The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
DRM is fundamentally flawed, because the user is both the recipient and the would-be interceptor that DRM protects against, so because of this it means the decryption key is at some point loaded in the memory of the user's device, which means that there's no "uncrackable" variant, but even admitting the possibility of an uncrackable DRM, you always have the analogue loophole. And because of the Internet, ordinary people can easily access the pirated copies made by other people.
The only thing that DRM proved effective for is vendor lock-in. Bought some games on Steam? Bought some books on Amazon? Bought some apps on iTunes Store? Those are "investments" hooking you in to these services for a long time.
And now DRM has infected W3C and web standards as well, because grandmas want to watch Netflix and as predicted, open-source can't join the party, because wouldn't you know, DRM is fundamentally flawed and is incompatible with open-source.
Then came the hackers who cracked games (and put banners up on game load..), copy tools to get around the copy protection. Locksmith was one I remember. My friend had a card with a button that would dump memory (machines only had 64Kbytes or 128) to disk, perfect for copying those games that loaded completely into memory and didn't go back to disk. You needed the card reload and play the games though.
I think some of those games survive in this era thanks to those crackers.
While some are fun to replay and important in context, The memory of those games is sometimes better than the reality. Though I miss mind-strike for intellivision though. Haven't seen anything like it.
If I remember correctly, a decent number of the titles Jason has uploaded have cracktros because that's all that's left (or all that we have for the moment).
Another interesting thing is that he's working with a cracker to provide crack-diaries that explore the thought processes and actions taken to break the security on the original media.
Read more: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4630
Interesting reads about the steps take to get those games working again.
I wish they made the descriptions more prominent. You have to click the "TEXT" link to get them. Great link.
The lengths they went through to get you not to copy disks...
https://ia801500.us.archive.org/29/items/Muppetville4amCrack...
Give it time. Most everything these days supports HDCP. Screens are being integrated with cameras.
HDCP + computer vision scanning of the room to ensure that only the licensed number of people (and no cameras) are present isn't that far off.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121105/21564420943/micro...
Alice can keep her own secrets. If Alice sends a secret to Bob, she is now dependent on Bob's willingness to keep it. But if Bob wants to share Alice's secrets with Eve, there is no scheme possible that would allow Alice to tell Bob and not Eve.
The best Alice can possibly do is identify Bob as the person who told Eve the secret, and then visit him in the dead of night and beat the willingness out of him with a PEX tube full of sand.
And if Alice wants to do that, she has to use a watermarking scheme that is undetectable to both Bob and Eve, otherwise Bob can remove it before sending the secret on to Eve, or Eve can strip it out as she gets it from Bob. You see the problem, here, since the whole reason Alice is doing this is because she has some difficulty keeping secrets. She is essentially hiding a steganographic message to herself inside her message to Bob, such that if she can detect it in any message from Eve to anyone else, she knows to pay Bob an angry visit.
Alice's real problem is that she's an abusive, crazy, dramatic, jealous stalker, to the point where Bob would usually rather deal with the shady, disreputable Eve than with her. As a result, Alice's schemes are often the figurative equivalent of "Bob, unlock your phone so I can read your mail, texts, and tweets," and sometimes even literally that exact thing.
There's little need to posit a theoretical. Look to Wolfenstein 3D, which had several changes. The Red Cross objected to the use of a red cross for the health packs, so later releases used a red heart. Germany objected to the use of Nazi symbols, the dogs replaced with giant rats, etc.
I can see how a future historian might use these as data points for a research project.
If you ask me, it's a mistake to obsess over the digital representation of a... collaborative performance? Even if you recreated everything about an online game in 50 years, it wouldn't be the same game without the same people, the same social context.
When you're playing a bit-for-bit identical, perfectly emulated game from 30 years ago - have you ever thought "ummm, this sucks, how did I ever spend so much time on it?" What got lost - your youth, your obsession, your manual dexterity, the lack of other entertainment ... you can't bottle all of that along with the disc image.
Something always gets lost, even if you copy all the bits.
How did we end up having historians in real life? How can we give similar incentive or motivation for mmos or other games?
Now that I thought of it, there's excellent coverage of what happens in e sports, e.g. "this team did this to beat that team", which also links back to the documentation of ancient wars.
Historically relevant software should leave behind enough cultural artifacts that its impact can still be understood regardless of the ability to re-run that software as it existed originally. (video evidence, writings about the medium etc...)
Imagine the case of emulators to see how this can easily become a recursive paradox.
Today we have emulators that allows us to run most software from the beginning of computation. Will it be relevant to be able to run those emulators 100 years from now in their current form?
That would be like researching an old movie from just critic reviews without watching the movie itself. Depending on the purpose of the study you would want one, the other, or both.
My point is about the feasibility side of it (or lack of it).
Why should we have the expectation that we are going to be able to archive everything just because now information is stored digitally? Seems a bit delusional assuming that it is possible at all to archive everything... well I agree that theoretically it is possible, but in practice as we are already seeing barriers pop up all the time. I would bet ancient people were faced with the same problems when dealing with written information.
This isn't theoretical - something similar actually happened with the different cartridge versions of Ocarina of Time on the N64. The original music for the fire temple sounded too much like an Islamic prayer and was changed[1].
[1] http://strategywiki.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of...
Spoilers: turns out it actually comes from a stock sound effects CD and was used in a handful of other games, too!
Now there is a decent amount of it that also tracks data generated by the actions (and not actions themselves), however without it, due to RNG you will get different results (even with the same actions)
Unless blizzard decided to implement a truly monumental storage facility, i doubt they would do it (for all actions)
They do however store some of the actions, mainly with the intend of recovering items/etc.
Because really, what else compares for wasting time than fucking video games?
That said, I recommend it be done on a sandy beach or on a hammock rather than the couch, and at least once per year, rather than once per lifetime.