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

Ripper (1996) with Christopher Walken and Paul Giamatti came on 6 CDs

I find it so funny that there are new games that are are smaller than Wing Commander 3 despite the 32 year gap. To be fair, they obviously pack their data very differently.

I miss the entire WC series... alot. I wish we could get something like that again today.

Ah Phantasmagoria, that was an interesting case with my CDROM drive at the time, I think it was a Mitsumi one and there was a compatibility issue with specific discs from the 7disc bundle, so I buy the game, going home and start playing with some friends - that was common practice back then - we finish day 1 and I enter the 2nd disc and the FMV is choppy as hell! Try again and again and again and I assume the disc is problematic, so we go back to the shop and they ask what CDROM drive I have, I say Mitsumi and they tell me that it is a known issue with some drives and there is no workaround, so they offer to exchange the game for a different one, oh this "Harvester" game looks intriguing :) Fun times!

Thank you for playing Wing Commander!

When I was in university living in some crappy room at a friend of my parents, it was freezing and there were some transportation issues because of it, so I didn't go to classes and was bored around programming (I wrote Pascal those days for fun and profit), so a struggled to the closest shop to ask what's interesting; Phantasmagoria it was.

Good memories playing that one on that massively heavy monitor that was normal back then, under the blankets with ice on the inside of the windows and on top of the blanket.

Myst was the CD-ROM killer game for me.

And yes, I think we both lived through the most rapid period of technological change (so far). Moore's law was real, the improvements each year were both felt and needed, and the software was coming along for the ride.

Quake was huge when it was launched - there'd never been anything like it. Of course, on my crappy Cyrix 6x86 and some similarly lame graphics card, I recall having to play it at something like 15fps. That wasn't great.

The first CD-ROM gaming experience I remember was the Turbo Duo console from late 1991. It came with 2 disks of games. The first and primary disk contained Bonk I, Bonk II, Gates of Thunder, and a hidden Bomberman 3. The second disk contained a combined Y's I and Y's II.

The Y's combo really stood out. You have to understand that late 1991 was still the age of 8-bit NES gaming. This game was very much an 8-bit game that could have run on the NEW and yet it also contained almost DVD quality animated cut-scenes with top quality digital audio. It really felt next level, because the quality of audio was like a studio music album and the animation quality was better than what was on television at the time. It really felt next level compared to the NES.

> “In the age before … ubiquitous internet access”

For some bizarre reason when upgrading from the family Mac SE to a Quadra, I had an idea in my head cd-rom drive was unnecessary. Thankfully in less than ten years I was proven correct.

Obviously I didn’t play enough games.

For me the music on the Monkey Island CD-ROM remaster was a real jaw dropper.

Remember the Commodore CDTV, which came out at the height of the "multimedia" hype: https://obsoletemedia.org/commodore-cdtv/.

"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). "

To me the Saturn made the absolute best choice. The whole game's OST would be burned as audio tracks. I used to - and still can - just drop a game CD into an audio player and enjoy emblematic OST's like Daytona USA, Sonic R and many others in full 44100Hz 16bit audio.

I recall a few PC games did that too: Total Annihilation comes to mind: I also still own the physical media and still can listen to the OST that way.

> like Mark Hamill

I just wanted to add, it also had John Rhys-Davies and Malcom McDowell! Crazy cast for a video game, especially back then. And these were not „just“ voice roles.

> Games were still being released for the SNES at this point, so imagine the contrast!

SNES games aged a lot less than those silly DOS games.

(I mean that SNES games look more sleek and "modern" today.)

Rebel Assault was the first to blow my mind. I had to have that game. That and the fully voiced version of Day of the Tentacle.

> 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.

Glad I am not the only one who carts an id1 directory around. Mine originally came from a retail disk with a funny story, I had bought it for a friend. a birthday present. and a couple years later I bought their old pc from them and that quake disk was in the box of parts. It had came back me.

This strategy makes sense in developing markets. People might be too poor to buy your game right now so you distribute it for free hoping that in the future they will get rich and then they'll actually buy your newer game.

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.

The data track never sounds very good. A little too industrial for my tastes.

NIN and iD (re-?)released a vinyl record set for the 30th anniversary a couple weeks ago.

> Just don’t forget to skip track 1.

