Later, the apps that would clone a USB dongle came along, and one software company that used USB dongles actually advised using this tool when we started running their software on Blade servers that did not support adding 24 USB devices. That's a good one!
- fabiensanglard 1mo ago
  I have a whole collection of boxes featuring anti-piracy stuff: https://fabiensanglard.net/happy/index.html https://fabiensanglard.net/happy/index.html The sentence "This created an only-too-familiar situation where illegitimate users enjoyed a better experience than paying customers." is a direct reference to these system which annoyed people who actually paid for their game!
  - dylan604 1mo ago
    Only to be repeated with the experience of streaming vs torrents

brcmthrowaway 1mo ago

If you were to do this today, how could you make it foolproof?

shoo 1mo ago
there isn't a market for gamers buying games on CDs these days, so it's not really a problem that needs to be solved
- brcmthrowaway 1mo ago
  Well how does Steam do DRM?
  - wbl 1mo ago
    Its easier on a system that doesn't need to do broadcast distribution and with servers available.
  - jamesfinlayson 1mo ago
    I think most (all?) Steam games link steam_api.dll (or something like that) which somehow figures out the running Steam process and thus the Steam ID, and then does a HTTP API request to check that you own the title. Like 15 years ago Steam launched CEG (Custom Executable Generation) - I remember reading a write-up a while ago, but each user had a customer launcher generated on install I think, and I think there was an extra segment put into the .exe file and that was put to use somehow, though I don't know if CEG is still a thing.
    - select1 1mo ago
      The ownership check you are referring to is a local check. There is another check (involving EncryptedAppTickets) which is not local, but far fewer games use that. CEG is long dead/was broken immediately in a pragmatic, automatable way.
- charcircuit 1mo ago
  The same problem exists with PC games released on DVDs.

jasongill 1mo ago

As soon as I saw "Quake Shareware" in the title of this post, I thought "Pray to the one you will pay!" which was what appeared on the screen when you ran QCRACK. I always wondered why Final Doom didn't unlock with QCRACK - I always assumed it was a bug with the keygen, never realized it wasn't possible to purchase it from the disk at all!

fabiensanglard 1mo ago
You can actually unlock Final DOOM from qcrack. But you need to use `-g` to give the codename of the game[1] because sku.17 won't give it away. 1. https://rmolina-co.blogspot.com/2016/08/qcrack-y-la-belleza-de-lo-innecesario.html https://rmolina-co.blogspot.com/2016/08/qcrack-y-la-belleza-...

zf00002 1mo ago

I remember Microsoft had a time limited version of Office on cd-rom that was sold for a couple bucks at Kinko's. You could replace a .dll in it and that removed the time limit.

bombcar 1mo ago
There was something similar (but I can't recall what) where you just set your clock far in the future (like 2010!) and then the trial would last that long + one month.
- picofarad 1mo ago
  Or use any serial number from a Microsoft hardware device, or use all zeros except the rightmost number is "7", like, "00000007" or...
Anamon 1mo ago
Corel once gave a German magazine a time-limited version of their graphics suite to put on the cover CD. You could overwrite a few .EXE files with their .BAK copies to turn it into the full version. That issue of the magazine sold out pretty quickly once it became public knowledge. Corel issue a statement that replacing the files doesn't make it a legally licensed copy. I'm sure many people cared. Edit: here's an article about it from that time. It was PC Direkt issue 5/2001. https://www.golem.de/0104/13530.html https://www.golem.de/0104/13530.html

toast0 1mo ago

> A gamer could go to any of the hundreds of CompUSA/Computer City stores and buy the CD for $9.95. I'm pretty sure I bought it for $6.66

thaumasiotes 1mo ago

> Upon contacting the operator, users were to also communicate a "SOURCE CODE". It played no part in generating the Unlock code. It may have been a way for the distributors to claim a transaction fee. Browsing eBay, I found many with names indicative of past/present retailers. 12-BSTBY BestBuy, 24-CCITY Computer City, 22-CUSA CompUSA, 88, 11-1111, 38-EB Electronic Boutique, 44-FTRSP Future Shop (Canada), 34-EGGH Egghead Software, and 56-MCTR Media Play/ Musicland. Why do we think that CCITY is a code for Computer City and not Circuit City?

mook 1mo ago
Presumably MCTR was MicroCenter as well.

edg5000 1mo ago

Am I reading this right, and was only the file header encrypted? Also, wasn't ID the company that did not use serials or other DRM? Maybe that explains their naivite, maybe they underestimated how easily games get cracked.

jamesfinlayson 1mo ago
Not sure about the early days - I got a Quake II CD in the early 2000s that didn't need a CD key. Doom 3 and Quake 4 required CDs, at least at release, but after a little while no CD patches were released.

songhonglei1985 1mo ago

[flagged]

palmotea 1mo ago

> By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card. That wasn't a new idea at the time. In 1994 Apple distributed a "software store" CD-ROM called Software Dispatch that implemented the same idea: https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-software-dispatch-from-1994.31509/ https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/apple-software-dispatch-from-1.... The thing was full of demos, and if you wanted to buy the full version, you just had to call some number to get an unlock code. I think I had at least one other CD-ROM that implemented the same concept. I'm sure there were tons of others.

alt227 1mo ago
The article doesnt say that they claim they invented it.

gregsadetsky 1mo ago

Surprised that it's not mentioned that the CD was also an audio CD with the Quake soundtrack..! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(soundtrack) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_(soundtrack) "Originally pressed on the same disc as the game, Quake was otherwise commercially unavailable until its release on vinyl in September 2020" Soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLttdCOgCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbLttdCOgCM

