Hacker News Reader

Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

Having used Wine for a lot of late '90s / early '00s Windows games, I think Win32-on-Wine is possibly the best, most stable game platform in history. Modern laptops run games of this era without breaking a sweat, publishers couldn't assume users had the bandwidth to patch everything after release, so there's a playable game right there on the CD. Many CD-ROM games didn't bother with copy protection (after all, who would copy a whole CD full of data?), so you can play straight from an iso.

View on HN

> publishers couldn't assume users had the bandwidth to patch everything after release, so there's a playable game right there on the CD

A reminder that Daggerfall (aka Buggerfall, aka the game that had a game-breaking bug in the very first dungeon at the beginning of the map) shipped in 1996.

Ah Bethesda, great games but holy shit, if it weren't for the mod community fixing them every time I swear I'd hate them.

Their most recent game is an example of what happens when they remove the mod community. A lot of people were very upset with FO76, but it being MMO disallowed mods, so game breaking bugs existed weeks into the game's release.

>Many CD-ROM games didn't bother with copy protection (after all, who would copy a whole CD full of data?), so you can play straight from an iso.

Please insert correct disc into the cd drive. Please enter your cd-key. Please type the third word from line 42 on page 13 of the manual.

Just Press Enter

~ CRACKED BY HeXPHReAK ~

Warning multiple threats detected on file keygen.exe

Quarantine or ignore

Meh...it's probably fine.

Doesn't sound like a private enough community to me.

I was super surprised my university pirated PuTTY. I knew it because I saw the "PuTTY keygen" app on the desktop. Only years later I realized it's an app for generating ssh keys...

8-bit techno music playing the background

rotating_skull.gif

Generally MODs[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file

C'mon, we can do better: Phrozencrew

You can get many DRM-free games on GOG. Most work fine in Wine on Linux.

Many are actually DOS games running on Dosbox, so you don't even need Wine, just re-wrap them in a native Dosbox feon your distros' repository.

I'm talking about Windows games obviously. Many have native Linux releases there as well and don't need Wine.

I just bought Heroes of Might and Magic 2. A pirated version came on my first pc, a 133mhz Pentium. Blast from the past, this game.

One of my personal favorites and a great example of a game that works well under Wine.

> Many CD-ROM games didn't bother with copy protection (after all, who would copy a whole CD full of data?)

Many early 2000 games I'm fond of used SecuROM. That's always a fun one.

True. Fortunately by now there are cracks for most of those games. And those cracks are relatively simple by modern standards. Maybe a few hex edits and/or a replacement DLL.

They already were commonplace back then. Common "performance hacks" involved simply installing the no-cd crack.

Back then even some audio CDs had copy protect. A certain Céline Dion CD was infamous for wrecking CDROMs.

Yup, there was also that time Sony rootkitted everyone's PCs.

This was actually the last time I rented a DVD.

If nothing before would teach people that Windows AutoRun for CDs were a bad thing, this one certainly did.

Unfortunately the feature is crucial on home PCs meant for the mass consumer market.

To the typical consumer, the action of inserting the DVD should communicate to the computer their intended action.

Every additional step, especially if it requires reading, pushes them further to just using a dedicated device for CD/DVD consumption.

To someone like you and me that might seem like an ideal practice, but to the typical consumer it's a usability problem.

I realize it's a bit different, but have you considered something like the NES, in terms of "what's the most stable platform?"

NES emulators have been ported to basically everything, which in turn makes NES games playable anywhere. And this includes modern NES games as well, as long as they were tested against either super-accurate emulators or real hardware (to ensure no reliance on specific emulator quirks).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com