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Comment by impostervt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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