How GOG.com Saves and Restores Classic Videogames | Hacker News Reader

How GOG.com Saves and Restores Classic Videogames

rockpapershotgun.com

270 pointsdanso84 comments

I used GOG to buy the original Master of Orion. Randomly throughout the game, to stop piracy, a screen will pop up and ask you to identify the name of a ship. Back when the game was release, the instruction booklet was the only place to get this information. If you clicked the wrong ship name, the game would exit.

In the GOG version, you can click on any ship and the game will continue. I was very impressed that they kept that small detail while providing an easy way around it. It really brought be back to the early 90's, playing the game round-robin with my father.

Frighteningly, since I hadn't played the game in 20+ years, I realized I still actually remembered some of those ship names.

I love old attempts at stopping piracy (I assume that's what that was?). I was setting up Warcraft in DOSBOX a few years ago and had a laugh when it asked for the nth word on the nth page in the instruction manual. Fortunately the internet provides, but that's a pretty clever attempt that I could see causing issues for pirates back in the day.

Some of them were actually pretty elaborate. There were manuals which were printed in specific colors so that you couldn't photocopy them to give to a friend

The Amiga game Alien Breed 3D came with this code booklet, printed in black-on-black: http://i.imgur.com/ok4mYSk.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Y9w0M7S.jpg

I bought Sim City for my Mac Plus back in 1990 and it's code sheet was really-really dark purple printed on really dark purple.

It was a sad day when I lost that sheet.

I have both sides of said purple sheet scanned, actually. The original sheet is in rather sad shape though, so the scans need to be vectorized, etc.

The early Computer RPG games, Pool of Radiance etc. had two methods: a "code wheel" where you had to align some dwarvish and elvish runes that looked like this: http://www.oldgames.sk/docs/codewheel/pool-of-radiance/

And a journal -- instead of the game show a very long description or showing a picture, it would tell you to look in your journal to entry 123 to see what happened or show you the map you would see. The journal is in the yellow pages here: http://www.c64sets.com/pool_radiance.html

Oh yes, I even laboriously copied out a Pool of Radiance code wheel onto a piece of cardboard I'd cut out from a cereal box. Not because I was industrious, but because I was such a lazy kid to have so much spare time.

My favorite was Electronic Arts' code-wheel, where you had to rotate three paper circles on a central axis to discover the needed codes based on three random words that sound sort of like something from the game world.

One of my friends hand copied the wheel for me for a particular game to help me play a copy. It wasn't a very good transcription... http://www.intric8.com/files/legacy.jpg

Yeah, they had that on the FA-18 Interceptor simulator for Amiga as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RdE1L9jCic

I have an original monkey island dial a pirate wheel somewhere, loved that copy protection

When I was a kid I had the Graphic Adventure Creator for the Amstrad CPC which used the Lenslok anti piracy system.

Lenslok was a kind of prism thing inside a plastic holder that you held against the screen in order to read an otherwise garbled code which you then typed in. It often took me dozens of attempts to log in.

http://birdsanctuary.co.uk/lenslok/

Ah yes, I remember Zool and its code-wheel. You had to line up certain colours and then read out the code that was printed in shiny black on matt black.

http://retrootakudensetsu.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/amiga-colle...

I remember Wizardry 4 had a red booklet like that - you had to look up a MordorCharge card number.

When I was a young'un we had a bunch of games on the family computer--which was actually a DOS box--and I played the crap out of most of those games. Except there was one--I think it was Super Huey--that I couldn't figure out for years. Whenever you started it up it asked some obscure questions about helicopters and I had no clue what the answers were. Whenever I saw my dad playing I just assumed he knew everything there was to know about aviation. It took me years before I realised you were supposed to look them up in the manual.

The weird part is that I knew about looking up the potion letters for Prince of Persia but didn't connect the dots for way too long.

for anyone interested, this video about the history of DRM is pretty cool.

https://youtu.be/HjEbpMgiL7U

It wasn't going to stop piracy - though fighting piracy has been a constant of software commerce since the beginning - but what it was supposed to do was to stop the circumstance where one meets with ones friend, who bought the game .. play it together .. copy it with ease with the power of ModernOS (tm) .. and thus avoid paying for a game. If you had to read the manual, it was a chance for you (the publisher) to impress the end-user yet again, and have the pirate-copy user actually kind of 'connect' with the artwork of what you'd accomplished.