There is very slightly more to it than just the mixed-mode sessions: the audio tracks on the Quake CD were mastered with pre-emphasis, so your ripper or player needs to apply corresponding de-emphasis EQ in order for them to sound correct. 1996 was actually a strangely late year to find any CD mastered with pre-emph; it was mostly an '80s thing: https://www.studio-nibble.com/cd/index.php?title=Pre-emphasi...

On top of being a technique that had fallen out of common use by that time, Quake has the pre-emphasis metadata flagged in the subcodes but not flagged in the TOC, so some software players/rippers like (annoyingly) Exact Audio Copy won't heed it: https://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Comparison_of...

Here's a side-by-side comparison — my EAC rip of my MacSoft version of Quake (left) alongside the output of `sox_ng deemph` for the same file (right): https://i.ibb.co/9m18CSsk/Emi-2026-08-17-18-52-48.png

And if you're curious, here's the pre-emphasis subcode channel Q flag and pre-emphasis frequency response as described in the Red Book standard, and sox_ng's code for undoing it:

― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...

― https://audio-union.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Red-Book-...

― https://codeberg.org/sox_ng/sox_ng/src/branch/main/src/deemp...

Although if someone has been unknowingly listening to the pre-emphasized tracks for thirty years, maybe the ‘incorrect’ one is what sounds right to them? :)

I remember I had the CD but rarely used it because having to pop in the CD just to play the game was annoying. So, I mostly played it without the sound track. Also, I never was that much into nine inch nails. Just not my genre. But my memory of the game is that it was fine without music.

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!

And when the crack came out on the same day as the CD release it was called a zero-day. A term that has long since lost ita original meaning, in fact it has been inverted.

I did reverse engineering as a hobby in my teens. The method for 90% of cracks back in the day boiled down to:

1. Launch the app.

2. Trigger the "not registered" screen.

3. Search for the string in the binary.

4. Search for code that references the location of the string and squint hard until you spot the "check if CD-key is valid" section.

5. Patch the final opcode from "jnz" to "jz". If you felt fancy, reverse engineer the checking algorithm to create a keygen instead of a patch.

Anticracking methods became mainstream in the late 90s, but they weren't very sophisticated and most amounted to obfuscation.

Long live +ORC, +Fravia and CracksLatinos.

The article doesnt say that they claim they invented it.

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-...

It was fun to just browse. As least as a kid it was

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.

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.

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

Presumably MCTR was MicroCenter as well.

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.

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

Did it work as an audio CD, the way PS1 games do?

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.

> since there is only 1 master disc

you destroy every retail disk a little

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49343326

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.

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.

Some sort of public key crypto scheme + including hard-to-change local device characteristics in the challenge.

A reminder that CD-ROMs are pressed from glass masters, not burned like CD-Rs. I wonder if anyone has tried something like this with burned discs, though.

No. That cracking group would have known a priori the phone call was a pretense, because id was very unlikely to press distinct CDs. So they could focus on conventional cracking techniques.

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.

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.

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.

The obscured part was pretending the unlocker needs external information

I think you right, however they left all the right clues to decrypt it in days. You really don't want to do that.

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.

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.

It's been scalped on announcement, sadly. Sold out everywhere.

It’s not Mandela effect, it’s AI.

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).

Thank you for reporting the issue. Fixed.

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

COD:BO7's single-player uses dedicated servers. Terrible, yes, but that's as foolproof as it gets when it comes to piracy. They also probably did this to combat all the 'services' offering to unlock camos/cosmetics that you'd normally have to grind for; players would give someone their credentials (probably stolen later and sold to cheaters) and the person on the other side would then use a hacked client to trick the backend into thinking they completed all the challenges. With a server-side campaign, that probably got much more time consuming, I reckon.

Every game separately encrypted then compressed into solid archives. Pressed in a way every game lands on different precise height of CD, padded before compression if necessary so it takes enough space on CD. Separate machine burning tiny holes in CD from the back, but not so tiny that CIRC could fixes them. At least one hole per file.

Install locates the damage and gives you code encoding locations. Over the phone You receive ECC code. No more magic keygens, pirates have to distribute whole multi megabyte games.

The computers in the photo and the layout of the store and signage are also quite strange.

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.

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.