Delk 1mo ago
It was actually reasonably common around the mid 90's for game CDs to have their music as audio tracks on the CD. I guess there was a point when CD-ROM was the target format anyway but game content hadn't necessarily grown to fill it yet. Having the CD drive play the audio directly (it could be directly connected to the sound card) with no decompression or software processing required probably saved some CPU cycles as well. I think at least half a dozen games I had around the time did that. Of course most of the soundtracks wouldn't be interesting enough on their own.
- jasomill 1mo ago
  Did the early proprietary CD-ROM interface cards that shipped in "multimedia upgrade kits" and on sound cards even support DMA? I know both DMA and PIO-only SCSI HBAs existed at the time, but I'm not sure about the proprietary interfaces that were more common for consumer CD-ROM drives.
  - rasz 1mo ago
    Very firsts Philips/DEC LMSI controller did DMA https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro/blob/main/EDA/ISA-Card/ISA-Card.pdf https://github.com/AkBKukU/CM153-Repro/blob/main/EDA/ISA-Car... Panasonic (MKE) was pure pooled PIO and didnt even support Interrupts. Sony and Mitsumi do have DREQ/DACK pins so most likely did ISA 8bit DMA. ISA DMA is pretty terrible and slow (4.7MHz clock, steals CPU cycles for the duration of the byte transfer), barely enough for 2x CDROM. IDE PIO is better on 286 and up than ISA DMA thanks to nice dedicated REP INSW. Taking into account ISA limits transferring one CD sector should take no less than ~700-1000us. While ISA SCSI and VLB controllers could do DMA, they rarely did with ISA 16MB memory limit and VLB compatibility worries. The one VLB IDE controller dlaiming to do DMA, Promise PDC20630, does MWDMA2 to the drive but with CPU manually pooling IO pins on the other side, total waste https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1323789 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1323789 TLDR: Talk of enabling DMA for your HDD and maybe even CDROM became common only somewhere around 1996, a good year into Intel shipping busmastering IDE controller in PIIX on Pentium boards (430FX and up). You had to put devices on separate IDE channels and hope everything is compatible and works.

PrimeAli 1mo ago

[dead]

gblargg 1mo ago

From the title I was expecting this to be about them packing 700MB of data on the CD, a common thing at the time by spacing the tracks slightly closer together, as some CD-Rs did.

ChoGGi 1mo ago
This is hacker news, not packer news. What are you, some sort of Green Bay fan?

adventured 1mo ago

$55 ($9.95 CD + $45 activation) in August 1996 = $116 today, per the BLS inflation adjustment calculator. Gold was ~$400 back in 1996. Now it's ~11 times that. An expensive game however you gib it.

nairboon 1mo ago
There was a lot less competition in the digital entertainment industry back then. Nowadays you still have AAA games going for $80 in a much more crowded market.

phendrenad2 1mo ago

Those photos of the inside of CompUSA are just stunning. Bright sodium lighting, not a dim dank cave (one of the benefits of CRTs over modern OLED screens and their color range from black to slightly-less-black). Colorful packaging everywhere (this was before fun was made illegal in 2012). Big signage, so you know where things are (the idea of a customer knowing where to find something without being diverted to an antivirus upsell by a "helpful" "associate" didn't bother MBA CEOs back then. Nowadays the idea would cause them them to spontaneously combust).

xg15 1mo ago

> The packaging was actually pretty high quality for a shareware product. On my copy, a sticker on the front clarifies this is the "Shareware version" with instructions to call 1-800-669-9342 (or 1-800-ID-GAMES) to unlock the full game. > The phone number is still active today. However you don't reach the unlock center since CompUSA went out of business. The Superstore chain closed between 2007 and 2008. Instead of an unlock operator we get an automated message to sell us elderly stuff. I remember how stuff like that presented an insurmountable obstacle as a kid. Buying stuff in the store, sure, but calling phone numbers or writing letters to companies? No way. I like how it has come full circle today, with the phone number being inaccessible once again...

lukwoz 1mo ago

"Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity. And never attribute to stupidity what you can attribute to time pressure. -- Fab's Razor". Surfacing this gem of a razor here, as it's buried deep in the (fantastic) blog post. Indeed, all too often, what we attribute simply to stupidity/ignorance, as per the classic Hanlon's razor, is actually downstream of market/client/management/deadline etc. pressure.

wodenokoto 1mo ago

How would the challenge/serial have worked if implemented correctly? Since the challenge rotate every 5 minutes, there must be some way for a user to enter against an old challenge, right? Else they call, get a code and nothing. But even with that out of the way, the decryption key must be the same across all discs, since there is only 1 master disc. So the challenge/serial must combine to create a decryption key, which can be shared across users.

jcul 1mo ago
IIUC the rotating challenge actually didn't have anything to do with the key, it was a red herring. The actual decryption key was just a function of the fixed serial number or something like that.
- wodenokoto 1mo ago
  I'm talking about, if they had actual encryption, how would it have supposed to even work?
rasz 1mo ago
> since there is only 1 master disc you destroy every retail disk a little https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343326

Aeolun 1mo ago

The best part of this article was seeing the old computer store. It was all so much better before the internet... Don't get me wrong. I like the internet, but...

Dan42 1mo ago

I'm upvoting this just for the blast-from-the-past anachronistic hype intro. > With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed photos[1], VOC soundtracks, and play with Video For Windows butter-smooth 12 fps 240x179 videos[2][3] lasting up to several seconds. Deliciously worded, and highlights how far we have come since then.

thesurlydev 1mo ago

There's Quake merchandise available on Nine Inch Nails (nin.com) store right now. I'm not affiliated with either. Just a fan of the band and the game.

manytimesaway 1mo ago
It's been scalped on announcement, sadly. Sold out everywhere.

emursebrian 1mo ago

You could also put this CD-ROM in an audio CD player and play the music on it.

kwar13 1mo ago

reading this was a trip down the memory line