I think that was a nice aspect - a respectful way to treat ones customers. Those days are long gone...

Then you had games like Red Alert 1 and 2 that gave you 2 discs for the purpose of sharing. Granted each faction disk is missing the other faction's campaign, but still.

Or Starcraft where you could install "spawn" versions for the purpose of LAN multiplayer.

The spawn feature sold a lot of copies of the game in our computer lab: After hours, the few of us that had the game set up spawn copies for everyone else to play multiplayer. After a couple of sessions, people bought their own copies to play on battle.net and play the campaign. By the end of the semester, a few dozen people bought copies from trying it in the lab.

Compare that to diablo 3: When it came out, my wife and I were going to do our traditional play of the campaign, but then we learned that we'd have to buy two copies: $120 quid for playing the campaign once just wasn't cost effective compared to many other games, so we just passed.

The cost of Diablo 3 convinced me and my brother to get Torchlight 2 instead. Best $40 we ever spent!

We actually bought two copies, thinking that since they require us to pay that much, it has to be a great game, just like previous Diablo titles. After finishing it I can say that it was a waste of money, we were wrong, and you did the right thing.

Wow, I have this very old, very vague memory about some game that needed something odd like that. I think it asked for some recipe, or three runes/pictures, from the manual. I didn't understand it as a kid, and thought it was annoying. I had all but forgotten it till I saw this thread. Now it all makes sense.

*Edit. Googling this yielded a list of games that had just that:

http://www.mobygames.com/game-group/games-with-manual-lookup...

I didn't remember Master of Orion had anti-piracy feature, but I still remember Microprose's F-19 Stealh Fighter had a similar one: there was a screen where it asked you to identify the silhouette of one of the planes in the game. Which is probably the most ineffective form of copy-protection ever... I had a pirated copy with no manual, and it was a joy to me to simply enter the right plane because I loved planes and knew the name of every one of them! To me this was like asking me to name the animals in the zoo.

The copy protection for Civilization was similarly ineffective. The mechanism there was that many turns into the game, a screen would pop up showing you the picture associated with a technology, and asking you to identify (from a list of 5 or so options) which technologies were the prerequisites to the pictured one. If you were familiar with the game, this wasn't difficult. Even if you weren't, though, all of the required information was present in the in-game Civilopedia, and accessible before the protection screen occurred.

Maybe that's a feature :-) you have to pay, unless you love jets as much as we do sort of thing.

The Microprose games I remember had that as the mechanism. For the simulators it was identifying military vehicles. For Railroad Tycoon it was identifying trains.

Brings back memories of the good old days.

I have to admit, I have them memorized too. The original MOO is a game I still pull out and play every few years. I didn't like the direction taken by MOO2 and every damned 4X game made ever since. They became more complex, but without providing much additional strategic depth. Take, for example, buildings. They offer a labor intensive way to specialize the output of a planet. You can spend hours working out an optimal build queue and some games will even let you automate a queue. In MOO, you just set the sliders and move on to dealing with the strategic outcome that has on your empire.

It probably exists and I'm not even aware of it, but I'd love to see a 4X game that focuses on simplicity and strategy rather than micromanagement. Not every galactic empire game needs to come down to city planning!

I completely agree. But it's probably just that nothing can ever live up to our memories...

My sentiments exactly. I haven't found anything like that as a computer game yet.

Perhaps the iPad version of the boardgame Eclipse comes close.

Leisure suit Larry 1 has some questions like that > http://www.allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz...

Example:

Pia Zadora is a. sexy. b. a singer. c. short. d. all of the above.

One of my favorite manuals for copy protection was Conquests of the Longbow.

http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/Manuals/Conquests_of_the...

The devs did a good job tying the druid hand code, druid trees, gemstones, and coat of arms into the story line.

Hmm, I don't think this was a design or style choice. It sounds a lot less risky to just modify the validator variable here via some binary hacking than try to remove all the code responsible for generating those ship questions. In the article, Paczyński claims source code is very rare for these games, and I imagine they just incorporate community binary hacks and call it a day.

Funny enough, I remember having this issue with a Steam game and the 'fix' was googling the old manual. Luckily, it only happened once per session. It seems like Valve is a much more conservative group than GOG.

But I'm sure I played a MOO1 pirated version that simply failed to ask the question, so doubtless there was a reason they chose that particular pirated form of MOO1.

For Master of Orion you will want to be playing with the latest fan-made patch. It removes some bugs. (They had to patch the binary, since the source was unavailable.)

Still one of my favourite games, and without a substitute that capture the flavour without introducing additional complexity and micromanagement.

Shameless self promotion (non-profit, though) but if you're interested in game preservation, and in particular, games that might not be worth a commercial re-release, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment in Oakland is always working to save stuff like Habitat.

We're running a Kickstarter right now, too, to move into a larger space. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themade/the-museum-of-a...

Impressive! I never thought I would see a project to restore Habitat. It is also great to hear you got Randy Farmer and Chip Morningstar on board.

For those of you who don't know, Habitat was the very first graphical MMO game back in in the 1980s run by the predecessor to AOL. The developers' and moderators' ("oracles'") experience was really interesting for me to read about. They've documented a real-time online virtual world with avatars and its own economy that predates the Eternal September, IRC and the Web. I posted some links in an old comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6390038.

Great article. I like how they view restoring old games as a form of archaeology and detective work.

I buy my games on GOG to support them, since they practically single handedly pushing DRM-free distribution forward. They are working to convince even historically DRM heavy publishers to release their games without DRM.

It's a pity they so far failed to push DRM-free video forward[1] because of backwards thinking publishers. May be the upcoming Witcher film from Platige Image will appear on GOG, since they might have easier time talking to Polish filmmakers about DRM-free release.

[1]. https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...

> since they might have easier time talking to Polish filmmakers about DRM-free release

Also because they've been publishing The Witcher games DRM-free for a while now, and probably have some good stats on how responsibly the Witcher fanbase deals with DRM-free releases.

Yeah, Witcher games are a great example, but I'm sure they have a lot of stats for different games sold on GOG, and that's one of the ways they combat this DRM stupidity. I.e. they come to publishers, show them charts and say that they simply lose sales by not releasing their games on GOG DRM-free. It works, though not rapidly.

With video, the MPAA/DRM corruption is so strong and sick, that publishers are just scared to move away from the status quo even when they admit that it's stupid. Someone will have to really break that wall to move things forward.

One thing that disappoints me about GOG is that, for many older video games, they use a DOSBOX version instead of a modern source port.

For example, if you pick up Descent 1&2 [0] you get it in all its 320x200 glory, complete with multiplayer that requires you to enable IPX in DOSBOX, extremely limited controller support, weird framerate issues, and assorted other glitches.

But the modern community has rehabilitated the 20-year-old game [1]. The internal game physics are the same (the ship and the weapons behave like the original) but you get access to higher resolution, better controller support, a multiplayer game tracker, and lots of other metagame improvements (including new modes for team play.) It's a better experience all around, and GOG could easily add a source port without any legal complication whatsoever.

[0] http://www.gog.com/game/descent_1_descent_2

[1] http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php -- install instructions

Actually, that's trickier than it sounds. The original licenses for the Descent/Freespace source releases prohibit commercial use from what I recall.

Unwinding that licensing mess so that they could use it is likely not worth the return on investment.

They've already tracked down the original license holders/issuers in order to release the software in the first place. It seems to me like it would be orders of magnitude less work to contact a source port author and get all parties to agree to a simple modified license that would allow for source modifications to be included in the bundle.

(The original Parallax license for Descent, as well as the Rebirth modification to it, can be found at https://github.com/CDarrow/DXX-Retro/blob/master/COPYING.txt . I'm not sure it would even need to be modified -- it prohibits "end users" from using it for revenue-generating purposes, but doesn't prohibit the original rights holders from bundling that end-user code with the original software.)

Nothing's preventing you from using a source port after purchasing the game assets from GOG

Nothing prevents me from using a source port after purchasing the assets from GOG (in fact, the source port installer is designed to use GOG assets if available.)

The thing that prevents some people from using source ports is that they don't know they exist. I regularly run into people who have bought Descent from GOG or Steam and are upset that they can't get multiplayer working, who have no idea about the source ports. (I normally find people like this in the chat room or forums for the prequel, Descent:Underground -- http://descendentstudios.com/ . It's been less than 24 hours since I last helped someone who had complained about, in this case, the Steam version, which is nearly identical to the GOG version.)

Even though there's the open-source (but somewhat stalled) Exult project, I'm almost interested in buying their copy of Ultima 7 (http://www.gog.com/game/ultima_7_complete), if there was some documentation on how the fuck they reverse engineered that mess. The game was so memory intensive that our computer barely met the requirements...and even then, it required its own "Voodoo" memory manager [1] which took a long time of tweaking INI files and learning what XMS/EMS memory were...I used to attribute my interest in computer programming to video games -- as in, wanting to make video games. But I think it's more accurate to say that clumsily screwing around with the details of my computer's boot process just to get Ultima VII to work made me much more inclined to try to tweak/hack every thing about a computer.

[1] http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager

At the bottom right of the page you linked, the game is included in a "GOGmix" named "GOG games using DOSbox", so I'd assume it's the DOSbox emulator being clever, rather than GOG's reverse-engineering skills.

For example, DOSbox emulates the DOS API directly, rather than running a real copy of DOS and emulating the hardware. That means that DOSbox's DOS doesn't actually take up any space in the emulated machine, leaving vastly more of the magic 640KB available for applications to use without having to mess around with memory-managers.

I'm not sure Exult is so much "stalled" as "mature". Yeah, there's forever another bug to fix, but even several years ago my impression was that it was comparable to the original game, and that's all you can really ask for. It's not as if the Ultima 7s were paragons of correct software design...

"Almost interested"? It costs less than lunch! Just buy it!

Trying to get old Ultimas working on my 486 was my inroad to software engineering.

I believe Exult still requires you to have the basic game data, which the gog version happily provides. I setup exult on top of the version i got from gog.

I have grown quite fond of GoG.

In the past year, I have spent more money on games at that site than I have at any brick and mortar or online seller.

Same - the Galaxy client just seems much more clean than Steam's. Even though they serve different markets, I feel like Steam has gone for a wider, shallower offering by including so much Early Access inventory.

It would be amazing if GoG Galaxy had linux support though.

You can vote for these items:

* https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/open_source_the_galaxy_c...

* https://www.gog.com/wishlist/galaxy/publish_galaxy_protocol_...

* https://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/document_the_protocol_and_...

The last item I bought was available on Steam too. I bought Satellite Reign for a lower price through GoG than I could have gotten it for through Steam.

Lower prices, classic games and no DRM. It's awesome.

I had been avoiding the Galaxy client because I didn't see any benefit but after your remark, I decided to try it.

It's not bug-free but so far I like it.

There are many old games, that are still unsurpassed, since today's games often just care about better and better graphic effects, but fall short of story or game-mechanics. I greatly admire games, that cope to bring much fun with rather simple means (and not necessary with graphic effects).

Gog makes many of such "Good old Games" available again. That is great!

Hmm... Maybe this is why Kings Quest 6 had some puzzles integrated with their printed manuals. Just a neat way to stop piracy!

One of my favorite early DRMs was for Indiana Jones (Temple of Doom, I think) which came with Dr. Jones' Diary. Some of the puzzles required looking up old journal entries and figuring out what was written in order to put the statues in the right order (or whatever the puzzle was) was a lot of fun as a little kid.

I got a copy later on and got a PDF of the diary just to play it again, it was a lot of fun.

pretty sure that is the grail diary from the last crusade

I wish more GOG games were made available for Linux and OSX. I really don't understand the reasoning behind this decision since DOSBox is already cross-platform.

GOG got me playing Sam and Max hit the road again! I dont know why, but I love that game ! Pick the costume from the book to play lol

I will be downvoted for this, but I have become wary of GOG after I learned that they're incorporated in Cyprus for the sole purpose of tax avoidance. Someone will mention Amazon (Luxembourg), Google (Ireland) and other companies now, but those are corporate behemoths from which you don't expect otherwise.

Have you looked into Polish tax laws?

Yeah, they're Polish. It's like being founded in Delaware as an American company.

Are you referring to this?:

"Delaware charges no income tax on corporations not operating within the state, so taking advantage of Delaware's other benefits does not result in taxation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_General_Corporation_L...

Many companies are founded as Delaware at least partly because of the legal framework and case law precedence that that state has for governing corporate bodies. Or, that's what I gleaned from an article a while back about how stock and options and things actually get transferred around.

Because taxes are innately moral...

No, but they aren't innately immoral either. Context means a lot in this.

Sadly their efforts are limited. They also sell this game:

https://www.gog.com/game/hostile_waters_antaeus_rising

It's a great game, glowing reviews, should be a sure buy, right?

What the reviews don't point out, and no part there warns about is that the game is quite buggy and slowly deteriorates in performance the longer you play, such that play sessions above 30 minutes are virtually impossible. Contacting tech supports only results in the usual "have you reinstalled your graphics drivers? tough luck."

Their efforts are laudable, but when they don't pay off, they're not above being a little less than earnest.

Hostile waters is great and everyone should buy it!

I have not noticed these issues you mention... HAVE you tried re-installing your graphics drivers?

<kidding!>

but if no one else is mentioning these issues it does suggest it is local to your setup. Time to master race up and get quad titans!

> HAVE you tried re-installing your graphics drivers?

Since 2009? Repeatedly. ;)

That's the sad part, aside from the graphics card my machine is near the performance limit: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10190786/DxDiag.txt

This behavior has also been repeated across multiple machines. What's your setup?

https://www.dropbox.com/s/mjv5bpodvzxhx4e/DxDiag.txt

yours is probably choking on Lenovo sending all your moves to Chinese servers ;)

Well hey! You helped me resolve a 6 year riddle:

I noticed you had only one monitor on your machine, and it turns out as soon as i set my machine to display on only one monitor the game worked smoothly!

Would give you more upvotes if i could, but you already have all of mine. ;)

That's great information, I'd recommend you sure on the GOG forum for that game and email back GOG support so they can add it to their knowledgebase.

Long done. ;)

Damn, not a lot of difference. Does even the map screen stay at good speed at all times for you?

They do offer "MONEY BACK GUARANTEE. 30 days coverage after purchase."

30 days is a lot for video games.

it's also a lie, I tried getting my money back via the GUARANTEE after less than an hour (because the game wouldn't work), and they essentially refused.

needless to say, I instructed my card company to issue a chargeback, and they did...

Did you have a bug at the time? You can easily get your money back if you did not download the game already.

To get your money back on an used product, you must prove that you have game breaking issues.

That must be new. I bought HW back in 2009 when i didn't see that option anywhere. :)

Its a lie, GOG won't refund under any circumstance. They're jerks.

Their refund policies are actually really fair. They have four of them. If I summarize them: a) You can cancel a preorder and get money back. (This game is nothing like promised in early trailers!) b) you can exchange a game for another of same value if you have not played or downloaded it (oh no! I have purchased the wrong game!) c) You can get money back if you get a bug (even if you downloaded it!) d) You can withdraw from a purchase for 30 days if the game has not been downloaded.

The c) point is the most interesting:

c) Money back guarantee: if you buy any GOG content and have significant technical issues with it (e.g. there is a major show stopper bug in a game that prevents you from finishing it), we will give you a full refund if all the following requirements are met:

(i) You must have genuine significant technical issues with the GOG content.

(ii) You need to contact GOG Customer Support to request the refund within 30 days of the original purchase (if you received it from a GOG-authorised exchange for another product, then the 30 day period starts running from the date of exchange).

(iii) GOG Customer Support must have a reasonable time period in which to try to resolve the issue before they process the refund to you.

sounds to me like a very specific problem that you turn around into a broad generalization. I get that you want to air a complaint, but what you're implying doesn't seem entirely fair IMO. what's more you say this was like 6 years ago. I mean, come on.

if this is what amounts to a horror story I'd say gog is doing just fine

I'm not airing a complaint or a horror story. I'm pointing out that there are limits to how far they're willing to go with making their games work, that they don't make efforts to let prospective buyers know of issues and that buyers should be careful.

That said, the game still doesn't work and hasn't worked over a range of machines, so it's not 6 years ago, but started then and has never changed.

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